A UK court has branded a dark web site advertising bitcoin-for-hire hitmen an “absolute sham” and “palpable nonsense” after a woman, who allegedly tried to have a one-time fling murdered, lost $25,000 in bitcoin.

Mother-of-five Helen Hewlett allegedly paid a £20,000 deposit for a hitman on the site Online Killers Market. It was agreed that money would exchange hands once her former fling, an ex-colleague, was murdered. However, the fake hitmen took Hewlett’s cash without going through with the deed.

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Australian securities regulators were investigating FTX as early as March 2022, according to emails obtained by The Guardian.

The investigation looks to have begun after it became clear that FTX was offering 20 times leverage on its investments. When regulators began to investigate, they discovered that FTX had acquired its license from a takeover of IFS Markets, which had itself acquired it by taking over Forex Financial Services.

In order to understand whether or not FTX was maintaining the standards required by the license, regulators issued an S912C notice to gather information to assess its compliance.

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A UK-based charity is being probed by regulators over its ties to collapsed crypto exchange FTX.

In a statement issued on Monday, the Charity Commission announced that it is launching an official inquiry into Effective Ventures Foundation, which received much of its funding from Future Fund, the charitable arm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-bankrupt firm. The charity previously described the collapse as a “serious incident.”

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Syrian-Australian conspiracy theorist Maram Susli, known online as Syrian Girl, has stepped back from social media after asking her followers for donations and receiving $127 in bitcoin from a wallet with alleged ties to numerous scams and Russian terrorism.

Pro-Russian Susli is a YouTuber who creates political content in support of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria while condemning the US and Israel. “Syrian patriot and Sunni Muslim from Damascus, anti-neocon, anti-NWO, anti-Zionist,” her YouTube profile reads.

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Established in 1999, quantitative trading firm Jane Street has grown to become a multi-billion-dollar Wall Street giant. The firm employs thousands of employees and, even though it’s not required to file public financials, it disclosed $7.8 billion in earnings on $17 trillion worth of securities trades after its fiscal year 2020.

However, perhaps the most interesting thing about the New York-headquartered company is that it employed five workers who subsequently went on to participate in Sam Bankman-Fried’s ill-fated FTX empire.

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Proof Collective co-founder Kevin Rose is the latest high-profile NFT investor to fall victim to a “social engineering” attack. On Wednesday, he signed a single transaction that triggered the sale of the majority of his collection for free.

Rose is a well-known tech investor. Before entering the world of NFTs, he co-founded Digg, had a stint at Google Ventures, and created apps focused on fasting and meditation. Proof Collective, which launched in late 2021 and created the popular Moonbirds series, counts Beeple and Gary Vee among its members.

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A recent report by Goldman Sachs, naming bitcoin as the best-performing asset of the year so far has bitcoiners once again dreaming the $100K dream.

This isn’t the first time that bitcoin has outperformed other assets. Indeed, there have even been reports that have tagged it as one of the best-performing of the last decade. But what are the odds of history repeating itself? In the event of a new bull market, will bitcoin be, as Paul Tudor Jones once said, “the fastest horse in the stable” once again?

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Bitcoin maximalist Jack Dorsey significantly contributed to the popularity of social media platform Nostr overnight on December 14, when he chose to tweet about it. Thousands of Bitcoiners joined the platform thanks to his publicity of the platform, which promises to be a credible decentralized social site that could displace Twitter.

His recommendation gained 428,000 organic impressions. The next morning, Dorsey donated 14 bitcoin (then worth $250,000) to Fiatjaf from Bitcoin gaming company Zebedee. Fiatjaf is the lead maintainer of Nostr and a developer on Damus, Nostr’s leading implementation.

So, what is Nostr? And why is the Bitcoin community excited about it?

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In the late 2022 depths of the bear market, sentiment for bitcoin miners was abysmal. Rig operators were suffering. Profits had evaporated. Equity valuations cratered.

Now that bitcoin is above $20,000, more miners are turning their rigs back on. The average hashrate devoted to bitcoin rose to over 272 quintillion calculations per second by January 23.

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