Moonday Morning: North Korean hackers are after your Bitcoin

The first weekend of December has been and gone, so Christmas must be just around the corner. But the blockchain doesn’t care about Christmas, it keeps on going no matter what.

Which means, there’s some catching up to do. Here are Hard Fork’s top cryptocurrency and blockchain news picks from the last weekend.

1. At the latest G20 summit in Buenos Aires, world politicians discussed a global cryptocurrency business tax. It’s currently illegal for a country to tax a business that doesn’t have a physical presence there, so it almost makes sense. If the tax does materialize, it’s a while away yet, as G20 countries are to go away and make make proposals for a final version to be created by 2020.

2. North Korean hackers are continually finding new ways to steal cryptocurrency from unsuspecting victims. The latest scandal sees hackers from the country going after the Bitcoin stashes of individuals. Previous tactics from North Korean hackers have targeted institutions like universities and cryptocurrency exchanges. Analysts say that Pyongyang is using the method to generate additional income as the country buckles under international sanctions.

3. The Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA) is looking set to deploy a regulatory framework for initial coin offerings (ICOs). According to local sources, the FSA is looking to protect citizens by limiting the amount one can invest in an ICO. The framework will also require ICOs to be registered with the agency too. While Japan may have granted the cryptocurrency industry self-regulatory status, this doesn’t prevent the FSA from setting some of the rules.

4. Venezuela’s President Maduro has done everything Satoshi Nakamoto said couldn’t be done and has manipualted the price of the country’s cryptocurrency, the Petro. Maduro has announced that the Petro has increased from 3,600 sovereign Bolivars to 9,000. That said, the cryptocurrency is barely a cryptocurrency, let alone a currency. There is still no wallet to support Petro, and purchases of the coin are issued to buyers with certificates (paper wallets). It would seem the cryptocurrency isn’t totally immune to inflation.

5. Mobile phone manufacturer, Huawei, made the launch of its Blockchain Services (BCS) earlier this month official in a press release published late last week. Much like Amazon’s recent announcement of its own blockchain cloud services, Huawei is claiming the service will help developers create, deploy, and manage blockchain applications. Huawei’s system is built on the open source blockchain software, Hyperledger Fabric.

Even though the cryptocurrency market has had one of its worst weeks this year, governments still want regulation, there are still hackers, and there are yet more talks of cryptocurrency taxes. Maybe these are the only things we can be certain of in cryptocurrency’s future.