#i have the hq gift exchange for feb

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Bitcoin Storms Back From Dip Below $10,000 in White-Knuckle Ride

Bitcoins wild start to 2018 turned breakneck on Wednesday, with the largest cryptocurrency plunging below $10,000 for the first time in six weeks before staging a rally to trade virtually unchanged.

The gyrations took the digital token across a trading range of more than $2,600 over 18 hours. Its tumble to a low of $9,186 pushed a monthlong rout past 50 percent and raised the specter that last years 1,400 percent rally was giving way to what many considered an inevitable bursting of the bubble. 

Bitcoin rebounded $1,600 in the next four hours to trade at $10,780 as of 3:44 p.m. in New York, according to consolidated pricing data collated by Bloomberg.

The drama Wednesday was sparked by increased scrutiny from regulators around the world that spread across the digital-coin realm in recent days, wiping out more than $300 billion in value just since Jan. 13. Bitcoins losses reached $140 billion from its record of $19,511 on Dec. 18. Its still higher by 1,000 percent in the past year. “Bitcoin was overbought and sentiment was ecstatic,” said Ari Paul, chief investment officer of BlockTower Capital Advisors. “This is an overdue correction triggered by South Korean regulation fears.”

In South Korea, a hotbed of trading, regulators warned they may shut down cryptocurrency exchanges completely after limiting their operations. China is said to have intensified its curbs on trading of the digital coins, extending restrictions to over-the-counter and peer-to-peer platforms after banning exchanges last year. In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission asked at least 15 funds to pull applications this month for bitcoin-related exchange-traded funds.

For more Bitcoin news: Did Bitcoin Just Burst? How It Compares to Historys Biggest Bubbles Bitcoin Resilience Tested as Traders Ponder What May Pop Bubble Bitcoin Fall Extends to 25% as Fears of Crypto Crackdown Linger BitConnect Closes Exchange as States Warn of Unregulated Sales

Thats left speculators across the globe struggling to determine when or how market watchdogs may rein in an industry that is decentralized and derives much of its value from anonymous ownership.

“We get sell offs like this fairly regularly. I think this one is more pronounced and press-worthy since it is affecting more people and the dollars at stake are greater,” said Joe Van Hecke, managing partner at Chicago-based Grace Hall Trading LLC. “Its a great time to evaluate which of these coins have staying power, actually have utility going forward, and invest in those.”

Souring the mood in the market, cryptocurrency exchange Bitconnect said its shutting down after receiving two cease-and-desist letters from state authorities for the unauthorized sale of securities and suffering from denial-of-service attacks, while one of the biggest trading platforms, Kraken, was offline for over a day last week as a scheduled update went awry.

In addition, some are blaming part of the rout on the Lunar New Year, as Asian traders cash out their cryptocurrencies to travel and buy gifts for the holiday that starts Feb. 16 this year.

The sell-off has been amid relatively high trading volume, with around 400,000 bitcoin exchanging hands on Jan. 15, the highest since Dec. 21, according to the latest data on Bitcoinity.org.

It wasnt supposed to happen that way. When bitcoin futures started trading last month on CME Group Inc. and Cboe Global Markets Inc. exchanges, it triggered speculation that there would soon be a range of crypto ETF and mutual fund offerings. That in turn would draw hordes of new investors and lift bitcoin even higher.

For more on cryptocurrencies, check out the podcast:

Many assertions that digital coins represent a bubble have triggered double-digit selloffs over the past year, often to be followed by rebounds. It fell 26 percent in a week after reaching its peak in mid-December, only to rally 21 percent in the next 10 days. Since then, its posted only two gains in eight sessions.

Bitcoins market value has dropped to about $170 billion from a peak north of $310 billion. The December surge began after the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission agreed to allow trading in bitcoin futures. The digital coin is still higher by almost 1,000 percent from a year ago.

"There are a great many investors that are excited to see Bitcoin below $10k as a second opportunity to enter at a price they feared theyd never see again," BlockTowers Paul said.

For related news and information: XBT Curncy GP for bitcoin VCCY for a cryptocurrency monitor

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-17/bitcoin-steadies-from-26-slump-as-traders-brave-volatility

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Hyperallergic: Required Reading

A very unique monument is being unveiled in Ireland, according to reporter Naomi O’Leary: “Sculpture to be unveiled in Cork to remember generosity of the Choctaw Nation, Native American tribe that sent famine aid to Ireland in 1847.” It’s by artist Alex Pentek. (via Twitter/NaomiOhReally)

Writing for the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott suggests that arts groups cannot afford to take Koch Brothers funds anymore, considering the world’s climate is at stake:

It is impolite, in critical circles, to link the politics of major donors to the cultural institutions they support. Many of our cherished arts organizations were created by Gilded Age plutocrats, yet are no longer tethered to the Darwinian social views of their originators. But cultural organizations exist in a complicated moral world, in which every dollar they collect is a dollar that isn’t being used to ameliorate poverty or cure disease. Most of us tend to deal with this dilemma by arguing that the good done by cultural organizations can’t be quantified and thus it is unwise to place it crudely in the balance with other social needs.

That’s because we think of the good offered by a museum or opera house as a potent but intangible improvement to the general character of the society. They make us better in some way, perhaps more intelligent, or empathetic, or sensitive in ways that increase our capacity to be and do good.

The logic is tenuous, but defensible, at least so long as the world isn’t in a state of extraordinary crisis. But it becomes much more difficult to argue for the arts relative to other social needs when the planet is threatened by wars, plagues, and other calamities, with the survival of civilization itself in the balance.

John-Paul Stonard writes about the Palace Museum in Taipei, which is a nice read (particularly if you’re unfamiliar with that great museum):

The other great tradition in Chinese painting is that of the scholar-artists, or ‘literati’, which developed in various guises between the tenth and 16th centuries. They typically painted in a rough, expressive style, using ink sparsely to reflect their aristocratic manners and to dissociate themselves from the paid professionals of the imperial court. Many of them became recluses – it seems to have been the fashion – and spent their days in the mountains, or studying ancient examples of the ‘three perfections’: painting, poetry and calligraphy. They refused to sell their works, preferring to exchange them or give them as gifts. Here, at least, the Palace Museum has a first-rate example on display, Wen Zhengming’s Zhong Kui in a Wintry Grove, a hanging scroll made in 1534. The demon-queller Zhong Kui stands huddled in a leafless forest, the trees sketched with thin, dry brushstrokes. Nature is the animating force in Wen’s paintings, the human figures remain passive, listening to the world around them.

Centuries before landscape became an independent genre in the West, painters in China were finding ways to represent the meeting of the human mind and the natural world. Paying little attention to conventions of perspective and lighting (there are almost no cast shadows in the early works), Chinese painting instead conveys a unique and absorbing sense of time. At the Palace Museum four handscroll paintings are displayed completely unrolled, including the Qing dynasty Gathering of Scholars, painted with great charm and liveliness of detail, and the much earlier Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden, a Ming dynasty scene of Chinese scholars occupying themselves with calligraphy, music, painting and conversation. These scrolls, some of which are eight or nine metres long, were designed to be read from right to left; as you shuffle along the unfolding scenes you lose yourself in the painting.

Redditors had a lot to say about this press image (roughly 2,000 comments) of Comey testifying:

Sasha Trubetskoy created this attractive imagining of the Ancient Roman road network as a contemporary subway system:

Katy Peary’s new album gets a thumbs down from the Washington Post:

What a demented thing to say on such a solipsistic, flow-sustaining, unwavy, missionless, momentum-deficient, same-old-place kind of pop album. At best, Perry sounds like she’s trapped in a purgatory, pantomiming progress, giving an endless pep talk to her own reflection. She wants to look out into the world, but she can’t look away from the mirror.

Funny or Die gives President Trump’s perma-tan the satirical treatment:

Is Apple’s new, futuristic HQ a step forward or back? Wired reports:

The fitness center has a climbing wall with pre-distressed stone. The concrete edges of the parking lot walls are rounded. The fire suppression systems come from yachts. Craftspeople harvested the wood paneling at the exact time of year the late Steve Jobs demanded—mid-winter—so the sap content wouldn’t be ruinously high. Come on! You don’t want sappy wood panels. This isn’t, like, Microsoft.

You can’t understand a building without looking at what’s around it—its site, as the architects say. From that angle, Apple’s new HQ is a retrograde, literally inward-looking building with contempt for the city where it lives and cities in general. People rightly credit Apple for defining the look and feel of the future; its computers and phones seem like science fiction. But by building a mega-headquarters straight out of the middle of the last century, Apple has exacerbated the already serious problems endemic to 21st-century suburbs like Cupertino—transportation, housing, and economics. Apple Park is an anachronism wrapped in glass, tucked into a neighborhood.

An extensive New York Times Magazine profile of recently released “leaker” Chelsea Manning:

Manning told me her decision to provide the information to WikiLeaks was a practical one: She originally planned to deliver the data to The New York Times or The Washington Post, and for the last week of her leave, she dodged from public phone to public phone, calling the main office lines for both papers, leaving a message for the public editor at The Times and engaging in a frustrating conversation with a Post writer, who said she would have to know more about the files before her editor would sign off on an article. A hastily arranged meeting with Politico, where she hoped to introduce herself to the site’s security bloggers, was scrapped because of bad weather. “I wanted to try to establish a contact in a way that it couldn’t be traced to me,” Manning told me. But she was running out of time. She describes a clearheaded sense of purpose coming over her: “I needed to do something,” she told me. “And I didn’t want anything to stop that.”

On Feb. 3, 2010, Manning signed onto her laptop and, using a secure file-transfer protocol, sent the files to WikiLeaks.

New hi-tech tools are helping researchers uncover the mysterious and violent fates met by the “bog bodies” of Europe:

Scholars tend to agree that Tollund Man’s killing was some kind of ritual sacrifice to the gods—perhaps a fertility offering. To the people who put him there, a bog was a special place. While most of Northern Europe lay under a thick canopy of forest, bogs did not. Half earth, half water and open to the heavens, they were borderlands to the beyond. To these people, will-o’-the-wisps—flickering ghostly lights that recede when approached—weren’t the effects of swamp gas caused by rotting vegetation. They were fairies. The thinking goes that Tollund Man’s tomb may have been meant to ensure a kind of soggy immortality for the sacrificial object.

“When he was found in 1950,” says Nielsen, “they made an X-ray of his body and his head, so you can see the brain is quite well-preserved. They autopsied him like you would do an ordinary body, took out his intestines, said, yup it’s all there, and put it back. Today we go about things entirely differently. The questions go on and on.”

Lately, Tollund Man has been enjoying a particularly hectic afterlife. In 2015, he was sent to the Natural History Museum in Paris to run his feet through a microCT scan normally used for fossils. Specialists in ancient DNA have tapped Tollund Man’s femur to try to get a sample of the genetic material. They failed, but they’re not giving up. Next time they’ll use the petrous bone at the base of the skull, which is far denser than the femur and thus a more promising source of DNA.

The continuing tragedy facing indigenous Christians in Iraq:

The arrival of IS was only the “tipping point” of a trend already gathering pace, as Christians experienced an “overall loss of hope for a safe and secure future”, according to the report, produced by Christian charities Open Doors, Served and Middle East Concern.

It noted that, for the Christians who have settled elsewhere, there is “little incentive” to return, with several saying “the Middle East is no longer a home for Christians”. Less than half of the people displaced from the Nineveh Plains, just outside Mosul, are expected to return, according to the report.

Your museum laugh for the week:

A friend after going through the National Gallery: "Well, that's Western art for you. A thousand years of crucifixions, then stripes."

— Sandra Newman (@sannewman) June 13, 2017

And, after the Sessions hearing this week, this helped me laugh it all off:

If you say "Kamala Harris" into the bathroom mirror 3 times, an old white man interrupts you.

— Benjamin Siemon (@BenjaminJS) June 13, 2017

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

The post Required Reading appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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