A drug-smuggling kingpin has been using west Dublin teenagers as young as 14 to store large amounts of narcotics bought with cryptocurrency via the dark web, reports Irish local media The Journal citing sources familiar with the matter.
Authorities suspect they run a criminal enterprise that distributes illegal drugs like cocaine, MDMA, and ketamine within the west Dublin area.
A 17-year-old boy arrested earlier this week over $682,000 (€600,000) worth of ecstasy seized at Lucan postal centre is believed to have actually been paid to hold them for the dodgy dealers. He was later released without charge.
According to reports, state police say there are “dozens of young people” in areas such as Lucan, Clondalkin, and Ballyfermot currently holding drugs for the syndicate – a supposed strategy to reduce legal risk.
International police recently disrupted two of the dark web‘s most prolific narcotics markets in a string of raids around the globe, including the US and Germany. They seized $600,000 in cash, as well as large sums of Bitcoin and Monero.
Not to mention, a Californian man who sold drugs on the dark web in exchange for Bitcoin was sentenced to 10 years in prison last month.
In the case of our drug smuggler from Dublin, narcotics squads are reportedly investigating, joined by the Ireland‘s National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the Garda National Drugs, and the Organised Crime Bureau.
Still, cryptocurrency-fuelled drug syndicates regularly get broken up, but it’s unclear just how much it affects dark web trade.
Coinbase reinstates GBP bank transfers, but ups fees for low-volume traders
After splitting up with its UK banking partner Barclays earlier this year, Coinbase has now fully reinstated GBP transfers. But it’s not all good news, as the exchange has also upped its fees.
In an announcement last night , Coinbase‘s UK CEO Zeesham Feroz wrote that UK customers can fund their wallets directly from GBP bank accounts or credit/debit cards once again.
The news comes as Coinbase had to find a new British banking partner when its relationship with Barclays came to a close – something it found with ClearBank.
As ClearBank is part of the UK‘s faster payments system, Coinbase is now able to offer fast transfers between Coinbase wallets and GBP bank accounts, Bloomberg reports .
When Barclay’s and Coinbase‘s relationship broke down, UK customers were inconvenienced as bank transfers took much longer to clear .
Even though all appears to be back to normal for UK customers at least, it’s not all good news.
Coinbase has also reworked its fee structure on its “Pro” platform, and as a result trading is a bit more expensive for low-volume traders . Previously, those that traded less than $10 million per month were charged a 0.3 percent fee.
There are now three new fee tiers below that figure. Fees for those investing between $0 and $10,000 have been bumped from 0.3 percent to 0.5 percent. And those that trade between $10,000 and $50,000 per month have had their fees bumped up by o.05 percent.
Contrary to this, Coinbase has dropped the fees for big-time traders. For example, fees for those that trade between $100 million and $300 million per month have dropped by 0.3 percent. Fees are based on a trailing 30-day volume.
How these prices changes will affect traders remains to be seen, but if responses to its blog post are anything to go by, people aren’t happy.
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Bitcoin Cash’s Q3 performance was horrid — here’s what happened
Bitcoin Cash is a household name in the cryptocurrency world. It’s never far from being in the top five cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that old. Bitcoin Cash was created in August 2017.
In response to Bitcoin‘s scalability challenges, its blockchain was hard forked to create a new coin, called Bitcoin Cash. Its creators wanted to create a cryptocurrency that acted as close to a digital version of cash as possible. It wanted to reduce the comparatively high transaction fees associated with Bitcoin to make everyday use of cryptocurrency a more achievable reality.
Bitcoin Cash tries to do this with larger block sizes, which means more transactions can be mined per block, in theory reducing confirmation times and increasing the speed of transactions.
However, this didn’t last for that long. Further infighting and disagreements meant Bitcoin Cash itself forked in August 2018, resulting in two different blockchains. Bitcoin ABC (supported by Roger Ver and Bitmain‘s Jihan Wu) and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (from Craig Wright).
Based on the stance most cryptocurrency exchange desks took, Bitcoin ABC continued to be recognized as Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin ABC/Cash continues to use the BCH price ticker while Bitcoin SV uses BSV.
As you might expect, given its close relationship to the OG cryptocurrency, BCH‘s market performance is never too far from Bitcoin. But let’s take a look at how Bitcoin Cash has performed recently.
A recap on Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin Cash first came to market in late 2017, just in time for the infamous bull run that lasted until February 2018.
As with most cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Cash is yet to see the highs it saw in 2017 again, and has generally been on a downward trend ever since.
Bitcoin Cash had one up swing in trading price during April 2018, where its price shot up from $643 to $1,683 over the course of the month. A year later, at the end of April 2019, Bitcoin Cash was trading at around $293, a staggering 83-percent drop.
The cryptocurrency’s performance for most of 2019 has been somewhat uneventful. On June 16, Bitcoin Cash reached its 2019 high, when it was trading at $487.
Bitcoin Cash Q3 performance
Bitcoin Cash had a positive end to Q2, but that trend didn’t continue into Q3.
Across the first two weeks of July 2019, Bitcoin Cash’s trading price dropped from around $403 on July 1, to around $283 on July 16.
In the context of cryptocurrency volatility, this 30-percent drop is a somewhat minor price correction. Across the winter of 2017 to 2018, Bitcoin Cash saw its price tumble by over 75 percent.
After this market correction, Bitcoin Cash recovered enough to trade sideways for most of August.
On August 5, Bitcoin Cash reached a monthly high of $333, a notable 18-percent increase on the low it saw just a few weeks earlier.
However, that was as good as it would get for the digital coin in Q3. For the rest of the quarter Bitcoin Cash had a few price fluctuations, but it would close a long way down on where it opened.
At the end of August, another albeit minor price correction saw the cryptocurrency’s price drop by 11 percent from $304 on August 27 to $270 on August 31.
Bitcoin Cash did manage to stave off the doom and gloom for a little while longer though. In the first three weeks of September a steady price rally saw the coin’s price rise from its end of August low to a monthly high of $322 on September 18.
Unfortunately, on September 19 Bitcoin, Cash’s price began to tumble as the coin witnessed another sizable market correction.
On September 26, Bitcoin Cash was trading at just over $216, a 33-percent drop on where it was trading just a week earlier.
Bitcoin Cash showed no signs of recovering in the final days of the quarter. On September 30, the coin was trading at $223, 45-percent down on where it opened Q3.
Major events in Q3
Perhaps the most notable news for Bitcoin Cash last quarter came in September, when it was announced that Bitcoinom was looking to launch a derivative for the cryptocurrency .
The timing of this news actually coincided with the small rally Bitcoin Cash saw in September, however, it wasn’t enough to encourage any kind of sustained growth. A Bitcoin Cash futures contract would be a long way off, and would need to overcome numerous regulatory hurdles before launching. Bakkt has done it for Bitcoin , so it’s not out the question that others will follow.
In early July, Scottish alternative punk-infused brewery Brewdog announced that it would be offering shares in its company, through its long-running “equity for punks scheme,” in exchange for cryptocurrency including Bitcoin Cash.
In the same week, Swiss fintech firm Amun AG announced a Bitcoin Cash exchange traded product, listed on the Switzerland-based stock exchange Six.
Neither of these announcements appear to have had any positive effect on the cryptocurrency’s trading price in the short term.
Looking ahead
It’s been a shaky start to the last quarter of the year for Bitcoin Cash. for most of October it has been trading sideways with no notable price swings.
However, this week’s news that cryptocurrency mining mainstay Bitmain had fired one of its co-founders , who was also the largest stakeholder in the business, is likely to garner interest from Bitcoin Cash fans.
The announcement was made internally to Bitmain by the company’s head Jihan Wu, a longtime supporter of Bitcoin Cash. In the hours following the news, Bitcoin Cash’s price increased by 10 percent.
Indeed, while this might be good news in the short term for Bitcoin Cash’s trading price, the long term impact remains uncertain.
