Report

The US Senate committee on Energy and Natural Resources issued a document stating that mining consumes about 1% of global energy. On public blockchains, mining embroils the computation of a massive amount of mathematical calculations known as hashes. On a normal day, Bitcoin miners collectively compute over 50 billion gigahashes per second.

Cryptocurrency poses four major types of risk, namely, financial, monetary, criminal and law enforcement, according to a report by the Guardia di Finanza (Gdf). The techniques are somehow sophisticated, restrained and variable. Judicial authorities registered increased complaints related to the illicit use of digital currencies.

It has been discovered in the Casaleggio Associati annual report that Italy participates in eCommerce more than any other European country, and blockchain technology and cryptocurrency are part of this digital shopping, especially when it comes to tracking products and making payments for purchased goods.

Financial institutions, including banks, are getting closer and closer to financial technologies (fintech) including cryptocurrency, blockchain, mobile payments and smart contracts, as they realize they have to keep pace with progress to make their work more efficient. A group of experts from Bank of Italy recently published a report dubbed "Banks and Fintech: strategies and business models" to explore the bond.

The main political opponent to Vladimir Putin, Alexei Navalny, has received donations of around 591 Bitcoin (approx. $3 million) since 2016. The Russian opposition leader has managed to raise weighty funding in cryptocurrencies for his political campaigns.

A recently published report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) for Defense & Security Studies, shows how DPRK - Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) wants to exploit Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies, especially in Southeast Asia, so as to bypass international economic sanctions.

Cybercrime, such as online fraud, industrial undercover activities, and the use of cryptocurrency for money laundering, etc. in Italy, is the rapidly increasing malevolent business with the highest margins of diffusion in the future, according to the Global Risk Report 2019 by the World Economic Forum. The country incurred a loss of around €10 billion in 2018.

It is now time to silence all those people who were tarnishing the image (and are against the adoption) of cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin by claiming that they are being used to fund terrorist activities since a new report by the RAND Corporation has discovered that terrorist organizations are the number one haters of digital currencies. Terrorists prefer cash over anything else.

China’s attitude on distributed ledger technology (DLT) is in agreement with global policy trends. The country embraces blockchain technology but not cryptocurrency, according to the BITBLOCK monthly research report on “Chinese Blockchain Policy.”