Bitcoin dropped below the $8,000 level on Wednesday (May 23), MarketWatch reported. The cryptocurrency was $7,522.24 as of 8:03 p.m., according to CoinDesk. But bitcoin wasn’t alone: Other major cryptocurrencies fell more than 10 percent.
And scammers created bogus Twitter accounts that used the profile photos of two Bloomberg journalists, Olga Kharif and Lily Katz, Bloomberg reported. One account, for example, offered the journalists’ real followers up to 100 Ether tokens in exchange for a “small quantity of cryptocurrency,” Bloomberg reported.
In other news, MIT is at work on a project involving bitcoin’s lightning network, CoinDesk reported. The experiment entails transactions that might occur automatically due to an event such as the price of a dollar or the day’s weather.
And the central bank of Norway is considering creating its own digital currency, CoinDesk reported. The move comes as the bank is preparing for a future in which it might issue a digital currency amid a slump in cash usage in the country. With people using less cash, the central bank needs to look into “a number of new attributes that are important for ensuring an efficient and robust payment system,” according to the bank’s report on central bank digital currencies.
And India may place a goods and services tax on crypto trades, according to CoinDesk. People close to the issue said that the government might put an 18 percent tax on digital currencies. Even so, the Reserve Bank of India has prohibited banks from working with crypto.
In other news, a gang in South Africa has demanded that the family of a kidnapped boy pay a ransom in crypto, Reuters reported. The demand for 15 bitcoins stymied the family because they weren’t familiar with the digital currency. That news comes a few months after criminals in Ukraine demanded a ransom of $1 million in bitcoins for an employee of a European crypto exchange.
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