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Bitcoin’s bad day didn’t shake the true crypto believers

Good morning! This Thursday, the crypto swings are coming faster and harder, Apple thinks the Mac has a malware problem, Amazon and Tile are taking on AirTags, Google Reader is almost kind of coming back and Internet Explorer is going away for real.
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There have been a lot of crazy days in the crypto market over the last decade. Yesterday was one of the craziest.
The big question: Have we passed the peak? The top of a market is always only obvious in retrospect, and a lot of people across the crypto industry are now looking back and seeing exactly where it may have been.
The first real sign of the crash could have been Musk's quick turn against Bitcoin, for environmental reasons. When he seemed to imply that Tesla might be selling all its bitcoin, that was another. The Chinese government's continuing crackdown on crypto was yet another, and seemed to be the most immediate cause of this week's selloff.
Unsurprisingly, the HODLers were out in force. "The Bitcoin market has its way of separating true believers from tourists," Hiro CEO Muneeb Ali tweeted. Almost as soon as the prices started dropping, #buythedip started trending on Twitter. "Entities I control have now acquired 111,000 #BTC and have not sold a single satoshi," MicroStrategy's Michael Saylor tweeted, " #Bitcoin Forever." ARK's Cathie Wood said Bitcoin is "on sale" and will ultimately be worth $500,000. Because this is crypto, and anyone can say anything they want!
But nobody really knows what's going to happen here. As Protocol's Tomio Geron reports, Washington is still struggling to regulate crypto. With no underlying asset or particular restriction to keep it moored, cryptocurrency trading is a pure momentum game: Prices going up leads to excitement leads to prices going up, and prices going down leads to panic leads to prices going down. For YOLO traders hanging out on r/WallStreetBets and Robinhood, yesterday might have felt like the cryptopocalypse. To Bitcoin lifers, it's just another bump in the road. And we won't know who was right for a long, long time.
It's not just Amazon employees who experience the benefit of increasing their starting wage to at least $15 an hour — a recent study from the University of California-Berkeley and Brandeis University found that when Amazon raised wages, the average hourly wage in the surrounding area rose by 4.7%.
On Protocol: Craig Federighi said the Mac has a malware problem:
The Freenode open-source project was sold to Andrew Lee, the crown prince of Korea, and the entire staff subsequently quit:
NFTs are basically … nothing, cryptographer Ron Rivest said:
Google's approach to misinformation starts with transparency, search head Prabhakar Raghavan said:
ByteDance has a new CEO.Zhang Yiming, the current CEO and co-founder, announced that he's stepping down. He'll be replaced by Liang Rubo, another ByteDance co-founder.
Peter Thiel and JD Vance both invested in Rumble, the YouTube competitor loved by some conservatives. This is Thiel's first social-media investment since Facebook, The Wall Street Journal said.
Ro acquired Modern Fertility, paying $225 million to add more women's health products to its platform.
Salesforce is going top secret. It's hiring someone to manage "the future of the insider threat management program," and the job requires a top-secret clearance.
Amazon and Tile are working on an AirTags-style tracking networkfor Amazon's Sidewalk project, which could help the network be much more self-sufficient.
Stewart Butterfield and Jen Rubio had a baby. Congrats, you two!
Every year, Hired's annual study finds that there's a big wage gap in tech. A lot changed in the last year, but not that: Hired found that men are offered higher salaries than women for the same job title 59% of the time, and women make about 95 cents for every dollar men are paid. When people complained about such a disparity, more employees were promised a raise that never occurred than actually received one.
A lot of these numbers are improving, but slowly. Too slowly. And you know what happens when they don't get better? People quit. And when nearly everyone is predicting that a mass of people are about to switch jobs after the pandemic ends, companies should be using every retention tool they have.
Kimberly thinks Amazon is "setting a good example for not only Florida, but every other state where the minimum wage is below $15/hr." That's because she has seen the difference $15/hr has made for her, her family, and her community.
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Correction: An earlier version of this story missppelled Prabhakar Raghavan's name. This story was updated on May 20, 2021.To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing. you accept our use of cookies. You can review our privacy policy to find out more about the cookies we use.