Tim Draper wore Bitcoin tie on Fox News and Reddit can’t shut up about it

Tim Draper, American venture capital investor and a known name in the cryptocurrency industry, showed up on Fox News last night to talk about a plan to cut California into three states.

But it turns out people could not care less about the future California – they were much more interested in Draper’s attire choice.

The famed cryptocurrency investor didn’t want anyone to doubt his devotion and chose to wear a Bitcoin tie to make his point.

Tucker Carlson, the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight at Fox News tweeted a snippet of his interview with Draper where he can be seen flaunting his splendid Bitcoin tie in all its glory:

Naturally, Tim Draper and his tie caught the fancy of the people of the internet.

Draper and his tie are also trending on r/Bitcoin on Reddit.

It seems Draper’s unusual attire choice confused quite a few Redditors, who struggled to grasp how Bitcoin ties with the splitting of California. Other posters quickly chimed in on the debate with their own suggestions:

Politics aside, it seems many users felt jealous of Draper’s Bitcoin tie – and wanted one for themselves. Thankfully, one resourceful Redditor has pointed where anyone can cop one .

It’s not the first time that Draper has worn a Bitcoin tie in public.

He wore a different Bitcoin tie in an interview with Bloomberg in 2017, but the tie was not nearly as flashy as this one, and probably why it didn’t manage to garner as much attention.

Tim Draper will be speaking at the TNW Conference in May this year, and we hope he will wear his signature Bitcoin tie to the conference!

The Next Web’s 2018 conference is just a few weeks away, and it’ll be

Binance announces $1 billion fund for blockchain and cryptocurrency startups

Cryptocurrency and blockchain businesses are scaling rapidly; so much so, that a cryptocurrency business that started less than a year ago is giving away billions of dollars in funding.

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, announced a $1 billion venture fund for blockchain and cryptocurrency startups on Thursday.

Ella Zhang, the head of the exchange’s incubator program Binance Labs, revealed the initiative, named “Social Impact Fund”, during an online meetup.

As per Zhang, Binance alone will contribute to the fund, and all investments will be made through Binance (BNB) token. The company plans to invest the $1 billion over 10 phases of $100 million each.

Binance Labs will focus on startups working with public blockchains, decentralized exchanges, custody/payments/wallet, stable digital currency, and compliant alternative trading systems or security token platforms.

Not all funds will be given directly to blockchain startups though. Binance will also be funding other blockchain funds as part of this initiative, provided they already have a fund size of $100 million minimum accumulated assets under management (AUM).

During the online talks, Zhang also revealed Binance’s plans for two other initiatives, a separate ‘ Binance Ecosystem Fund’ with twenty future partners and a Cryptocurrency Governance Initiatives (CGI) aimed at encouraging self-regulation in the industry and fight scams.

It is worth noting that this is not the first effort of Binance to support blockchain and cryptocurrency startups. It earlier funded Signal founder’s proposal for a new cryptocurrency for mobile payments in April. Binance’s CEO also met the president of Uganda in April and promised to support the growth of blockchain technology in the country.

Binance is not the only one venturing into funding other ventures. In April, Coinbase announced a venture fund for blockchain startups as well. Before this, Ripple donated $29 million in XRP in March to an American public school charity. Ethereum has also been awarding grants for innovative blockchain startups that help solve the existing problems within the space.

The fact that all of these companies started within the last 11 months to six years and are already funding other projects does show how dumbfounding the growth of cryptocurrency space has been.

[ via: Techcrunch ]

Researcher finds 50,000 sites infected with cryptocurrency mining malware

The cryptocurrency mining malware epidemic is getting out of hand : nearly 50,000 sites have been surreptitiously infected with crypto-jacking scripts, according to security researcher Troy Mursch from Bad Packets Report .

Relying on source-code search engine PublicWWW to scan the web for pages running crypto-jacking malware, Mursch was able to identify at least 48,953 affected websites. He adds that at least 7,368 of the compromised sites are powered by WordPress.

The researcher notes that Coinhive continues to be the most widespread crypto-jacking script out there, accounting for close to 40,000 infected websites – a stunning 81 percent of all recorded cases.

It is worth pointing out that Mursch was able to find at least 30,000 websites running Coinhive back in November last year.

For the rest, Bad Packets Report indicates the remaining 19 percent are spread between various Coinhive alternatives, like Crypto-Loot, CoinImp, Minr and deepMiner.

His research suggests there are 2,057 sites infected by Crypto-Loot, 4,119 by CoinImp, 692 sites by Minr, and 2,160 by deepMiner.

Back in February, security researchers discovered that a slew of legitimate websites – including government and public service agency portals – were quietly running crypto-jacking scripts.

The researcher has also published a document on PasteBin file detailing the 7,000 affected sites found since January 20 this year. “ Some of these sites have already removed the crypto-jacking malware,” the PasteBin page reads. “However, many remain compromised. Browse at your own risk.”

In the meantime, those seeking to protect themselves against such attacks ought to read this piece explaining how to stop hackers from secretly borrowing your CPU power to mine crypto.

Those interested in the full Bad Packets Report can read the post here .

Even though blockchain and cryptocurrency might not be perfect yet, we’re exploring the possibilities at TNW Conference 2018. Find more info here .