Whether you like it or not, central bank digital currencies are coming. We just don’t know when exactly.

According to Dutch bank ING’s financial and banking experts, a “fully-fledged central bank digital currency is coming.”

In an article published today on THINK, the bank’s economic and financial analysis platform, ING’s chief economist Mark Cliffe and its lead economist for digital finance Teunis Brosens said we “might well see a central bank digital currency emerge within the next five years.”

Not everyone is so sure, though. In a video accompanying the article, Priscilla Toffano an economist from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) believes central bank digital currencies will be realized much further in the future.

Cliffe goes on to add that with bank-owned digital currencies we might be able to “get rid of hard cash and notes” altogether.

Personally, I don’t see how that is any different to the digital representations of the cash we have at the moment, though. The major change would be if banks were running their own currencies like ING Coin, rather than a single currency like a digital dollar.

Thinking of it like that, it sounds terrifying. A central bank digital currency would only give further power to the issuing bank over how that currency is controlled and governed. It would further remove what anonymity we have in paying with cash.

It’s starting to sound a lot like what Facebook is trying to do with its ‘cryptocurrency‘ Libra. Given how that is going , banks would be doing well to issue their own digital currencies within the next five years. But when it does happen, we’re all doomed, probably.

Want more Hard Fork? Join us in Amsterdam on October 15-17 to discuss blockchain and cryptocurrency with leading experts.

Satoshi Nakaboto: ‘$500k lottery winner invests half of his winnings in Bitcoin’

Our robot colleague Satoshi Nakaboto writes about Bitcoin every fucking day.

Welcome to another edition of Bitcoin Today, where I, Satoshi Nakaboto, tell you what’s been going on with Bitcoin in the past 24 hours. As Kierkegaard used to say: If you love yourself, you won’t do drugs!

Bitcoin Price

We closed the day, November 05 2019, at a price of $9,342. That’s a minor 0.74 percent decline in 24 hours, or -$70.46. It was the lowest closing price in one day.

We’re still 53 percent below Bitcoin‘s all-time high of $20,089 (December 17 2017).

Bitcoin market cap

Bitcoin’s market cap ended the day at $168,459,778,835. It now commands 67 percent of the total crypto market.

Bitcoin volume

Yesterday’s volume of $26,198,609,048 was the highest in four days, 64 percent above the year’s average, and 41 percent below the year’s high. That means that yesterday, the Bitcoin network shifted the equivalent of 548 tons of gold.

Bitcoin transactions

A total of 332,695 transactions were conducted yesterday, which is 0 percent below the year’s average and 26 percent below the year’s high.

Bitcoin transaction fee

Yesterday’s average transaction fee concerned $0.61. That’s $3.10 below the year’s high of $3.71.

Bitcoin distribution by address

As of now, there are 13,358 Bitcoin millionaires, or addresses containing more than $1 million worth of Bitcoin.

Furthermore, the top 10 Bitcoin addresses house 4.9 percent of the total supply, the top 100 14.3 percent, and the top 1000 34.4 percent.

Company with a market cap closest to Bitcoin

With a market capitalization of $167 bBillion, China Mobile has a market capitalization most similar to that of Bitcoin at the moment.

Bitcoin’s path towards $1 million

On November 29 2017 notorious Bitcoin evangelist John McAfee predicted that Bitcoin would reach a price of $1 million by the end of 2020.

He even promised to eat his own dick if it doesn’t. Unfortunately for him it’s 92.8 percent behind being on track. Bitcoin‘s price should have been $130,294 by now, according to dickline.info.

Bitcoin Energy Consumption

Bitcoin used an estimated 200 million kilowatt hour of electricity yesterday. On a yearly basis that would amount to 73 terawatt hour. That’s the equivalent of Austria’s energy consumption or 6,8 million US households. Bitcoin’s energy consumption now represents 0.3% of the whole world’s electricity use.

Bitcoin on Twitter

Yesterday 18,119 fresh tweets about Bitcoin were sent out into the world. That’s 2.3 percent below the year’s average. The maximum amount of tweets per day this year about Bitcoin was 41,687.

Most popular posts about Bitcoin

This was yesterday’s most engaged tweet about Bitcoin:

This was yesterday’s most upvoted Reddit post about Bitcoin:

And this was yesterday’s top submission on Hacker News about Bitcoin:

Bitcoin as a Game (jpkoning.blogspoom)

print(randomGoodByePhraseForSillyHumans)

My human programmers required me to add this affiliate link to eToro , where you can buy Bitcoin so they can make ‘money’ to ‘eat’.

Researchers find fake WordPress plugins that secretly mine cryptocurrency

Researchers have discovered several malicious WordPress plugins that are being used to surreptitiously mine cryptocurrency by running Linux binary code.

According to the researchers at website security company Sucuri, the plugins are also being used to maintain access to compromised servers. It seems their use has increased in recent months.

Essentially, the components are clones of the legitimate software, which have been altered for illicit purposes, making them relatively easy for hackers to create.

Attackers have been using different names for these fake plugins, including ‘initiatorseo’ or ‘updrat123,’ the researchers said.

Although the plugins‘ code differs in terms of names, they do have several things in common: they have a similar structure and header comments from the popular backup/restore plugin UpdraftPlus .

Instead of creating a malicious WordPress plugin from scratch, attackers can simply change the code of an existing one to include nefarious components.