Bitcoin Pizza Day & Crypto Market Drop: Overview of the Week

Increased regulatory scrutiny. Bring it on, say the crypto billionaires. Mike Novogratz and the Winklevi are not bothered by more regulation. In fact, they welcome it. Both parties want to weed out and deter bad actors in the crypto space. No one likes a bad actor. Oh my God. Here is your overview of the week the Department of Justice has opened a criminal probe into whether traders are manipulating the price of cryptocurrencies. Federal prosecutors are working with the cftc, a financial regulator that oversees derivatives tied to Bitcoin. The investigation is focused on the illegal practices that often affect prices, such as spoofing or wash trades. Spoofing is where a trader submits multiple orders, then cancels them once prices go up or down, as appropriate. Wash trades involve cheaters trading with themselves to create false demand, thus encouraging others to invest. Crypto exchanges are beginning to realize that if they want to go mainstream, they have to act. Gemini, run by the Winklevi, hired Nasdaq last month to oversee surveillance of crypto on their exchange. They've also urged trading platforms to work together to form a group that would self regulate for the entire industry. Bitcoin slumped to a six week low, falling below 7.5K for the first time since April. That's a 20% drop since its May peak. Adding to Bitcoin's woes, the exchange OKEX suspended withdrawals and fiat trading to rectify an error that was producing inaccurate account balances. Tom Lee predicted a rally with the increased regulatory scrutiny. What we have is quite the opposite. And now for your Tom Lee of the Week with Tom Lee. Tom Lee is fast becoming the anti Buffett. Whereas Buffett talks fud, Tom Nostradamus Lee prefers to make wild predictions that often don't work out. So as miserable as it feels holding Bitcoin at 8,000, the move from 8,000 to 25,000 will happen in a handful of days. A handful of days may not sound like very much until you consider the fact that unlike Trump, Tom Lee has massive hands. We celebrated Bitcoin Pizza day this week. Eight years ago, on May 22, 2010, a programmer paid for two pizzas of Bitcoin. This was the first time Bitcoin was used to buy goods. A historic moment. The moment is immortalized online in a bitcointalk.org forum where programmer Laszlo Hanyetz confirmed that he'd bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC from Papa John's Pizza in America. Hanyuz had asked users in the forum to deliver two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin eventually, a teenager named Jeremy Sturtevant, nicknamed Jerkos, accepted the bitcoin and sent Hanyu two pizzas from Papa John's and the rest, as they say, is history. At the time, one bitcoin was worth a fraction of a cent, meaning Hanyatz's 10,000 bitcoin were worth $41. Today, the original bitcoin pizzas would cost you around $80 million. Hanyetz, a brave pioneer, paved the way and inspired others. Because of him, services like Pizza for Coins, egifter and even some restaurants accept various cryptocurrencies to buy the Italian delicacy. Hanyetz made headlines again in February by reliving his glory days and buying two pizzas using the Lightning Network. Here you can see Laszlo's family enjoying the bitcoin Lightning pizzas. Bitcoin relies on heroic early adopters like Hanyc, but don't be a hungry Hungarian tonight. No two for one deal is worth $40 million. Google wants to hire Buterin Allegedly the Ethereum co founder, posted a tweet with a screenshot, apparently from a Google recruiter asking if Google made sense for him right now. Buterin quickly deleted the tweet. He had also included a poll asking if he should take the job. The answer was a resounding no. In case you were wondering, Google could do with his help at the moment, they are currently working on two separate blockchain projects, a tamper proof auditing system and a cloud oper platform. As the saying goes, there are 6 million ways to die. Choose one. Google realizes it only has two Vitalik can destroy them from the inside or continue destroying them from the outside. Vitalik earlier this year, crypto was deemed halal under Sharia law. Now a London mosque is the first in the world to accept bitcoin donations. The mosque in Hackney, London hopes to raise at least $13,000 in cryptocurrency. Donations over Ramadan Muslims are asked to donate 2.5% their wealth during the 30 day festival as part of Zakat Alms Giving. We are trying to appeal to a wider audience with the new money, said the chairman of the Board of Trustees. It's big in the Islamic world and we have set up a platform for wealthier Muslims outside our community to support and donate to our mosque. A blockchain expert who helped advise the mosque on setting up the bitcoin wallet is hopeful for this scheme to be a success. If Muslims, who make up a quarter of the world's population, hold just 1% of bitcoins or $1.3 billion, then 35 million in zakat contributions is due. Ramadan Mubarak IGN Happy Ramadan to all our Muslim Cointelegraph fans. Privacy focused Cryptocurrency Verge has been hacked again. The previous hack happened in April. 250,000 verge were stolen then. This time 35 million verge coins were stolen in a matter of hours. Verge tweeted that their mining pools were under a DDoS attack on May 21, noting that they were working to resolve it. At the time of writing, the hack was equal to around $1.4 million. Verge's Twitter account was also compromised in March with hackers tweeting about a fraudulent giveaway of Verge coins. Critics of the cryptocurrency don't believe developers are doing enough to prevent hacks. Not all doom and gloom though. Last month Verge announced a partnership with pornhub. If Verge continues having, ahem, performance issues, investors might move on to a coin that doesn't find it so hard to stay up in the market. Thanks for watching. Like for one high five from Tom Lee's massive hands like subscribe and Hodl for two.