Category Archives: Bitcoin

No one doubts that Bitcoin is still the most important cryptocurrency, and it may stay that way for a long time, but it is in a complicated moment due to different factors.

Last weekend Bitcoin held above the $41,500 resistance level over the weekend after it was unable to break the $46,000 resistance level.

Like currency markets around the world, cryptocurrencies are suffering the ravages of fears of an armed conflict in Ukraine, not to mention doubts about Federal Reserve rate hikes leaving investors.

In addition, after falling to an annual low of $33,000 in January, the Bitcoin reached monthly highs of $46,000, which was reached at the end of 2021, but the strength shown in February is not consolidated.

For now, the Bitcoin has traded above $43,500, even approaching $44,000 at times, but it needs a series of positive news for it to maintain that upward effect.

Some cryptocurrency experts are confident that Bitcoin will return to $50,000 before the end of February, although other scenarios point to a fundamental bearish high of $44,000 before it begins to mark down.

Even several major cryptocurrency assets suffered a drop of more than 20% in the last week, even with Bitcoin's apparent resilience.

It is important to consider that the Relative Strength Index (RSI) levels, a price chart indicator that calculates the magnitude of price changes, showed readings of 39 on Monday, suggesting the end of the weekend decline.

Readings above 70 suggest that an asset is "overbought" and could undergo a correction, while below 30 implies "oversold" where assets may recover.

Read more:
Bitcoin price: How's the digital asset starting this week? - Marca English

Valkyrie Investments announced on Tuesday it has crossed $1 billion in assets under management (AUM), partly underscoring the volatile cryptocurrency market's tentative recovery from a brutal fall-winter slump.

To be sure, digital tokens are a long way from the crypto market's rip-roaring heyday back in the fall, when Bitcoin (BTC-USD) scaled to a fresh record near $69,000, but Valkyrie's announcement showed how some crypto asset managers are positioning themselves to outlast the whipsaw action.

"From individuals ... to family offices, pensions, and endowments eagerly allocating to hedge funds and trusts, our industry has a firm footing on which to continue growing through the remainder of this year and beyond," Valkyrie CEO Leah Wald said in a press release.

The firm launched its Strategy Bitcoin fund (BTF), the second SEC approved Bitcoin exchange traded fund (ETF), in late October, the firm now manages two other "bitcoin-adjacent" ETFs.

With approximately $46 million in AUM, the ETF side of Valkyrie's business amounts to a marginal 5% of its bottom line, according Bloomberg Intelligence senior ETF analyst, Eric Balchunas.

The other 90% of Valkyrie's total assets come from custom built separately managed accounts (SMAs), six different crypto-protocol trusts for accredited investors, as well as overseeing a Decentralized Finance-focused hedge fund captained by Tom Brady's former business manager.

Currently said to be in the process of completing its Series B raise, Valkyrie Investments has made an early name in the category of bitcoin ETFs.

Cryptocurrencies are still down more than 32% from $2.92 to $1.98 trillion, according to Coinmarketcap.com data, having tumbled in recent weeks in fear over the direction of monetary policy. Meanwhile, investors bought into ETFs around the time that Valkyrie launched its ETF are likely underwater.

Though the firm's ETF assets might appear small compared with competitors, Bloomberg's Balchunas acknowledge how important it is for crypto ETF issuers to stake a claim in the budding financial product line early. He suggested that eventually, the category for digital asset ETFs "will be massive."

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Based on data from Cerulli Associates, Balchunas pointed out in a report last week that a 2-3% crypto ETF allocation from the total advisors market could lead to a trillion dollar inflow into crypto ETFs in the next five years.

But in addition to crypto's roller-coaster price action, regulation proves to be a major roadblock for many U.S. financial advisors. According to a survey last month from digital investment manager Bitwise, only 15% of advisors said they allocated client portfolios to crypto in 2021. The vast majority of those respondents cited "regulatory uncertainty" and preference for a Bitcoin spot ETF, which has yet to be approved by the SEC.

David Hollerith covers cryptocurrency for Yahoo Finance. Follow him @dshollers.

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Valkyrie boasts $1B in assets as crypto winter eyes thawing, Bitcoin rebounds - Yahoo Finance

The fastest route to enterprise adoption is for those within the BSV ecosystem to work together, says Richard Baker, CEO of TAAL Distributed Information Technologies Inc.(CSE:TAAL| FWB:9SQ1 | OTC:TAALF).

Richard believes that mainstream adoption is close, and that the next two years will be critical in showing the world what Bitcoin SV is capable of, so long as the community sticks together.

We have to remind ourselves that right now we need to group together as an ecosystem and really power through the next 24 months but this is the best technology and the best utility network for the long term.

The fight is outside, it isnt inside, he stresses.

Richard believes that Bitcoin SV is following a Gartner hype cycle model and is currently approaching a trough of disillusionment. While that may sound disconcerting, it does mean that BSV is one step closer to entering a plateau of productivity where it will see mainstream adoption, something Richard predicts will happen around the time of the next Bitcoin halving in 2024.

On this weeks episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Richard tells Charles Miller that his priority in his new role as CEO of TAAL is commercialising the transaction processing business. To do this it is integral that as many transactions as possible are happening on the Bitcoin SV network and that those transactions are monetised.

He is particularly excited about developments in the play-to-earn gaming category which he says is booming. He singles out CryptoFights, a blockchain game developed by FYX Gaming and built on the BSV blockchain that is regularly recording daily transactions in the millions.

But its not just the gaming industry that Richard has set his sights on. He hopes that TAAL will become a major blockchain infrastructure provider for a whole range of industries.

He explains that because of the interoperability of the blockchain and the ability to jump in and out of all these different ecosystems, these metaverses, is going to require something that looks a lot like a Metanet service provider, we will need to have robust architecture that deals with all of the movement of microtransactions and identities in and out of all those different ecosystems.

His experience as CEO of GeoSpock, a deep-tech software technology company, will stand him in good stead to guide TAAL towards this goal. During his tenure at the Cambridge startup, his focus was on translating real world data from sources like IoT sensors and smart street lighting into data for decision-making for governments and enterprises.

He also has experience in the telecoms industry, building extensive optical fibre networks around the world in the early 1990s. This role saw him establishing infrastructure that became the backbone of the internet we know today and fostered innovation in a way nobody could have imagined, something he hopes to replicate at TAAL, with the blockchain.

Richard is confident that he will be successful in commercialising the mining company and reshaping it into a dominant player in the blockchain landscape. He predicts a joining of forces over the next three, five, seven years of mobile operators, the big cloud compute companies and the public blockchain leaders.

Indeed, he tells Charles that he has had six conversations just in the last week with big enterprises that are looking at public blockchains as the way they will run their businesses in the future.

Hear the whole of Richard Bakers interview in this weeks CoinGeek Conversations podcast or catch up with other recent episodes:

You can also watch the podcast video on YouTube.

Please subscribe to CoinGeek Conversations this is part of the podcasts fourth season. If youre new to it, there are plenty of previous episodes to catch up with.

Heres how to find them:

Search for CoinGeek Conversations wherever you get your podcasts

Subscribe oniTunes

Listen onSpotify

Visit theCoinGeek Conversations website

Watch on theCoinGeek Conversations YouTube playlist

New to Bitcoin? Check out CoinGeeksBitcoin for Beginnerssection, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about Bitcoinas originally envisioned by Satoshi Nakamotoand blockchain.

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Richard Baker: The Bitcoin SV community must unite to win over the market - CoinGeek

An on-chain analyst says he might have found the oldest Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) bear ever.

What Happened: Matthew Hyland, who carries out cryptocurrency technical analysis, tweeted a screenshot from Bitcointalk.org, a Bitcoin forum.

The screenshot, dating back to Oct. 22, 2011, features a post by Proudhon, who wrote that day were not going to make it beyond $3. Go ahead, watch.

Proudhon remains active to this day and has a new signature for his current posts which reads, The price of bitcoin can never be sustained over $50k.

Proudhon has obviously been proven wrong on at least the $3 prediction as Bitcoin is trading at $43,056.25 at the time of writing.

See Also: How To Buy Bitcoin (BTC)

Why It Matters: Bitcoin was created by a pseudonymous person who called themselves Satoshi Nakamoto, with the first transaction on the network taking place on Jan. 3, 2009.

Taking into consideration the date of his post, Proudhon may well have been one of the earliest cryptocurrency bears.

Hyland shared a response to Proudhon by ShapeShift founder Erik Voorhees, who simply said Fail.

Hyland speculated on Twitter that perhaps Proudhon was the gold bug and notable Bitcoin bear Peter Schiff.

It remains to be seen if Proudhons prediction that the price of BTC can never be sustained above $50,000 comes true. The apex coin touched an all-time high of $68,789.63 in November.

Read Next: Coinbase Aims To Take A Bite Out of $700B US Remittance Market To Let Users In Mexico Cash Out Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin In Local Currency

Originally posted here:
Is This Person Who Forecast That Bitcoin Would Never Cross $3 The Oldest Crypto Bear Ever? - Benzinga - Benzinga

It is not the first time the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rejected proposals for a Bitcoin spot exchange-traded product (ETP), but efforts continue to be made by different financial institutions. The recent attempt made by Cboe BZX Exchange on Jan. 25 to list the Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust as a Bitcoin ETP has also failed.

The SEC letter published on Feb. 8 pointed out that the exchange has not met its burden to demonstrate the fund is designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and to protect investors and the public interest.

Although proposals of Bitcoin spot ETPs have never been approved by the SEC and such products are not available in the U.S. market, they do exist in the European market. By investigating the prices of ETPs traded in the European market, one could gain a good insight into whether fraudulent and manipulative acts are possible.

To investigate whether the SECs concerns of fraudulent and manipulative acts are justifiable, this article will compare the historic prices of three European listed ETPs and the Bitcoin spot price history from 18 exchanges to see if there are any significant price disparities that could induce market manipulation.

There were two major concerns raised by the SEC from a technical perspective towards BZX Exchanges proposal:

(1) No data or analysis was provided to support the argument that arbitrage across the Bitcoin platforms helps to keep global Bitcoin prices aligned with one another, thus hindering manipulation and eliminating any cross-market pricing differences. There is no indication of how closely Bitcoin prices are aligned across different Bitcoin trading venues or how quickly price disparities may be arbitraged away.

(2) The exchange does not demonstrate the proposed methodology for calculating the index would make the proposed ETP resistant to fraud or manipulation. Specifically, the exchange has not assessed the possible influence that spot platforms not included among the indexs constituent Bitcoin platforms would have on Bitcoin prices used to calculate the index.

To see if the above issues exist and whether manipulative acts are possible within the ETPs listed in the European markets, historic data (from Google Finance) of the following three ETPs listed in SIX Swiss Exchange are compared with Bitcoin spot price from exchanges (data from Cryptowatch).

As described in the proposal by BZX Exchange, the index calculation will be based on the volume-weighted median price (VWMP) in the previous five minutes from five exchanges Bitstamp, Coinbase, Gemini, itBit, and Kraken.

In a very simple and basic attempt to replicate the index calculation with best efforts, the daily spot prices from four out of the five aforementioned exchanges Bitstamp, Coinbase, Gemini and Kraken are used.

Since the Bitcoin ETP price scale is often different from the Bitcoin spot price, the daily percentage change (or daily return) is used in all charts for easy comparison of price disparities.

The graphs below show the daily return comparison between each of the three ETPs and the aggregated Bitcoin spot price, calculated from the four exchanges using the volume-weighted median method.

The left-hand-side scatter plot shows how closely the ETP price is aligned to the spot price. If the two are perfectly aligned, all the points should fall onto the blue dash line. The right-hand-side plot compares the daily percentage return and also plots the difference between the two.

Comparing WisdomTree ETP and the spot, although most of the points in the scatter plot cluster within the +/-5% radius, there are certainly some significant price disparities outside this radius. One day during the three-month period had the daily return difference (blue dash line) between the ETP and spot price reached above 10%.

It is also interesting to note that the volatility of ETP price percentage change tends to be higher than the spot. The graph below comparing Coinbase Physical Bitcoin (blue line) and Bitcoin spot (pink line) shows the percentage change of the former could reach nearly 15% whereas the latter only went past 10%.

Similarly, 21Shares Bitcoin ETP price is also more volatile than the spot and the correlation with the spot is lower (62%) than that of WisdomTree (67%) and Coinbase Physical Bitcoin (66%).

The price comparisons shown above suggest cross-market pricing differences between the ETP price and the Bitcoin spot price from exchanges exist. The price disparities have not been arbitraged away quickly enough to prevent manipulative acts.

However, it is important to highlight that this is only a very rough comparison using the daily data. The difference in prices might be due to the different cut-off times each ETP uses to calculate the end-of-day price, i.e., exchange-traded products do not trade 24-hours like the crypto spot price; they trade during the Exchanges regular trading hours from 9:30 am to 4:00 pm.

Also, in practice, a much higher frequency will be used to calculate the index price, i.e., the BZX Exchange proposal suggests calculating the index price using the previous five minutes data from five exchanges and updating the Intraday Indicative Value (IIV) per share every 15 seconds. The analysis done here is using only daily aggregated data to proxy the index price and might not reflect the actual index price using high-frequency data.

It is worth pointing out that although price disparities can be observed between ETPs and spot price using daily data, price discrepancies between the ETPs, themselves, are much smaller as shown in the graphs below.

It is very likely that these ETPs listed in the same exchange all use the same frequency and cut-off time to calculate their prices; hence, the price differences are smaller among themselves. This reinforces the point that the price disparities between the Bitcoin ETP and Bitcoin spot price might come from the frequency and the cut-off time used in the methodology of ETP index calculation, which can not be replicated exactly the same in this analysis.

In the first point of concern mentioned at the beginning of the article, the SEC also asked how closely Bitcoin prices are aligned across different Bitcoin trading venues.

Based on the cross-platform BTC/USD data collected from 18 exchanges from Cryptowatch, the exchange price disparities are very small. As an example to show how closely the prices align to each other, Coinbase, Gemini and Bitstamp are compared against Kraken and the correlation between each pair is very close to 100%.

The SEC is also concerned about the possibility of price influence and manipulation from spot platforms that are not included among the indexs constituents. If Bitcoin prices from other platforms are very different from the four constituent platforms, Bitstamp, Coinbase Gemini and Kraken market manipulators might seek to exploit the disparities for profit.

To see if price disparities exist between the four platforms and others, the bottom right graph below compares the aggregated volume-weighted median price from the four platforms with the aggregated price from all 18 exchanges. The nearly perfectly aligned line shows there is almost no difference between the two. The spot platforms do not have large price disparities and the prices are closely aligned across different Bitcoin trading venues.

With such great similarity in daily prices, manipulative acts will be very difficult across exchanges. However, price manipulation could still happen intraday but its beyond the reach of this analysis due to lack of high-frequency intraday data.

Based on the analysis from the three SIX Swiss Exchange listed ETPs prices and the Bitcoin spot prices from 18 exchanges, it seems price disparities do exist between ETP and spot. This could potentially lead to manipulative acts towards ETP index price, even though the applicants frequently claimed the sophisticated index calculation methodology prevents such acts.

The SECs concerns about fraud and manipulation seems to be justified based on the price disparities between these European listed ETPs and the spot price. That said, the difference could be caused by the daily data frequency used in this analysis, which is different from the high-frequency data used in practice.

On the contrary, no significant price disparities can be found among different Bitcoin trading venues. Although the spot markets from these venues are more decentralied and less regulated than traditional stock exchanges, malicious price manipulation across these platforms could still be very difficult.

Given the large number of centralized and decentralized, regulated and unregulated crypto exchanges out there, it is extremely hard to prove price efficiency and similarity across all of them. The U.S. ETP applicants still have a long way to go to convince the SEC.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.

Link:
Heres why the SEC keeps rejecting spot Bitcoin ETF applications - Cointelegraph

Cryptocurrencies are becoming increasingly popular, especially in the gambling scene. In this guide, well take a closer look at the best Bitcoin casinos that have embraced this payment option by providing Bitcoin-specific games and creating special crypto bonuses for their players.

Read on and find out what fun awaits you when you sign up for any of these top online Bitcoin casinos.

First look:

Runners-up:

Pros:

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mBit Casino has been around since 2014 and it has clearly created a name for itself as one of the best Bitcoin casinos in the industry.

There are over 2000 Bitcoin games for players to enjoy. The welcome bonus is generous enough to convince new players to sign up, and the ongoing promotions make them want to come back.

Welcome Package: 4.8/5

At mBit, you can start your journey with a Bitcoin welcome package that knocks your socks off. You will receive up to 5 BTC to play around with, but the offer doesnt stop there. The casino even gives you 300 free spins to test a range of its entertaining slots. You may even win big while spinning the reels if lady luck is on your side.

Bitcoin Promotions: 4.9/5

If youre worried the rewards will stop right after you sign up, dont be. This site has multiple promotions to keep loyal players happy. Theres a 2100% up to 2.5 BTC bonus every Friday. You can also enjoy a 330% bonus up to 1 BTC when you top up your account every Wednesday and Thursday.

On top of all these, there are several other BTC promos that you can get such as the Refer a friend bonus and other seasonal promos.

Game Variety: 4.8/5

Another reason why players enjoy Bitcoin casinos is because of the wide variety of games that are usually available in these online casinos. mBit casino, for example, offers more than 2,700 titles of Bitcoin games in the form of slots, poker, blackjack, baccarat, roulette, and more.

The only thing we are missing in this casino site is a great live dealer section, which were hoping to see become available for US players pretty soon.

Banking: 4.8/5

mBit casino supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Tether. Banking with Bitcoin at this crypto casino comes with mostly reasonable limits. Youre free to deposit as much into your account as you want. The minimum is only 0.0001 BTC, so you wont feel pressured to put large amounts into your account.

The same goes for withdrawals, which have a minimum of 0.0002. However, you may be disappointed by the maximum limit (10 BTC). Sadly, youll need to make multiple transactions if you want to take out more.

The casino doesnt charge fees for these transactions on the bright side. Theres one from the Blockchain but thats fairly standard practice with Bitcoin. The small charge isnt going to break the bank.

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Cloudbet is a fantastic Bitcoin casino for players who want bonuses on their favorite games, such as slots or blackjack. Aside from the usual casino bonuses that players experience from other top Bitcoin casinos, Cloudbet offers special promos that keep crypto players coming back for more.

Welcome Package: 4.7/5

Cloudbet offers up to 5 BTC for new players so that you have plenty of funds to test the slots or table games. There is one small downside though, as the site doesnt include any free spins as other top competitors do.

Wed love to see them include some free spins for a well-loved slot. That way, you could take a test drive of one of the best titles the site offers before deciding whether you want to stick around.

Bitcoin Promotions: 4.8/5

Cloudbet stands out for its blackjack bonus, which gives players $10 for hitting 21 three times on a live Evolution title. Its an incredible opportunity for blackjack fans, as they can pad their bankroll while enjoying their favorite casino game.

Slot fans also have an exciting opportunity at this crypto casino. You can potentially win 1,000x your stake if you land a Mega Flash symbol on a Spinomenal title. Who wouldnt love winning a potentially massive payout just by spinning these popular reels?

Other offers include weekly free spins and deposit bonuses that can spice up your gameplay and keep things interesting.

Game Variety: 4.6/5

This Bitcoin casino is one of the most versatile online casinos around. Not only does it offer a competitive library of casino games, but it also allows players to explore its other sections such as sports betting, esports, racing, and even virtual sports betting.

Its casino section itself offers a diverse set of games that are dominated by top-quality slots. Blackjack, Baccarat, Roulette, and other Jackpot games can also be enjoyed by crypto players. Live casino games are also available. Theres really nothing else to look for in Cloudbets games portfolio.

Banking: 4.7/5

When it comes to crypto banking, Cloudbet allows great room for flexibility. It supports 12 cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash, ETH, USDT, LINK, PAXG, DAI, USDC, DSH, DOGE, PAX, and LTC.

While it does not support traditional payment options, there is a way for you to still enjoy the casino. You can buy coins using your fiat money, credit card or e-wallets through Cloudbets partnership with Moonpay. This is one way to get started with crypto gambling if you dont have crypto funds available yet.

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If youre looking for some game variety, Bitstarz casino is no doubt the best on our list. With over 3,500 titles, most of which are crypto-exclusive casino games, there are more than enough games for you to explore without ever getting bored.

Welcome Package: 4.7/5

If you sign up at Bitstarz, youll get an impressive welcome package of 5 BTC and 180 free spins. This deal is fantastic for exploring what the site has to offer. The only casino that offers more free spins is our number one pick, Mbit Casino.

Bitcoin Promotions: 4.5/5

Every Bitcoin deposit at this online casino receives a 10% boost. This promotion is an incredible incentive for using this currency. You are rewarded simply for using your preferred currency!

Unfortunately, this is the only Bitcoin-specific bonus on the site. However, you can take advantage of plenty of other offers, including free spins and several tournaments.

Game Variety: 4.9/5

Aside from providing crypto players a good platform to spend their crypto funds on, Bitstarz is also known for its extensive games library. With over 3,500 casino games, players are spoiled for choice whether it be classic slots, Megaways, table games, jackpots, or more.

Wed like to note, though, that while it has the most impressive portfolio of games on our list, Bitcoin does not offer any live casino games for US players.

Banking: 4.8/5

Bitstarz makes Bitcoin banking straightforward and stress-free with high maximums and no fees. The $20 minimum deposits and withdrawals may be too steep for some players, though, so please factor this in.

Whats noteworthy about Bitstarz is, despite its being a Bitcoin casino, it does allow deposits using traditional payment methods such as credit cards, Skrill, Neteller, paysafe, zimpler, and more. Thats on top of the cryptocurrencies it supports, which are Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Tether.

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If youre a slots fan and youre into cryptocurrency, you need a decent Bitcoin online casino to play slot games at. 7bit casino is designed with crypto fans in mind, but they definitely put more emphasis on slots fans. Any list of Bitcoin casinos would be incomplete without it, as its one of the pioneering crypto sites.

Welcome Package: 4.7/5

Like many other Bitcoin casinos on our list, 7bit Casino offers new players up to 5 BTC to kickstart their site experience. This bonus also comes with 100 free spins with a wagering requirement of 45x.

Bitcoin Promotions: 4.67/5

Aside from its generous welcome bonus, this Bitcoin casino also has an amazing cashback offer. You get between 5% and 20% refunded every weekend. Further good news is that this isnt the only exciting cash-back bonus on the site. The popular Bitcoin casino also offers a daily refund ranging from 5% to 15%. You can minimize your losses this way.

Other Bitcoin promotions include free spins and weekly reload offers which you can use to top up your online casino wallet.

Game Variety: 4.6/5

7bit casino is undoubtedly one of the most competitive Bitcoin casinos around, and it shows when it comes to the quality of games it offers. Weve counted around 1200 titles so far, but the site advertises over 7000 Bitcoin games on offer, which means theres more for the players to explore.

With an overwhelming list of online casino games, its worth noting that 7bits specialty lies in its slots selection. This Bitcoin casino site has the most advanced Bitcoin slots youll find in the industry.

Banking: 4.73/5

7bit Casino makes banking simple. It wont charge you any transaction fees, so you know exactly how much is going in and coming out of your account. Plus, you arent restricted by unreasonable minimums, as you only have to deposit at least 0.003 BCH (Bitcoin Cash) or 0.001 BTC.

This crypto casino does not restrict its payment methods to just cryptocurrencies. In fact, there are over 10 options for players to choose from, including credit cards, Maestro, Neosurf, Litecoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Netelller, Paysafecard, Rapid, Skrill, ecoPayz, and Zimpler.

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Bitcoin casinos are known to favor crypto players, but its also nice to have banking options that are usually seen in traditional online casinos to accommodate other players. Wild Casino is one of those hybrid casinos that allow both. Aside from its flexibility in terms of banking, there are other features that both crypto and non-crypto players will surely appreciate about it.

Welcome Package: 4.6/5

Wild Casino starts your experience on the right foot with up to $9,000 when you deposit with Bitcoin. The first deposit is a 300% match up to $3,000, followed by four 150% up to $1,500. Theres a 45x playthrough requirement for this bonus a bit steep for most players, but its one of the most generous packages weve seen in Bitcoin casino sites.

Bitcoin Promotions: 4.64/5

When you deposit with Bitcoin at Wild Casino, you receive a 10% boost. While this is the only Bitcoin-exclusive offer on the site, its a pretty incredible one. Who wouldnt love getting free funds on every deposit?

There are several non-Bitcoin-specific promos available as well, like the 10% weekly rebate, Tuesday top-up, VIP reload, refer-a-friend, and more.

Game Variety: 4.2/5

Wild casino does not seem too wild when it comes to game variety. There are less than 400 titles on offer at the time of writing. It may not be as extensive as other Bitcoin gambling sites but what it does offer is more than enough for both crypto and traditional players.

There are slots, blackjack, video poker, and other table games. It also has live dealer games, which is something that not all crypto casinos offer.

Banking: 4.71/5

While it doesnt excel in the games selection department, Wild Casino definitely makes up for it in terms of banking flexibility. This crypto casino makes it easy for both traditional and crypto players to deposit and withdraw funds into their Wild Casino accounts using whatever payment option they prefer. There are 18 options to choose from, including 10 cryptocurrencies.

This Bitcoin gambling site offers high transaction maximums, so even high rollers dont feel restricted when funding their account or withdrawing winnings. However, the transaction minimums are a bit steep, especially if youre a small-stakes gamer.

Welcome Package

Online players are mostly in it for the entertainment, but they all want to get their moneys worth when they sign up to the best Bitcoin gambling sites. And the crypto casino with the best welcome bonuses delivers the most value for them. Thats why its one of the first things we considered while reviewing the top online crypto casinos.

Bitcoin Promotions

Bitcoin-specific promotions are also one of the things we carefully considered. We want to know that the crypto casinos generosity doesnt stop at their welcome bonuses. We looked for crypto casinos that will continue to reward you, even after your welcome bonus is all used up.

Game Variety

You can only make the most of your crypto gambling experience when you have all the options laid in front of you. Thats why we looked for the best crypto casinos with diverse online casino games, even including some specific Bitcoin casino games.

We also included options like crypto sports betting site and crypto casino sites that offer esports, horse racing, tournaments, and more.

Banking

Flexibility in terms of banking options is something that every player looks at before signing up for an online casino. While their ability to support multiple cryptocurrencies is the highlight of our review we also considered crypto casino sites that allow fiat currencies and other payment methods.

You can find out how to pick out the top Bitcoin casinos here, but here are some additional factors you should consider:

Security

Keeping your information safe is crucial when playing at online casinos. Consider factors like what encryption technology they use and their safety policies to protect your money when you fund your account or withdraw winnings.

License

Top Bitcoin casinos have trusted licenses, which means a respected authority monitors them and keeps them in line. Look for seals on the online casino from places like Malta or Curacao.

Overall User Experience

A simple and easily navigable interface is one of the things to consider when choosing the best crypto casinos. You want to be able to access important links in just a click or two. A simple sign-up process is a good thing as well, not to mention a quick payout process. All of these contribute to a players overall Bitcoin gambling experience.

Weve presented ten of the best btc casinos in the industry today, and gave an in-depth review of five of our top picks. mBit casino stood out as our most trusted Bitcoin casino because of its impressive games variety, generous welcome bonus, exclusive promotions on Bitcoin deposits, and smooth banking process.

But even if you dont choose our number one pick for the best crypto casino, we know youll have a top-notch experience at any of these sites. Now pull out your crypto wallet and start spinning the slot reels or roulette wheel!

IMPORTANT:

Gambling is strictly 18+ only. The sites mentioned in this review may not be available in your region. Always practice due diligence and do your own research about gambling policies in your area. The information presented is not meant as gambling advice. The site does not guarantee profit in any way. Players must bet at their own risk. Gambling is addictive. If you suspect you may have a problem, call the National Problem Gambling Hotline at 1-800-522-4700 or visit ncpgambling.org and begambleaware.org for free resources.

Sponsored by Paradise Digital Media

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The best Bitcoin casinos for BTC games and crypto bonuses in 2022 - WISHTV.com

On Wednesday, the publicly-listed cryptocurrency firm Coinbase announced the launch of a collaborative effort called TRUST, which stands for Travel Rule Universal Solution Technology. The plan is described as an industry-driven solution developed to comply with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Travel Rule. There are currently 18 crypto firms that have joined TRUST so far, and the collaborative effort is welcoming other companies to join the initiative.

For quite some time now, FATFs Travel Rule has been a top concern within the crypto industry as virtual asset service providers (VASPs) have been told they need to comply with the regulatory policy. As cryptocurrency has grown more popular, FATF has been releasing guidelines on the Travel Rule, as the intergovernmental organization believes the rule needs to be applied to VASPs.

Essentially, the Travel Rule is a descriptive label for the regulatory guideline that aims to curb illicit transactions and money laundering. The rule mandates that all companies that deal with finances have to pass on KYC/AML transmission data concerning their customers identities to the next financial institution. The transfer amount tied to FATFs Travel Rule has a threshold thats equal to $3,000 or higher.

In a blog post published on Wednesday, Coinbase explains that it has crafted a new plan called TRUST with a slew of other well known VASPs. Travel Rule Universal Solution Technology or the TRUST collaborative effort includes VASPs such as Robinhood, Fidelity Digital Assets, Tradestation, Zero Hash, Bittrex, Coinbase, Gemini, Avanti, Circle, Bitflyer, Zodia Custody, Paxos, Anchorage, Symbridge, Bitgo, Kraken, Blockfi, and Standard Custody & Trust.

The core goal in designing TRUST was to achieve top-tier compliance with the Travel Rule, while fully honoring customers expectations over how their information is handled, Coinbase detailed. The plan called TRUST follows the 17 crypto firms that launched a similar collaborative effort called the Crypto Market Integrity Coalition (CMIC). That specific coalition, launched last week, said it has plans to promote public and regulatory confidence in the new asset class.

The TRUST plan highlighted three fundamentals to the efforts compliance solution. The first is the TRUST members never centrally store sensitive customer information and secondly TRUST will leverage a mechanism that utilizes proof of address ownership. Moreover, TRUST members must have core security [and] privacy standards. The Coinbase blog post adds:

We require all TRUST members to meet core anti-money laundering, security, and privacy requirements before joining the solution. And we are partnering with Exiger, a global market leader in technology-enabled compliance and risk management solutions, to help us meet that bar, and to provide ongoing compliance support.

Now that the TRUST has been launched, the collaborative initiative will continue to add members and the blog post notes that the Travel Rules reach is expanding internationally, and so must the TRUST solution. During the next 12 months, the group plans to expand to many other jurisdictions, according to the Coinbase announcement.

What do you think about the recently formed TRUST and the organizations Travel Rule goals? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Jamie Redman is the News Lead at Bitcoin.com News and a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open-source code, and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written more than 5,000 articles for Bitcoin.com News about the disruptive protocols emerging today.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

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Coinbase and 17 Other Crypto Firms Launch 'Travel Rule Universal Solution Technology' Regulation Bitcoin News - Bitcoin News

Bitcoin Magazine obtained exclusive access to details about the upcoming COLDCARD Mk4, the new version of Canada-based Coinkites Bitcoin hardware wallet that improves upon the popular COLDCARD Mk3.

The main features of the new model include a USB-C connector, no restrictions on Bitcoin transaction size, increased security with an extra secure element, NFC integration, a slide cover, a USB virtual disk mode, and an extensive Trick PIN optionality.

The front and back of Coinkite's upcoming hardware wallet, the COLDCARD Mk4. Photo courtesy of Coinkite.

In the connections front, the user can opt into using NFC with the Mk4 by enabling it in the devices settings as the feature will come disabled by default. Once turned on, NFC will enable the COLDCARD to come near a compatible device to sign a transaction or a message, co-sign in a multisig setup, or share information from the devices MicroSD card like a payment address or an extended public key, a partially-signed Bitcoin transaction (PSBT), a text file, or a transaction file.

Coinkite founder NVK told Bitcoin Magazine that the goal with NFC is to lower cost, improve UX, and further adoption.

Imagine hardware wallets being able to just tap-to-pay, he said.

Although QR codes have recently become popular in some hardware wallets, NVK said they havent been adopted in the larger payment industries because they have extremely low data bandwidth, are more complex and not human readable, and require more expensive hardware.

This feature was added to improve phone-wallet UX as all modern phones have NFC, free, already sitting unused, NVK said. NFC will be available to all COLDCARD functions we are able to send or receive data, just like the SD card or USB cable.

In addition to requiring NFC to be turned on for usage, NVK told Bitcoin Magazine that the Mk4 will also enable the user to permanently disable the feature by scratching a PCB trace exposed on the MicroSD opening.

While previous versions of the COLDCARD had a single secure element (SE), Mk4 brings a second SE to establish a more robust security model for the users private keys and suppress potential single points of failure. Moreover, the fact that the second SE is from a different vendor further protects the user from any unexpected bugs or issues with a specific SE design.

An attacker would need to fully compromise the two secure elements and the main microcontroller (MCU) before being able to extract seed words from the COLDCARD Mk4 as the device now distributes the encryption key among the three components. Additionally, even if all three components are compromised, the devices PIN code would still be required.

Mk4 also allows the user to set up multiple Trick PINs. While the actual PIN unlocks the device and enables wallet functions, Trick PIN codes can exert alternative functionality such as unlocking a duress wallet, triggering a long login delay, or bricking or blanking the COLDCARD.

These PINs are useful in different scenarios, but they can often come in handy in a physical attack where the user is coerced into unlocking their COLDCARD. For instance, the user can just use a Trick PIN for unlocking a duress wallet for plausible deniability. Alternatively, in a more extreme scenario, the user can type in a Trick PIN that wipes the COLDCARD clean and then bricks it, making it unusable.

Additional improvements brought by Mk4 over Mk3 include faster booting; a 120 Mhz CPU, up from 80 Mhz; maximum space for settings now 512 KB, up from 4 KB; more multisig wallet possibilities; firmware upgrade now takes 15 seconds, down from two minutes; 216 bytes of new secure storage alongside main seed phrase; a flashing light indicating when the USB connection is in use; a USB disk emulation for simple use with web browsers and other PSBT sources; and a doubled flash memory for firmware, among other updates.

Mk4s launch date is yet to be determined, but the device is available for pre-order at the Coinkite store.

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Inside The New COLDCARD Mk4 Bitcoin Hardware Wallet - Bitcoin Magazine

One of the first problems new investors run into is where they should invest. With thousands of publicly traded companies, there's no shortage of companies to choose from, and with the emergence of cryptocurrencies over the last decade, the options have expanded even more.

Between the S&P 500 and Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC), here's what I think is the better first investment.

Image source: Getty Images.

The S&P 500 is an index that consists of the 500 largest companies in the U.S. by market cap. S&P 500 index funds are funds put together to mirror the index, and different brokerages put together their own funds. If you want to invest in an S&P 500 fund, you have multiple options, such as the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF, SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, iShares Core S&P 500 ETF, and more.

The companies in the S&P 500 cover almost every industry you can think of, making it ideal because it gives investors instant diversification. Instead of having to invest in individual companies in varying industries one by one -- and increasing your risk of making a bad investment -- you can just invest into an S&P 500 fund and be instantly invested in top players in respective industries.

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that was released in 2009 that has since gone on to be the world's most popular and biggest cryptocurrency by market cap. Bitcoin was revolutionary because it was the first decentralized currency, meaning no central power (like the Federal Reserve) controlled it.

As of February 9, 2022, Bitcoin's price has increased by over 13,570% since its inception, making it one of the most lucrative investments of all time in any asset. Unfortunately, those historical gains don't automatically mean investors can expect similar increases in the future.

If you're just beginning to invest, one of the last things you'll likely want to do while you're still learning and getting used to how markets work is to put your money into an investment that will inevitably experience extreme volatility. By no means is the stock market exempt from volatility, but the S&P 500 has shown to be a lot more stable in the long run.

Another aspect of investing that you'll miss out on if you choose Bitcoin over the S&P 500 is dividends. Along with an increase in asset price, dividends are the other primary way investors make money from their investments. If you invest a set amount into Bitcoin and the price doesn't increase, you don't make any money. If you invest a set amount into the S&P 500 and the price doesn't increase, you should still make money from dividend payouts.

In 2021, the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF had a 1.59% dividend yield. If that dividend yield stayed the same and you invested $10,000 into the fund without ever contributing another dollar, you would've earned over $3,700 in dividends over 20 years -- even if the fund's stock price didn't increase. Being paid for simply holding an investment is not a perk you currently get with Bitcoin.

While an S&P 500 fund is one investment, the multiple assets within it ensure you're able to reap the benefits of many different companies and industries. One of the pillars of investing is diversification; while the potential upside of Bitcoin may be enticing, you never want all your money in a single asset. Using dollar-cost averaging and making consistent investments in the S&P 500 is one of the best things you can do to accomplish your long-term goals.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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Bitcoin vs. the S&P 500: Which Is the Better First Investment? - Motley Fool

It was the fall of 2014. Jennifer Robertson was struggling with the fallout from a messy divorce and juggling weekend waitressing gigs to make ends meet. One night, at the urging of friends, she swiped right on Tinderand met the love of her life.

Gerald Cotten was a Bitcoin entrepreneur. Robertson didnt know exactly what that meant, but she didnt think she needed to. Cotten was smart, successful, and kind. Over the next four years, as his company, QuadrigaCX, expanded exponentially, Cotten and Robertson, twentysomethings in love, became wealthy beyond their wildest imaginings. They acquired property, bought yachts and planes, travelled to exotic destinations. So much money rolled in so fast that they occasionally ended up with huge piles of cash on their kitchen counter.

In November 2018one month after celebrating their wedding in a Scottish castle and just twelve days after Cotten signed a will naming Robertson his executor and sole beneficiarythey set off on what was supposed to be an extended honeymoon. Instead, suddenly, unexpectedly, almost inexplicably, a seemingly healthy thirty-year-old Cotten died in an intensive care unit in India, of complications from Crohns disease.

Overnight, their dream life became Robertsons worst nightmare. Cotten possessed the only key to the online vaults where his customers investments were supposedly stored. No one knew where to find $215 million belonging to more than 76,000 investors.

With investigators unable to trace the money and the company seeking creditor protection, a firestorm of unconnected dots, incendiary innuendo, and wild speculation quickly erupted on the internet.

Robertson, online posters insisted, was conspiring with Cotten, whod faked his own death and was hiding in some extradition-free backwater until they could rendezvous and live happily ever after. Or Robertson had murdered Cotten and was the real mastermind of a different plot.

Truth didnt matter much in the months after Cottens death, as the trolls began to stalk and threaten Jennifer Robertson.

Stephen Kimber

TICK-TOCK, tick-tock, tick-tock. The disembodied voice at the other end of my phone line began in a singsong tone that morphed into what seemed like a death threat. Times up. Click. Theywhoever they werehad found me.

Facebook had been the trolls first, and perhaps easiest, avenue to track me down. Someone must have identified me from photos of Gerry and me on my profile page and then used Facebook Messenger to send chilling messages to my friends. Our money or violence your choice jen, declared one sender, who appeared to have experienced losses in the Quadriga debacle and blamed me. Im going to take one for the team and kill jen, wrote another. I soon began receiving puzzled messages from Facebook friends. Whats going on? everyone wanted to know. I contacted Facebook. The best the company could suggest was to block trolls from future posts, but of course, the damage had already been done. And what about the next person who found out I was that woman?

People did find me. They uncovered my phone number, my email address. Soon, my personal information was all over the internet. I stopped answering the phone. I remember others pretending to be Gerrys friends, messaging me on platforms like WhatsApp, asking why I hadnt told people he had died and claiming that they wanted to go to the funeral. After a few such messages, I realized their senders were not who they claimed to be.

I had to change my phone number, shut down all my social media accounts, even get a new email address. It felt like being in a movie: I was no longer the director of my own life story. It had become a horror film with me in the role of both villain and victim. The comments were worst on platforms like Reddit, where I became known as Dead Jen Walking and Gerry was allegedly dead Gerry. According to someone who called himself Scamdriga, I had married a scam artist and knowingly [spent] money on Fendi and Prada meanwhile hard working canadians get nothing.

My family and friends warned me not to read what people were writing about me, but I couldnt help myself. I was like a moth being drawn to the flame and then consumed by it. It hurt in ways it shouldnt have when strangers not only didnt like me but appeared to actively hate me. I deserved to be waterboarded for hours, then crucified. But not just memy father as well. Hang her dad right in front of Jen. Even my dogs! How about you give us the location of Gerrys dogs so that we can light them on fire?

I should not have been surprised, I suppose, that the story of Quadrigas missing millions would generate a media feeding frenzy. But I was still shocked to be targeted as someone who should be tortured and then murdered in various horrific ways. I know some were just venting, but others seemed deadly serious.

I became too frightened to even venture outside. After the pictures of our houses in Fall River, Nova Scotia, and Kelowna, BC, were posted online, I spent a few sleepless nights at my mothers house in Nova Scotia before renting a furnished apartment on a month-to-month basis at Bishops Landing, a condominium project beside Halifax Harbour, in the citys south end.

The harassment got so bad that I called the Halifax police. After that, the number of overt online death threats decreased. But none of it made me feel safe.

I was spending far too much time by myself in the apartment, feeling more alone than Id ever felt in my life, paying too much attention to my online bullies, and worse, worrying that they might be right. Who was I? Who was Gerry? Was this all my fault? Id become more scared for my life than ever and yet, in that same contradictory moment, had begun wishing for nothing more than to be dead. I was afraid to die, but I didnt want to live.

I refused to speak to journalists, partly because I wasnt emotionally ready and partly because I still didnt know enough to answer questions on the record. That didnt stop the press from writing stories featuring a version of me I barely recognized. A Widow, a Laptop, and $190 Million: Whats Going On with QuadrigaCX? demanded a headline on a web-based publication called Finance Magnates, which catalogued what it suggested was a flurry of conspiracy theories, including one that Cottens death was faked as a way to hide the fact that the exchange is insolvent. Faked by me? By me and Gerry conspiring together? What did they think had happened inside that ICU in India? Did they even care?

BreakerMag, another online publication that reported on the cryptocurrency industry, weighed in with a story headlined 11 Fishy Things About the QuadrigaCX Mystery. The more facts that come to light, the fishier it smells, declared reporter Jessica Klein. Among the facts that smelled to her: our recent marriage. You read that right, Klein continued. Cotten only got married about a month before his alleged death. Alleged? Of course.

The Globe and Mail dispatched a team of journalists across Canada and even to India to ferret out every scrap of information they could, in a bid to better understand how [Gerry] died, but also to get a glimpse at how a man who carried the keys to vast sums of other peoples money lived. Thanks to the posse of reporters, Quadriga creditors, and conspiracy theorists rummaging through the closets of Gerrys past, I soon began to learn all sorts of things I hadnt known, and some I hadnt wanted to know, about Gerald Cotten.

Even before I met him, Gerry was a well-known and sought-after cryptocurrency advocate. He often spoke at financial-technology conferences, was a member of the Bitcoin Foundation, and served as an adviser for a nonprofit called the CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium. He was frequently interviewed about the business of Bitcoin and was shown in a 2014 online video in which he helped two preschool kids insert a $100 bill into an early Bitcoin ATM in Vancouver to demonstrate just how easy it was to convert ordinary cash into cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin, I learned, is a form of cryptocurrency, which exists only in digital form and can be bought and sold and valued in transactions that are beyond the control of banks or governments. It was launched in 2009 by a mysterious and perhaps fictional person (or people) operating under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The first commercial Bitcoin transaction took place in 2010, when a computer programmer in Florida bought two Papa Johns pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoins. A few months later, in July 2010, the real-world value of a single Bitcoin had rocketed from eight 10,000ths of a dollar to all of eight cents. But its value continued to increase exponentially, if erratically, as Bitcoin was discovered by all manner of investors, from curious financial dabblers to anti-establishment activists and even criminals who found the byzantine world of cryptocurrency an irresistible and convenient means to mask their black market transactions.

The value of a Bitcoin fluctuated wildly. Consider 2013, for example, the year Gerry began Quadriga. At the beginning of that year, you could buy a single Bitcoin for $13.28 (all figures in this paragraph US). In early April, the same Bitcoin was worth $230. A week later, it had tumbled back to $68.36. On December 3, the price peaked for the year at $1,237.55 before dropping, three days later, to $697.02, a collapse of nearly 45 percent. Still, the upward long-term trend seemed clear.

I tried to square the benign man I had known and loved with the shady scam artist described in the media.

The truth is, I still knew very little about Quadriga or how Bitcoin worked. I didnt even have my own Bitcoin account. Quadriga was Gerrys business, and that was fine with me. But, after he died, I had to learn quickly. I soon had to look up Ponzi scheme. According to reporters, Gerry had been involved in a number of similar frauds and scams before I met him; among them, he had served as a payment processor for a Costa Ricabased digital currency company that, according to Vanity Fair, was used by drug cartels, human traffickers, child pornographers and Ponzis to launder money. Gerrys business relationship with his former partner, Michael Patryn, dated back to 2003, to a time before Bitcoin, when Gerry was just fifteen. They had become involved with a website called TalkGold, which Vanity Fair later claimed was devoted to high-yield investment programs, or HYIPs, more commonly known as Ponzi schemes.

I tried to square the benign man I had known and lovedthe smartest, funniest, kindest person Id ever met, a man who had taught me so much, the only man Id ever known who offered me unconditional love, who made me feel like his number-one person alwayswith the shady scam artist described in the media reports. I couldnt. Everything kept getting worse. The Globe and Mail tracked down one of Gerrys subcontractorspart of a network of entities that helped move millions of dollars around so Quadriga could take deposits and facilitate withdrawals, sometimes in the form of physical bank drafts, for its clientsto a rundown, vinyl-sided trailer in rural New Brunswick rented to Aaron Matthews, one of Gerrys payment processors, and his wife. The reporter encountered a man on the trailers porch who insisted no one by that name lived there. He begrudgingly says his name is Jim. A short time later, he declines to answer any other questions. Visibly shaking, he demands a reporter and a photographer leave the property.

There were, to be fair, larger issues at play in all these stories. Even if everything about Quadriga had been above board, the reality was that the company represented a much bigger problem for everyone involved. In less than a decade, cryptocurrency had grown exponentially in popularity, attracting all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. If no one in authorityno government, no oversight body, no financial institutionseemed able to regulate the industry or protect consumers, thats because they couldnt. Cryptocurrencies were devised for the explicit purpose of circumventing the traditional financial world. But, of course, the more disorderly the industry became, the more susceptible it was to manipulation.

According to a financial prospectus I read about later, Quadriga claimed to be processing between sixty and ninety per cent of the volume of digital currency exchange transactions in Canada by November 2015. In 2017, Quadriga processed more than $1 billion (US) in trades from 363,000 individual accounts. Each side of each transaction earned revenue for Gerry. Meanwhile, Bitcoins themselves kept increasing in valuefrom about $400 (US) at the beginning of 2016 to more than $900 (US) by the end of the year and then to an unbelievable $13,000 (US) less than a year later. At one point in 2017, Gerry told me that the price of a single Bitcoin had risen to $25,000 and he was earning $10 million a month.

Although the Quadriga website assured clients that all funds in the [Quadriga] system are highly liquid, and can be withdrawn at any time, the reality was that clients had no way of verifying those claims beyond taking Gerry at his word. They did. And so did I.

The simple fact is that Gerry should never have been in a position to hold all the levers of a billion-dollar company with no internal or external oversight. I know that now. I didnt know it then. I didnt believe I needed to.

When Gerry did mention business problems to me, he was always vague. I knew he was frustrated with conventional banks, which he considered anti-Bitcoin. He vented occasionally about finding some way to take Quadriga out of the banking system entirely, but my understanding was that Gerry spoke as a legitimately aggrieved party, an ahead-of-his-time cryptocurrency entrepreneur whose business was being unfairly hamstrung by risk-averse bankers who wanted to control the Bitcoin industry.

I do remember Gerry telling me how careful he was to make sure his business was above reproach. He boasted that Quadriga had been the first cryptocurrency exchange in Canada to hold a money services business licence from the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, the countrys antimoney laundering authority. So I didnt worry.

In February 2019, soon after Quadriga sought creditor protection, I met with the court-appointed monitor, a serious middle-aged man named George Kinsman. The meeting was suggested by Richard Niedermayer, a lawyer I had hired to help me through the complicated issues involving Gerrys estate. Kinsman was a Halifax-based partner at Ernst and Young who ran an Atlantic restructuring practice and, according to his LinkedIn profile, had spent over twenty years providing solutions to corporate entities facing financing challenges.

You really should meet him, I remember Niedermayer suggesting. Youre someone who wears your heart on your sleeve. Once he meets you, hell realize that youre not capable of anything criminal. Perhaps, if he can put a face to the name, you can build a relationship with him.

It didnt work out that way.

Niedermayer and I met Kinsman in a large boardroom at the downtown Halifax law office of Stewart McKelvey. He had a job to do: find out what had happened to the money and then recover as much of it as possible for Quadrigas customers.

In the weeks and months that followed, I turned over every email, every text message, every electronic device, every scrap of information requested. Even after Id answered every question about every personal expense for the previous year, for example, the emails kept pushing. Why did you buy this? Why did you do that? I wanted to tell him the truth: Because we had lots of money. Because we could. Sometimes, in his zeal, he overreached. At one point, he emailed Niedermayer to complain about a $90,000 payment to what he called a high-end travel company in Kelowna. I had no idea what he was talking about; when I checked, the high-end travel company was a La-Z-Boy store that had supplied all the furniture we bought for our Kelowna home.

On March 5, 2019, the lawyers all trooped back into court in Halifax for a hearing on Quadrigas request for a forty-five-day extension of its creditor protection while the monitor continued to try to sort out where the money had gone. A few days beforehand, Ernst and Young had released its latest report, documenting its very limited success to date in recovering what it now estimated was $215 million in cash and cryptocurrency that Quadriga supposedly held at the time it stopped operating.

The report did not shine a favourable light on Quadrigaor Gerry. The monitor said it had found one Quadriga account in a Canadian credit union containing $245,000. The account had been frozen since 2017. Ernst and Young also noted that the company had been unable to locate or provide formal accounting books or financial records, and the law firm was now trying to determine whether Quadriga had ever even filed any Canadian tax returns. Never filed taxes? I couldnt believe that. How many times had Gerry railed to me about Trudeaus greedy government or complained about the millions of dollars hed had to pay in taxes?

Another issue involved something called wallets. Since you cant keep cryptocurrency in conventional bank accounts, people use virtual wallets to store and protect their holdings. The wallets dont contain actual cryptocurrency but are just tools for managing the blockchainthe official record of whats been bought and sold. Hot wallets are connected to the internet and can be used by investors to buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrency with other users in real time. The downside of hot wallets is that, because theyre connected to the internet, theyre vulnerable to hackers. Which is where cold wallets enter the picture. They exist offline, often on usb sticks and CDs, so theyre more secure, but that makes it more difficult and time consuming to move them online for buying, selling, and trading.

Ernst and Young had managed to identify six Quadriga cold wallets so far but had found almost nothing inside any of them. In fact, it appeared as though the Bitcoins the wallets tracked had been transferred out in the months before Gerry died. Transferred by whom? To where? Why? To date, the report noted, the applicants have been unable to identify a reason why Quadriga may have stopped using the identified bitcoin cold wallets for deposits in April 2018. However, the monitor and management will continue to review the Quadriga database to obtain further information.

The monitor had written to ten of Quadrigas third-party payment processors asking for any funds they were holding on the companys behalf. So far, that effort had generated a paltry $5,000. Further relief from the court, Ernst and Young suggested in legalese, may be necessary to secure funds and records from certain of the third-party processors.

Ernst and Young had also contacted fourteen cryptocurrency exchanges where it believed the companyor Gerryhad opened trading accounts. The report noted that those accounts appeared to have been artificially created outside Quadrigas own normal process, using aliases no one could connect to an actual customer, and that these accounts had been subsequently used for trading. By Gerry? So far, only four of the exchanges had responded, and only one of those had confirmed that it held even minimal cryptocurrency on behalf of Quadriga.

The only bright spot in all of this was that RBC had finally agreed to deposit $25.3 million in court-held CIBC bank drafts into an account for disbursements. (CIBC had held up releasing the money for about a year in a dispute over who owned it.) The problem, as far as Quadrigas customers were concerned, was how the monitor planned to disburse the initial tranche of the money. Ernst and Young would get $200,000 and its lawyers $250,000. Another $230,000 would go to Quadrigas lawyers and $17,000 would be set aside to pay Quadrigas remaining contractors whod been working with the monitor.

But the biggest single payout listed was a $300,000 repayment of shareholder advances. That was to repay me for the amount Id agreed to put up from my personal accounts to cover costs associated with the companys initial creditor protection.

The lawyers representing Quadrigas creditors werent happy with any of it, least of all the idea that I was entitled to the largest portioneven though Id lent the money to the company in the first place. They noted that Ernst and Young had asked for more information from my lawyers as well as an agreement to freeze my assets while it reviewed any information we provided. The repayment contemplated, explained the creditors lawyers in a letter to the court, is inappropriate until such time as the monitor has reviewed the requested information and satisfied itself as to the source of funds used to fund the CCA [Companies Creditors Arrangement Act] proceeding.

In the end, none of the money I lent the company, which totalled $490,000, was ever reimbursed. Id voluntarily provided the amount from what I thought of at the time as my personal bank account, though my finances had by then become entangled with Gerrys and Quadrigas.

I still found it difficultthough no longer impossibleto believe Gerry might have intentionally done something wrong.

By this point, all I wanted to do was wash my hands of the whole thing. In preparation for the hearing, Id had to prepare yet another affidavit on behalf of the company, recommending the appointment of a new director who could straighten out Quadrigas tangled affairs and then sell the platform to someone elseanyone elseso I could finally grieve for the man Id loved.

I continued to find it difficultthough no longer impossibleto believe Gerry might have intentionally done something wrong. I resisted allowing myself to go there. The truth was that I still loved Gerry. Part of me felt as though our life together had been a dream, the best dream you could ever imagine, and now it was time to wake up. But to what? I spent a lot of time thinking, sifting, shuffling, trying to work things out in my head that never worked out.

Richard Niedermayer understood that my mental health depended on putting Quadriga in my rear-view mirror. He suggested approaching Kinsman with a settlement proposal that would allow me to extricate myself from the mire that Quadriga had become, keep what was mine, and get on with making a new life for myself. At the time, I was holding close to $12 million in properties, cash, and other assets on my own behalf and as Gerrys executor. We already knew that the monitor believed some of those assets might rightly belong to Quadriga. So we proposed that I would keep $5 million, mostly in rental properties from Robertson Novathe residential property management company I built using Gerrys capitalwhile turning over everything else to the monitor and giving up any future interest in Quadriga, including whatever the platform might ultimately sell for. We thought it was a generous offer.

Niedermayer had agreed to work out the details. Now he was on the phone again with what I assumed was an update on the negotiations. That settlement, he told me simply, isnt going to happen.

Ernst and Youngs investigation, Niedermayer explained, had now concluded that Quadrigas investors money wasnt just missing. Gerry had stolen it. Hed set up fake accounts using fake names like Aretwo Deetwo and Seethree Peaohh, filled the accounts with fake cryptocurrency, and then used that to make real trades, gambling that the value of crypto would increase and he would make money. It didnt. Instead, the value fell and kept falling. Gerry had lost at least $100 million that Ernst and Young had been able to trace so far. Another $80 million remained unaccounted for. Worse, Gerry had mixed Quadrigas income with his own, using funds that belonged to Quadriga investors to finance his lifestyle. Our lifestyle! Our lives!

There has to be something they dont understand, I remember insisting to Niedermayer. I mean, this is Bitcoin. They just dont understand Bitcoin. I dont understand Bitcoin. And Gerry was great at making trades. He did day trades, Questrade. He made money all the time. I was babbling. Seethree Peaohh? Gerry wasnt even a hard-core Star Wars fan. Why would he?...I mean, Gerry loved to gamble. Its true. We would go to the casinos whenever we travelled, and we had fun, but Gerry was always the one who said, Weve spent enough. Lets go home. I was almost pleading now. There has to be a mistake. Gerrys so smart. If he hadnt died, he could have explained

Niedermayer, I recall, cut me off calmly. It doesnt really matter, he replied, because Gerrys not here. If he hadnt died, maybe none of this would have happened. But he did die, and he left nothingno instructions, nothing. So now its all a matter for interpretation. And the monitor has decided this is the only interpretation that makes sense.

I got off the phone and tried to fit together all those puzzle pieces I hadnt been ableor willingto put into their logical places. I was no longer in denial that all the money the monitor claimed was missing really was. But how had it disappeared? I still couldnt understand or accept it. And, more importantly, why?

All I knew was that I felt empty, drained. How much worse could it get? And then, in the middle of all that, I thought of how much I missed Gerry, how much I needed him now.Ernst and Young, appointed by the court to sort out Quadrigas financial situation, had decided it was time to shift Quadriga from creditor protection to bankruptcy proceedings. Bankruptcy would reduce costs for the company, so there would be more to distribute among Quadrigas thousands of creditors. Ernst and Young could now move on from its monitoring role to become Quadrigas trustee in bankruptcy.

The remaining question was how much of Quadrigas missing funds Ernst and Young could recover. Quadriga had 76,319 registered creditors, virtually all of them clients, who collectively claimed they were owed $214.6 million. So far, Ernst and Young had recovered only $32 million in cash, much of it the formerly frozen CIBC funds. It was tracking another million or so in the hands of uncooperative third-party payment processors, and the move to bankruptcy would give the trustee the right to compel production of documents and seek examination of relevant parties under oath.

The only other source of Quadriga funds ripe for recovery, the monitor suggested, was those assets I had believed were legitimately mine. During the course of the monitors investigation into Quadrigas business and affairs, the monitor became aware of occurrences where the corporate and personal boundaries between Quadriga and its founder Gerald Cotten were not formally maintained, and it appeared to the monitor that Quadriga funds may have been used to acquire assets held outside the corporate entity. Ernst and Young wanted me to agree, voluntarily, to what is known as an asset preservation order, so that it could do its work without concern that assets possibly recoverable for the applicants stakeholders may be dissipated.

I had no intention of parting with any of those assets. When I initially tried to sell the plane and the boat after Gerry died, my only purpose was to provide emergency funds to keep Quadriga operating. When I transferred my real estate into a trust, it was at my lawyers urging in order to protect what we then genuinely believed were my assets from getting tangled up in Quadrigas messy business affairs.

But, if I didnt immediately agree to the asset preservation proposalunder which Ernst and Young would allow me to continue to operate Robertson Nova under its supervision and earn a living, so long as I didnt try to sell any properties or move their ownership beyond the courts jurisdictionErnst and Young would escalate matters and ask the court for something called a Mareva injunction, a remedy that, as I understood it, would assume I was involved in fraud, freeze all my assets, and put my life under Ernst and Youngs complete control.

I agreed that asset preservation was my best option. Under the terms of the order, I would receive $10,000 a month. That may seem reasonableand it might have beenexcept I had to use that money not only to cover my current living expenses but also to maintain aspects of a lifestyle Gerry and I had lived but that I could no longer afford and yet, due to the court order, couldnt easily dispose of. I was still responsible for the upkeep, insurance, taxes, etc. on our house in Kelowna, for example, but I wasnt permitted to sell it without the trustees permission. It was another asset I was required to preserveand pay foruntil someone other than me decided what to do with it.

I was also still being pilloried regularly in the press and online. Along with Gerry, I remained the villain of this story. In early June, the FBI announced it was trying to identify victims of Gerrys fraud to provide these victims with information, assistance services, and resources. Coindesk, a cryptocurrency news site, reported that Australian authorities had even become involved. Australia? I knew I needed to find a way out of this morass. I went to Niedermayer and told him Id had more than enough. I was ready to write an ending to this chapter of my life. Instead of haggling over the details in court, I wanted to make a deal with the trustee for a fresh start.

At that point, the value of the assets I nominally controlledall of which were under the asset preservation ordertotalled around $12 million. Niedermayer and I talked about how much of that I might be able to keep in a settlement. Not much, he said. The reality was that wed be negotiating not only with the bankruptcy trustee but also with a committee representing those described as Quadrigas affected userscheated investors who, understandably, wanted to claw back every penny Gerry had ever taken out of Quadriga. I told Niedermayer that, if it was indeed their money and that had been proven, then they should have it. It should go back to them.

I decided to propose a financial settlement I believed would be enough to satisfy Quadrigas creditors while -allowing me to press reset. On October 7, 2019, Ernst and Young accepted a deal in which I transferred over all assets including cash, investments, vehicles, loans, and real estate. In exchange, I got to keep what the agreement referred to as excluded assets: $90,000 in cash, my $20,000 RSP, my 2015 Jeep Cherokee with a book value of $19,000, my jewellery (including my wedding band and a pink sapphire ring Id bought in Greece, valued at $8,700, but not my engagement ring), personal furnishings up to a value of $15,000, and my clothing and similar personal effects. The trustee justified its decision to give me that much because the estimated aggregate net realizable value of the excluded assets is likely less than the costs that would have been incurred in pursuing the trustees claims against Ms. Robertson, the estate and the controlled entities.

In other words, it was cheaper for them to settle than to pay lawyers to fight me in court. My own lawyer put it another way: given that the assets I turned over were estimated to be worth $12 million, Id ended up with slightly more than 1 percent of the total value.

I didnt fall in love with Gerald Cotten because of his wealth. When we met, he didnt have that much, at least not by the fairy-tale standards Quadriga would set for us just a few years later. It was a bonus when the value of a single Bitcoin rocketed through the roof and Gerry appeared to be making more money than we could possibly spend in a couple of lifetimes. I wont lie: I loved being rich. I loved not having to ask, Can I afford that? I couldwhatever it was. We could buy a house in Nova Scotia, another in British Columbia, even our own island with a yachtnot just a sailboatto get us there. We could travel to exotic places.

It took me longer than many others to appreciate the extent of Gerrys deceit. Like much of the rest of the world, I learned about Gerrys fraud incrementally. It morphed, at first slowly and then suddenly, into a torrent of doubt that became an inexorable flood of accusation and, finally, a tidal wave of irrefutable evidence that almost swallowed me whole. What if Gerry really had been a bad person? Had I loved a bad person? If I had, did that make me a bad person too?

But, even as the evidence piled up daily in front of me, forming the story of a secretive, manipulative, deceitful, even criminal Gerry, I clung to the belief that he must have had a plan. If he hadnt died, I kept telling myself, Gerry would have been able to solve Quadrigas cash-flow problems, open the cold wallets, ensure that the companys investors got what they were owed, and make everything right with our world again. I now know that wasnt true.

This piece was adapted with permission from Bitcoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions by Jennifer Robertson with Stephen Kimber, published by HarperCollins Canada in 2022.

Jennifer Robertson is a former HR specialist and property manager. She lives in Nova Scotia.

Annissa Malthaner is an artist and illustrator based in London, Ontario. Shes shown work at Mad Ones Gallery, in Toronto, and has illustrated work for The Logic and Readers Digest.

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Confessions of a Bitcoin Widow: How a Dream Life Turned into a Nightmare - thewalrus.ca