Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is acknowledging that it’s getting harder for institutional investors to ignore the cryptocurrency market with total assets ballooning to $120 billion and bitcoin soaring more than 200 percent this year.

Bitcoin is either an enormous bubble or has a lot further to run. Financial forecasters are weighing in on the cryptocurrency, trying to divine where bitcoin’s price is headed, now that it sits at around $3,400, up from around $600 a year ago.
Here are the arguments for bitcoin hitting $5,000—or higher.

Bitcoin exchange BTC-e will return under a new name and issue a token in order to refund users, according to a forum account tied to the platform.

The comments come after BTC-e, one of the longest-running and arguably most secretive of the world’s cryptocurrency exchanges, was shuttered by U.S. authorities late last month. After arresting one of the exchange’s alleged operators, officials handed down more than $100 million in fines and seized BTC-e’s web domain.

However, the exchange’s remaining staff, communicating through a long-held account on the Bitcoin Talk forum, have pledged to return despite the crackdown, later claiming that it was able to secure access to at least some of its funds.

In his new report “One Nation Overdosed” MSNBC Correspondent Jacob Soboroff looks at how the drug fentanyl is flooding in the U.S. from the Internet.

The time for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) seems to have come and gone as quickly as Anthony Scaramucci’s stint as White House Communications Director. Launched on August 1, Bitcoin Cash’s value shot up as much as $7.6 billion in market cap before wiping out more than half its value in the proceeding days.

A former manager of an Indianapolis nightclub was also the drug kingpin of an operation that traded in bitcoin and sold cocaine and heroin through the darknet, federal authorities said Wednesday.

Images have emerged reportedly showing the dark web advert used to try to sell British model Chloe Ayling.

The 20-year-old claims she was held captive for almost a week after being lured to Milan, Italy, for what she was told was a photo shoot. Her alleged captor, Lukasz Pawel Herba, reportedly drugged her and placed her in a large suitcase in a car boot.

Mr Herba has claimed he only became involved under duress from a Romanian gang living in Birmingham.

Kevin Campbell’s LinkedIn page reads like an inside joke. Maybe it was a mildly funny double entendre, before the overdose.

“Substance Abuse Counselor.”

That’s how Campbell described himself on the sunny, want ads and Amazon side of the internet. On the “dark Web,” he was “PTandRnR,” a drug dealer on the Silk Road black market.

PITTSBURGH - A Florida resident has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh on charges of conspiracy to distribute 400 grams or more of fentanyl and a quantity of carfentanil, and distribution of quantities of methamphetamine, carfentanil, and ecstasy, Acting United States Attorney Soo C. Song announced today.

The four-count indictment, returned on August 1 and unsealed Friday, named Robert M. Gilner, a/k/a Gman19635, 30, of St. Petersburg, FL, as the sole defendant.

In June, the mysterious group who for almost a year has been dumping hacking tools and exploits stolen from the NSA launched a subscription service that promised to provide new tools to subscribers every month.

The group, known as the Shadow Brokers, said this was like “wine of month club [sic]” but for router, browser, and Windows 10 exploits, among others. Since then, the subscription service has mostly been shrouded in mystery. Now, a security researcher has shed at least some light on it, claims to have identified several subscribers and estimating how much money the Shadow Brokers have made so far from the service.

Speaking of trading pairs, we are also happy to confirm that our preparations for launching Ethereum are in their final stages. As of Thursday, 17 August, Ethereum will be available for trading with USD, EUR and BTC.

There are two bitcoins now?

It’s safe to say uncertainty cast a pall over the cryptocurrency markets last week when on August 1, a group of developers and miners split the blockchain and created a new cryptocurrency.

It was the first (high-profile) bitcoin fork to date, and in response, the price very well could have entered a period of unprecedented churn. With bitcoin and bitcoin cash competing, it wasn’t hard to foresee this creating market dislocations and downward pressure on price.

What happened, however, was the opposite, as in the last few days markets have surged past all-time highs. In fact, analysts have indicated a major upswell in confidence and a broad consensus that the upward march of bitcoin’s price could continue.

If a few companies, or even a cluster
of companies, can effectively take control of bitcoin governance, and
force a change — that is a definitional failure of Bitcoin’s
decentralised value proposition in itself.

The technical team behind the bitcoin scaling proposal Segwit2x is doubling down on its controversial plan to introduce code that would seek to hard fork the network in three months time.

The Dutch Public Prosecutor’s Office announced the first arrests conducted by law enforcement in the country regarding the takedown of the Hansa Market.

Investors are flocking to one of the first offerings of digital tokens done under the U.S. securities regulations.

Venture-backed startup Protocol Labs Inc., which intends to develop a distributed data storage system called the Filecoin Network, has raised $52 million in a first tranche of the offering, according to Protocol founder Juan Batiz-Benet.

Participating investors, including Winklevoss Capital, Digital Currency Group and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, bought securities that entitle them to obtain the Filecoin tokens.

NEW DELHI, AUGUST 7:  
India may soon take a call on how to deal with virtual currencies including bitcoins on the regulatory front with a government-appointed panel submitting its report to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley here recently.

Fidelity users can now track their bitcoin and cryptocurrency investments alongside more traditional assets.

Announced today, the company’s R&D and innovation unit, Fidelity Labs, is formally partnering with cryptocurrency startup Coinbase to make the feature available. Fidelity customers must already have a Coinbase account to take advantage of the service, which will be rolled out to users starting tomorrow.

BITCOIN: FAD OR the future? The question has dogged the digital currency since its inception nearly a decade ago, and recent developments raise it anew. Last week, a new variant of bitcoin emerged via a “fork” in its underlying code, threatening to confuse and divide the still-small world of bitcoin adherents. Meanwhile, the price of a coin has soared to record heights above $3,000, from about $1,000 at the year’s beginning.

Some have likened the cryptocurrency market to the Internet sector in 1999. While there was little doubt then, and clear evidence since, that those companies would take over the planet, the two Nasdaq indices fell an average of 90% in the 30 months ending 2002. This time, the bitcoin mania, which has dwarfed even the Tulip Bulb lunacy, should become the posterchild graduate school case study for not only finance, but also psychology, sociology, and perhaps other disciplines. Ironically, for lacking discipline!

Friends don’t let friends hold bitcoin below $2,900, the line in the sand of sell-stop protection. Otherwise, in the near future, one could be wishing they’d sold this $3,500 zone, as bitcoin breaks under $35, with growing potential for $3.50.

Folksy, soft-spoken, almost bland in demeanor… Randall Lord does not seem the kind of poster child Washington would choose for a Federal case. But on August 10, Lord says he will have to choose between an expected 46-month prison sentence that begins at his local Marshals’ office… or one which starts at the Fed Bureau of Prisons in Georgia. And this case, like most Fed financial cases, comes with its share of disturbing moves on the part of authorities and press-titutes.

On Monday, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) — a US-based privacy group — filed a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accusing one of today’s top VPN providers of deceptive trade practices.

A digital asset investment project has netted close to $1.8 million through an initial coin offering (ICO).