A small town in Washington, Wenatchee, is seeing a Bitcoin mining boom due to low power prices and cooler temperatures.
There are quite a few reasons why people choose to move to a small town. They may wish to get away from the hustle and bustle of the big city. Perhaps they wish to simplify their life and get back to basics. Or it may be, in the case of Wenatchee, Washington, that people may be looking to join in a Bitcoin mining boom.
The New Virtual Gold Rush
A small town in Washington state that lies a few hours away from Seattle is becoming the center of cryptocurrency mining for the United States. It appears that the rural town of Wenatchee is experiencing a major Bitcoin mining boom as people are flocking to the area to start up operations. Steve Wright, the head of the local power utility, says that there are already a dozen major cryptocurrency miners in the area. That number is set to explode as he notes that another 75 have made inquiries about moving to Wenatchee. Wright says: We’ve come from just a few people out there who have been knocking on the door all of a sudden to people who are banging on the door pretty loudly. Why Wenatchee? Moving to a small town in the name of high-tech crypto mining may sound counterintuitive, there are some great reasons why miners are choosing Wenatchee. The first reason is the cost of power. Electricity is extremely cheap for the town, costing only 2 to 3 cents per kilowatt hour. Power is so cheap as that there’s plenty of hydroelectric power due to a series of dams on the Columbia River.
Another reason why Wenatchee is a prime location is that it boasts cooler temperatures that keep the mining servers at the right temperature. To cap it all off, the town also has a tremendous internet capacity.
When you factor power cost, internet capacity, and average temperature together, you can see why Wenatchee is such a great spot to open up your very own crypto mine. Plus, Seattle is only 3 hours away if you want to take advantage of everything that a major metropolis has to offer.
However, Steve Wright is worried about the area’s new status of a Bitcoin mining boom town. He says:
What we don’t want is people who come here to make a quick buck off of our low-cost electricity and then leave town and leave us holding the bag, and leave the people of this community holding the bag. In the long run, miners, just like every other business, will go to where they can generate a maximum profit by lowering costs. Perhaps Wenatchee should be happy that they can broaden their tax base a bit with the increased industry.
0 Comments
Bitcoin is losing fans.
Investors using London-based contracts-for-difference firm IG Group Holdings Plc have increasingly taken bets on declines in the cryptocurrency. That’s a change from a year ago when a far greater majority wanted to be long, according to Adam Blemings, head of futures and foreign exchange. Last January, more than 90 percent of the company’s customers were betting on price rises. Now as many as a quarter are betting on declines, Blemings said in an interview in London on Feb 5. “This time last year, everyone wanted to be long bitcoin,” Blemings said. “That’s not what we’re seeing now.”
Cryptocurrency prices stabilized this week after the biggest selloff in three years amid greater regulator scrutiny. Bitcoin, peak to trough, dropped as much as 70 percent since December. IG Group Chief Executive Officer Peter Hetherington said last month that the company was one of the biggest users of Bitcoin futures on the CME Group Inc.’s exchange. IG Group, which takes the opposite side of many of it’s clients bets, hedges all of its exposure to cryptocurrencies.
Contracts for difference, or CFDs, are derivatives that allow investors to speculate on the price of securities and other instruments, such as cryptocurrencies and commodities. Bitcoin traded little changed at US$8,240 on Friday.
Traders on the platform are most bullish on Ripple XRP, with longs outnumbering shorts 18 to one, and 12 to one for Ethereum. For comparison, Apple Inc longs outnumber shorts 10 to one, while gold and oil have ratios below two to one. Trading volume hasn’t decreased since prices of digital currencies started falling in December, Blemings said.
Bullish Ripple A great share of those trading Ripple are betting on a rally “The small coins are still seeing more buyers than sellers,” Blemings said, adding that the company also offers trading in Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold. He said there are no immediate plans to add to the range of digital-currency products the company offers.
Biomedicine just took another leap forward. University of Colorado Boulder scientists created so-called electronic skin—e-skin for short. The e-skin is a thin, semi-transparent material that can act like your skin through measuring temperature, pressure, humidity and air flow. The new material, which was detailed in a study published Friday in Science Advances,could make better prosthetics, improve the safety of robots in the future and aid development of other biomedical devices.
"This has quite broad applications, in a sense, to enable sensation of otherwise passive systems," Jianliang Xiao, mechanical engineer at Boulder who led the study, told Newsweek. Those passive systems are the electronic devices we use, but which don't have the same capabilities that our skin naturally has. This e-skin has the ability to sense for pressure, which is a key factor for improving prosthetic limbs. For instance, if the e-skin is wrapped around a prosthetic hand, the e-skin would enable the prosthetic to sense for pressure when holding a glass cup. Knowing how much pressure the mechanical hand is applying could prevent a person using it from accidentally crushing the cup, Xiao explained.
"If you think about what real skin can do, real skin can prevent people getting burned [and] can prevent people getting hurt," Wei Zhang, a chemistry professor at Boulder and co-author of the study, told Newsweek. "E-skin can basically mimic those [preventative] functions. At least that's one big part of the electronic skin."
The e-skin also has applications for the future of robots. In the future, should robots handle babies in some form, they would be able to feel for pressure and temperature. "Sensing is critical because when human beings interact with robots, we want to make sure that robots don't hurt people," Xiao said. Robots in the future could be handling a baby and, if the robot can feel for pressure, the robot could handle a baby more safely. Detecting a fever is another benefit. “When the baby is sick, the robot can just use a finger to touch the surface,” Xiao said. Then, “it can tell what the temperature of the baby is.” The material is made from a polymer network called polyimine as well as silver nanoparticles, the latter which provide strength, chemical stability and electrical conductivity. Researchers explained that the e-skin can heal itself, just by mixing compounds found in ethanol with the material. Heat and pressure can allow the e-skin to wrap around curved objects easily, such as human skin and intricate robotic hands. Plus, the material is recyclable, which is what researchers say makes their e-skin material unique.
"I think we are the first group to demonstrate recycling of such multifunctional e-skin," Xiao said. E-skin is recycled by soaking the polymers into a solution that degrades the polymers down and separates the silver nanoparticles, which sink down to the bottom of the solution. "What drives us to make such devices to be recyclable is because, nowadays, we are facing very serious environmental pollution due to tens of millions of tons of electronic waste,” he added.
Zhang took the recyclability concept a step further. He sees a future where you can simply soak your cell phone or your laptop in a solution that dissolves the materials down to be reused again. That would be the "dream," he said.
US blockchain company Skuchain has partnered with Japanese tech giant NTT Data to build a blockchain platform for supply chain and logistics management.
The solution, which combines blockchain technology with internet of things (IoT) innovations such as radio-frequency identification (RFID), has already been trialled in Japan’s manufacturing sector, where it has been successfully used to improve supply chain efficiency. The solution is being jointly marketed by Skuchain and NTT Data in Japan and further afield.
Skuchain and NTT Data are also working with companies in Japan to use the supply chain platform to offer inventory financing offered through the blockchain platform – a key part of Skuchain’s offering in other industry sectors such as food and agribusiness.
Skuchain is also in the process of implementing a supplier financing programme based on its blockchain technology with one of Japan’s premier automotive manufacturers, with the California tech company set to make big strides in the Asian supply chain space this year. At the crux of the product is blockchain-enabled track and trace technology, which helps manufacturers with complex supply chains ensure that products are traceable at every node. By harnessing IoT, such as RFID, it means factory workers don’t have to go through the arduous process of scanning each pallet of goods to ensure it is there, since RFID tech allows for goods to be scanned on a collective basis, using mobile phones.
The blockchain element comes with Skuchain’s Popcodes app, which allows for tracking and tracing goods at every point of the supply chain. Enabling all of this technology together reduces stock wastage, increases efficiency and allows companies to have greater control over their supply chains.
Rebecca Liao, Skuchain’s vice-president for business development and strategy, says that the work done on the physical side of the supply chain is more advanced than that of the financial side. But as large companies making big investments in blockchain technology, banks may have to follow in their footsteps, or be left behind.
“Banks were early to the story, because blockchain started as fintech. But they move slowly: there’s a lot involved with bank technology that is outside their control, including interoperability, standards and regulations. That is a much slower process, but on the supply chain side, our idea has always been to go after large anchor buyers because they have whole supply chains with lots of needs. We’re very excited to have Japan on board, their supply chains need no introduction,”
(Bloomberg) -- Singapore and Malaysia unveiled a plan to create a trading link that allows each country’s investors to access the other’s stock market. The news was announced by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak at a Securities Commission conference in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday. The link will be established by the end of the year, he said. Singapore and Malaysia’s regulators and national exchanges will work on the arrangements for the system, which will connect markets with more than $1.2 trillion in value and about 1,600 listed companies. The move comes just months after the closing of an earlier attempt to connect the markets, which started in 2012. While that effort failed, the success of Hong Kong’s links with exchanges in mainland China made it more pressing for bourses in Southeast Asia to establish their own regional alliance, said Song Seng Wun, an economist at CIMB Private Banking in Singapore. “Regional competition has put pressure on the exchanges,” said Song. “The two exchanges don’t want to be left behind and have investors flock elsewhere so now they’re waving a flag and saying, ‘we too will have a trading link.”’ Singapore Exchange Ltd.’s shares closed down 2 percent on Tuesday, while Bursa Malaysia Bhd. stock fell 1.1 percent amid a sell-off in global equities. A rise in trading flows under the Hong Kong-China stock connect demonstrates the potential opportunity for regional exchanges, said Bloomberg Intelligence senior industry analyst Sharnie Wong. Long-Running EffortThe announcement came after bilateral discussions between Najib and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at a retreat last month. It’s the latest move in what’s been a long-running effort to introduce cross-border trading between the two countries separated by a causeway. A Singaporean over-the-counter market, known as Clob, that traded billions of shares of Malaysian-based companies was in 1998 banned by Malaysia, which alleged that Clob was an illegal exchange. The Clob dispute didn’t stop the nations holding talks in 2004 about allowing investors to trade securities on each other’s exchanges by the end of 2005. While that didn’t happen, the Asean Trading Link started in 2012, with Bursa Malaysia and SGX as its members, later joined by the Stock Exchange of Thailand. That system shut last year, five years after its high-profile debut. Cross-Border Research As well as the cross-border buying and selling of shares, the new stock link will cover arrangements including clearing and settlement, a first for the two markets, according to SGX. The new link’s cross-border clearing and settlement will be key for its users, Malaysia’s Securities Commission Chairman Ranjit Singh said in an interview. “Investors will essentially be able to trade equities from another stock market, and settle in local currency as if trading in the local market,” he said at the event in Kuala Lumpur. “Retail investors will notably benefit from this.” Institutional investors will also be interested, said Danny Wong, chief executive officer at Areca Capital Sdn. in Kuala Lumpur. “Once the link is there, it would encourage a lot of cross-border research reports, and in this case the exchange of information would be easier.”
“We hope to cover more on the small- and mid-caps. With this kind of trading link we hope to expand into more undiscovered gems in the market,” he said.
(Bloomberg) -- An elated Elon Musk pulled off another seemingly impossible feat Tuesday when SpaceX launched the world’s most powerful rocket in 45 years, then flew two of its spent boosters back to the Florida coast for a spectacular, simultaneous recovery on land.
With hordes of fans gathered along the Florida space coast, the new rocket rumbled aloft under clear skies shortly after 3:45 p.m. local time. The live-stream of the Falcon Heavy Test Flight was the second-most-watched in YouTube’s history, reaching more than 2.3 million concurrent views, and the launch led all three television network broadcasts in the U.S. Tuesday evening.
Falcon Heavy cleared the launch pad without blowing up -- a feat Musk had said would be enough to deem the mission a win -- and continued on to deliver Musk’s cherry red Tesla Roadster with a space-suit wearing mannequin at the wheel toward an Earth-Mars elliptical orbit around the sun.
"It seems surreal to me," said Musk, 46, during a post-launch press conference. "Crazy things can come true." Falcon Heavy, with three boosters and 27 Merlin engines, makes SpaceX a competitor to United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy, a workhorse for large U.S. military payloads. Its 5 million pounds of thrust are the most since the Saturn V used for Apollo moon missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “A private company just outperformed every government on earth,” said Greg Autry, a professor at the University of Southern California and a former NASA White House liaison. “This is bigger than anything Russia or China is doing. No one else is even close.” The SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch on Feb. 6.
The strides Musk has made rendering Falcon 9 launches more routine -- SpaceX pulled off a record 18 launches last year-- has helped make it one of the word’s most richly valued private companies.
Following the launch, SpaceX accomplished a feat never before seen in space history, re-landing two rocket cores back on earth. Two touched down on land in tandem; the third center core that was slated to settle on an unmanned drone ship ran out of propellant needed to slow down the descent and slammed into the ocean instead. Falcon Heavy side cores have landing at SpaceX’s Landing Zones 1 and 2. "The center core didn’t land on the drone ship," said Musk, who said early reports are that the rocket booster "hit the water at 300 miles per hour and sprayed the drone ship with shrapnel."
Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX already has paying customers committed to flying with Falcon Heavy, including commercial satellite operators Arabsat, Inmarsat and Viasat, according to its launch manifest. The U.S. Air Force also chose Falcon Heavy for its STP-2, or Space Test Program 2, mission, though the vehicle still needs to go through certification.
Musk outfitted his Roadster with cameras to capture views of the car as it floated through space, but the batteries are only expected to last for roughly 12 hours. Behind the wheel was “Starman,” clad in the same space suit that astronauts will wear during SpaceX’s Crew Dragon flights to the International Space Station. Musk said that Crew Dragon is now the company’s top priority, with the first demo flights slated for later this year. A nearly indestructible disk carrying a digital copy of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction book series, Foundation, is also on board, along with a plaque engraved with the names of SpaceX’s 6,000 employees.
The successful test flight means that SpaceX can move forward with Falcon Heavy missions for paying customers, with the first to take place within three to six months.
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 and has led the company since the beginning. Falcon Heavy was developed without any government funding, and took far longer than originally planned. "We tried to cancel the Falcon Heavy program three times because it was way harder than we thought," said Musk. "Our total investment is over half a billion."
Progress for German politics is buoying the euro, the U.S. and China may be headed toward a trade war, and North Korea visits Seoul. Here are some of the things people in markets are talking about.
Merkel Makes Progress Germany’s Social Democrats backed formal coalition talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel after a divisive party convention, marking a potential breakthrough toward her fourth term. A majority of SPD delegates gathered in Bonn on Sunday voted in favor of negotiations to renew the “grand coalition” with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union-led bloc. Party and labor leaders had argued to move forward with a joint policy outline reached on Jan. 12, rather than walk away from government. Merkel hailed the “positive result” in Bonn before meeting with fellow leaders of her CDU in Berlin to lay out the negotiating path ahead. With coalition talks able to begin as soon as Tuesday, the end of a four-month political stalemate is on the horizon, enabling Merkel to move toward re-inauguration possibly by mid-March. The euro rose 0.4 percent to $1.2270 as of 6:30 a.m. in Tokyo. U.S.-China Trade-Clash Fears The next month will be crucial in signaling whether U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to get tough on China over trade turn from rhetoric into reality. A year into his presidency, Trump has failed to stem growth in China’s trade surplus as an economic upswing in the U.S. fuels imports from the world’s factory floor. Yet the kind of punitive actions threatened during his campaign haven’t materialized, with Trump ordering his administration to study the challenges instead of slapping on tariffs from the get-go.
Now, a raft of China-targeted trade decisions are piling up on Trump’s desk as the deadlines for those assessments loom. The clock is ticking on a decision whether to impose new tariffs on steel imports, while initial reports on aluminum and solar panels are due next week. Outside of geopolitics, trade-related fears are probably the biggest external risks we face, according to Michael Spencer, global head of economics at Deutsche Bank AG.
North Korea’s Seoul Visit An advance team for North Korea arrived in Seoul on Sunday as Pyongyang reversed a decision to cancel the visit, a day after signing an agreement with the South to march under a unified flag at next month’s Winter Olympics. North and South Korea on Saturday solidified plans to march together and agreed to compete with a joint women’s ice hockey team in a rare show of unity amid heightened tensions about Kim Jong Un’s nuclear program. With the games to be held in South Korea, the agreement offers a moment of reconciliation amid mounting tensions on the Korean peninsula involving missile tests and military exercises. North and South Korea will enter the opening ceremony in Pyeongchang under a single flag. The two nations haven’t competed as a team in 27 years.
Watching Those Central-Bank Decisions
The world’s biggest bond market probably needs a little push from central banks to prop up yields at the highest in more than three years. The Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank both have policy decisions this week, before an announcement from the Federal Reserve on Jan. 31. While no action is expected from any of the three this month, investors will be on alert for the latest signals on withdrawal of policy accommodation after years of unprecedented stimulus. Any dovish hints from officials could pull the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield back from the brink: It touched 2.66 percent on Friday, the highest since July 2014. Traders are on edge because technical indicators signal weak support for the 10-year Treasury if the yield breaks even higher. That’s not to say there’s any hint of panic. In fact, strategists are questioning the pace of the ascent in yields, and anticipate a reversal if policy makers signal they’re hesitant to remove the proverbial punch bowl. “If the market is reminded that low rates globally are going to stay low, at least for this year, there’s room for these rates to come back,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, an interest-rate strategist at TD Securities. “Everyone is trying to get all excited about rates moving up today, and one of the biggest pain trades is that rates start moving up later.” Coming Up… It isn’t just central-bank decisions that will keep this week’s news cycle humming. Legislators are working to resolve the U.S. government shutdown, and the World Economic Forum takes place in Davos, Switzerland. On the shutdown, the House and Senate were back in session Sunday with a federal government shutdown in its second day amid a spending-bill impasse in Congress. The House is supposed to be on recess this week, but members stayed in Washington as negotiations continue. A bipartisan group of 20 Senate centrists was working Sunday on a compromise plan to get the government funded for three more weeks while the immigration debate continues. But there was no assurance that party leaders -- or the House -- would go along. The shutdown may even affect Davos, as Trump is scheduled to join world leaders and senior executives there, but the trip may be scuttled depending on what’s happening on the home front.
What we’ve been reading
This is what caught our eye over the last 24 hours. thanks for watching!
Airbnb is making rents in New York City spike as owners yank units off the market, study finds2/1/2018
Skyrocketing New York City rents can be blamed at least in part on the rise of the home-sharing service Airbnb, a new study has claimed.
The report, released Tuesday, analyzed Airbnb activity between September 2014 and August of 2017 and was published by McGill University in Montreal. It was commissioned by the Hotel Trades Council, a union organization, and co-sponsored by local New York neighborhood groups. The study found Airbnb had removed between 7,000 and 13,500 units of housing stock from New York City's long-term rental market.
It calculated that by reducing supply, Airbnb activity had in fact increased median long-term rent in the city by 1.4 percent over three years "resulting in a $380 rent increase for the median New York tenant looking for an apartment this year."
The study further claimed that in Manhattan, the increase is more than $700. Airbnb claims 'anti-home sharing bias'Airbnb has questioned the methodology, noting that the report uses "available for rent" instead of actual booked nights in determining that listings have been removed from the long-term market. Airbnb has argued that many people don't update their listing availability.
Under New York State's Multiple Dwelling Law, short-term rentals of fewer than 30 days are illegal in buildings with three or more units, unless the owner is present. Private room rentals would also be unlawful if the owner wasn't there.
The report estimated that given those laws, at least two-thirds of Airbnb revenue in New York is likely generated from illegal listings. In response to that charge, Josh Meltzer, head of northeast policy at Airbnb said in a statement Tuesday that the home-sharing service actually supports a change in the law. "Although inconvenient for this author's anti-home sharing bias, Airbnb supports legislation that would restrict home sharing to one single home," he said.
"This would finally allow enforcement to focus on illegal hotel operators while protecting regular New Yorkers who are trying to make some extra money to live in a city that gets more expensive by the year," he added.
The study also refreshed an earlier study which looked at listings in 72 predominately black neighborhoods across New York and found that three-quarters of the Airbnb hosts in those areas were white. The latest study suggested that Airbnb "continues to have a strongly racialized impact" as the loss of housing, which it blamed on the company, was six times more likely to affect black New Yorkers.
To date, messaging with Alexa has meant sending screeds using Amazon's in-house system, which doesn't do you much good if your recipient doesn't have an Echo speaker. You won't have to be quite so selective from now on, however, as Amazon has added support for SMS messaging through Alexa-capable devices connected to Android phones (there's no word on iOS). You can explicitly tell the voice assistant to "send an SMS," but it will also pick SMS automatically if you message a contact that doesn't have an Echo.
There are some catches outside of the Android requirement. Not surprisingly, you can't use this to text 911, participate in group messages or send MMS -- there's only so much you can do when you can't actually see the chats. You'll still be reaching for your phone most of the time, then, but this could be helpful if you want to let a friend know you're on your way while you're racing out the door.
|
CORWIN GROUPLatest News Archives
October 2021
CategoriesBy submitting this form, you provide consent for Corwin Group to email you occasionally with industry news and promotions. You may unsubscribe from these emails at any time.Testimonials & Disclaimer
Important Disclosure: By visiting this site, you agree to be bound by CorwinGroup’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. CorwinGroup.com is intended for accredited investors and otherwise qualified investors who understand and accept the risk associated with private investments. Investing in private investments on CorwinGroup involves risks, including, but not limited to market and industry risks, risks related to a specific property, currency fluctuation risk and liquidity constraints. Investments are not bank deposits and are not guaranteed. There is a potential for loss of part or ALL of the investment capital. CorwinGroup does not endorse any of the opportunities that appear on the site, nor does it make any recommendations regarding the appropriateness of particular opportunities for any investor. No correspondence or information provided on CorwinGroup.com or by any representative of CorwinGroup should be construed as a recommendation of a security. Each investor is advised to conduct his/her own due diligence as CorwinGroup does not provide any investment advice, business advice, or tax or legal advice. CorwinGroup is not registered under the Securities & Futures Act or the Financial Advisor’s Act. Neither the Securities and Exchange Commission in the country nor any federal or state securities commission or any other regulatory authority has recommended or approved of the investment or the accuracy or inaccuracy of any of the information or materials provided by or through the website. Please read Corwin’s Terms of Use for more detailed terms and conditions to which users of CorwinGroup are subject. |