Moonday Mornings: Coinbase stored 3,420 passwords in plain text

Welcome to Moonday Mornings, Hard Fork’s wrap-up of cryptocurrency and blockchain news from the past few days.

Let’s not waste anymore time, check it out.

1. Around 3,420 Coinbase customers have allegedly been affected by a bug on the exchange’s sign up page, which resulted in user passwords being stored in plain text on “internal server web logs.” The cryptocurrency exchange began emailing the affected customers to make them aware of the situation, it said in a blog post late last week.

2. A delegation from the US House of Representatives is due to meet with authorities in Switzerland this week to discuss digital currencies, in particular Facebook’s Libra. Tensions are likely to be high as democrat Maxine Waters, the banking committee president, is leading the delegation. Waters has so far been highly critical of the Libra project and its relationship with Switzerland, citing money laundering concerns, local news NZZamSonntag reports.

3. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao expects the US version of the cryptocurrency exchange to go live “within a month or two.” Speaking in an interview with Cheddar last week, CZ also said that there were still a lot of things in flux, though. It appears uncertainties in the regulatory space are cause for CZ’s biggest concerns, “But we’re willing to try” he added.

4. The Australian Tax Office has reportedly sent letters to cryptocurrency investors who have put large amounts of their retirement funds into the digital assets, CoinDesk reports. It seems to be taking a leaf out of the US Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) book.

5. Got a bit more time on your hands? Check out this long read about how terrorists are turning to Bitcoin to fund their campaigns.

The militant Palestinian group, Hamas, has grown increasingly sophisticated in its use of Bitcoin as a fundraising mechanism this year. “You are going to see more of this,” said Yaya Fanusie, a former analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency told New York Times.