Latest news with #CakeWallet
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Silent Payments keep your Bitcoin private, and you safe from extortion
Silent Payments keep your Bitcoin private, and you safe from extortion originally appeared on TheStreet. A common phrase you might have heard if you were born before the economic system was digitized and credit cards became the standard form of payment for Americans was 'cash is king.' Cash is valuable to people, in large part, because it is untraceable. Oftentimes, criminals would take advantage of this fact to avoid taxes, buy illegal substances, and keep their true wealth hidden from onlookers. There are plenty of reasons someone may want us cash for completely legal reasons, including gifts for spouses that would be given away if included on a credit card statement, tipping, avoiding debt, and shopping at cash-only businesses. Bitcoin is not like cash. It is a public ledger, where anyone can look up every transaction that has been made on the network. If someone knows your wallet address, there are no secrets, including your total balance. Vik Sharma, CEO of Cake Wallet, spoke with TheStreet Roundtable's Jackson Hinkle to discuss what he is building to help people use Bitcoin 'on a daily basis' without fear that their data will be known to the world. Bitcoin wallets do not display on the network with your name or any other personal information. Instead, they are a random sequence of numbers and letters. Still, there are a myriad of ways someone might be able to figure out whose address is whose. One way someone might get that address is if you send it to them for a transaction. 'When you give somebody your address, they can see your activity, your balance, in that address. Everybody in Bitcoin says 'don't reuse the same address.' So now you have to generate a new address every time somebody wants to send you Bitcoin,' explained Sharma. This is a hassle for people who want to keep their information private, and with kidnappings and extortion of crypto figures becoming more common, that number is increasing. Silent Payments is a feature supported by Cake Wallet that allows users to receive Bitcoin without exposing their public wallet address. Instead of broadcasting a fixed public address, the recipient shares a silent payment address, which is similar in appearance to a normal address, but cryptographically different. 'Every time somebody else uses (the silent payment) address to send to you, a new address is generated on the sender side for you that only you can access,' said Sharma. This gives users unparalleled privacy when conducting Bitcoin transactions, without needing to understand complex technical steps or jump through extra hoops. In short, it allows Bitcoin to be used as cash currently is, something not possible with traditional wallets. Silent Payments keep your Bitcoin private, and you safe from extortion first appeared on TheStreet on Jun 10, 2025 This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Jun 10, 2025, where it first appeared.
NBC News
31-05-2025
- Business
- NBC News
A cutout of President Donald Trump holding a bitcoin token at the Moonshot booth during the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Bridget Bennett / Bloomberg via Getty Images Crypto Trump's crypto complicates Las Vegas wedding between MAGA and bitcoin At the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas, attendees questioned the effects of Trump's meme coin.
May 31, 2025, 7:19 AM EDT By David Ingram LAS VEGAS — At bitcoin's biggest event of the year, the Trump administration was omnipresent. Vice President JD Vance was the keynote speaker at the Bitcoin 2025 conference Wednesday, President Donald Trump's sons Eric and Donald Jr. appeared on multiple panels, and a delegation of White House advisers including crypto czar David Sacks praised crypto as the future of technology. The crypto community is used to being treated with skepticism and scorn from many politicians and lawmakers. But a warm embrace from the Trump White House still hasn't erased some crypto investors' skepticism. As Trump has been loosening government oversight and regulations around cryptocurrency, he has also waded into his own crypto project: the $TRUMP coin. Earlier in May, Trump hosted a private dinner at his Washington, D.C.-area golf club for top $TRUMP coin buyers, who on average spent more than $1 million per seat and sparked widespread concern about opportunities for influence-buying. The $TRUMP coin is what industry professionals call a meme coin — meaning it offers little technical innovation or practical use and that its value is extremely volatile, relying on cultural cachet and symbolism. To many serious investors in bitcoin or other established cryptocurrencies, meme coins are seen as a hazard to the long-term success of crypto. On the conference floor, some bitcoin holders predicted that crypto novices would lose money on the $TRUMP coin, hurting the reputation of the entire industry. While many attendees liked Trump's crypto policies, they weren't sold on his coin. 'A lot of them will get burned to leave and never come back — which I think is a terrible outcome, and I don't like it,' said Seth for Privacy, the vice president of crypto wallet software company Cake Wallet. The host of a privacy podcast, he declined to share his last name and is known online as Seth for Privacy. 'Obviously, the best-case scenario would be none of that stuff exists,' he said of meme coins. He said he still hopes that $TRUMP coin and others like it could be an 'on-ramp' to bitcoin. More than 67,000 buyers of the Trump meme coin have acquired it with debit cards, a likely sign that they were crypto neophytes, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. Bitcoin investor Ryan Nichols, who traveled to the Bitcoin 2025 conference from Austin, Texas, said he's a Trump fan but wouldn't touch Trump's digital currency. 'I love Trump. I really want to see what he does to improve this country. But at the same time, I don't think his coin is going to be much better than the Hawk Tuah coin,' he said, referring to a meme coin that crashed in December and is now the subject of lawsuits. 'I think it will continue to be a pretty good investment for a few more months at most, and then probably drop,' he said. The Trump Organization and the website administrators of where the meme token is for sale, did not respond to requests for comment Friday. The White House declined to comment, saying in an email, 'The $TRUMP meme coin has nothing to do with the White House!' The price of the $TRUMP coin fluctuates. It sold for less than $1 a coin on Jan. 17, the night Trump announced it with a post on X. Within two days, it soared past $70, according to data from research site CoinGecko. Its value plunged after Trump's inauguration and has since bounced in a range from about $8 to $16 a coin. On Friday, it was trading at around $11, with a total market capitalization of $2.2 billion, according to CoinGecko. First lady Melania Trump launched a meme coin of her own, called $MELANIA, also in January. Its price has cratered from more than $13 a coin to $0.32 as of Friday, according to CoinGecko. Two Trump-affiliated companies own 80% of the $TRUMP coin project. While their ability to sell is restricted in the short term, the creators get a fee for every trade. Those fees have added up to more than $324 million since January, according to the research firm Chainalysis. The amount going to Trump personally is not known. Another conference attendee, Edan Yago, a co-founder of the startup BitcoinOS, called the $TRUMP coin a form of legal corruption and not a good use of the underlying technology. 'Trump has discovered that he can issue a token and have people buy that token. Given our current legal system, it's all fine, and so there's new forms of graft and new forms of corruption that have come part and parcel with this new technology,' he said in an interview at the conference. He compared meme coins to brothels on the edge of a gold rush. 'You always have this happen whenever there's massive growth,' he said. Audrey Geiger, another bitcoin investor, said she voted for Trump and likes that he has loosened regulations on cryptocurrency, but she said she wouldn't buy the $TRUMP coin. 'Never touched the stuff,' she said. 'I just ignore that. It's all noise. It's gambling.' The comments are a sign of a tension in the marriage between the MAGA and crypto movements. The two groups formed an alliance last year, when Trump was seeking support for his return to the White House and the crypto industry was looking for changes in federal policy. Trump had previously been a harsh critic of cryptocurrency, saying in 2021 that it 'seems like a scam,' but he flipped in the following years. He spoke at last year's bitcoin conference, made a series of promises to support crypto in office and now calls himself 'the crypto president.' Trump has made aggressive moves to deregulate the cryptocurrency industry and has vowed to launch a government-owned ' strategic reserve ' of digital currency. Fueled in part by those actions, bitcoin soared to a record high of more than $111,000 in May. 'As soon as he won the election, that set in stone that he was the face of crypto for at least the next four years,' Nichols said. Trump's coin has been widely criticized, with government ethics experts and Democratic politicians decrying it as a breach of presidential norms and a vector for possible attempts at influence-buying. Some Republican lawmakers said Trump's dinner with $TRUMP coin owners made them uncomfortable. Jason Jisa, who attended the Bitcoin 2025 conference as a vendor selling Trump-themed merchandise, said he owns bitcoin but not Trump's coin. Wearing a gold- and silver-colored sequin jacket, he said the meme coin has left him stumped. 'It's something we're all paying attention to, trying to figure it out, right? It's something new,' he said. New Hampshire state Rep. Keith Ammon, a Republican, spoke onstage at the conference about his role in creating his state's pathbreaking cryptocurrency reserve. In an interview, he said Trump's coin shouldn't be part of such a reserve fund, which under New Hampshire law is limited to digital assets with a market capitalization of over $500 billion. 'A meme coin is like a casino chip: You might get lucky on it, but it's not a long-term store of value. It's a Skee-Ball token,' he said. By contrast, he said he believes bitcoin 'is the digital version of the bar of gold.' But even as many bitcoin enthusiasts expressed frustration with Trump's meme coin, none of the conference attendees interviewed by NBC News suggested there was anything to be done about it other than to try to persuade Trump to back off. They all said they oppose federal regulation of cryptocurrency, preferring to let meme coin buyers beware. Seth for Privacy said the community needs to 'take the good with the bad.' 'If you could limit what cryptocurrencies people could launch or what meme coins could exist, necessarily you could limit what freedom use cases could exist with these things as well,' he said. At the three-day conference at the Venetian resort and casino, Trump's name, likeness and slogans were everywhere: on artwork for sale, on hats and clothing and on the lips of speakers. A Trump look-alike roamed the expo floor. And onstage, speakers reinforced the mutual benefits of the MAGA-crypto marriage. They praised Trump's overhaul of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which previously classified many digital tokens as securities under a 1933 law. And they extolled Trump's pardon of Ross Ulbricht, who in 2015 was sentenced to life in prison for running the dark web marketplace Silk Road. Prosecutors had blamed Silk Road for six drug overdose deaths, while Trump called the sentence too harsh. The White House dispatched a cadre of advisers to speak at the conference, an unusual show of force from the U.S. government at an event that's explicitly anti-government. Sacks, the White House czar for crypto and artificial intelligence, said onstage that the Trump administration had already delivered much of what the industry had on its wish list, and he solicited ideas from the audience about what more the administration could do for crypto. 'I think by August, we might have achieved the crypto agenda in Washington,' Sacks said onstage Tuesday. 'What would you guys like to see? What else is on your wish list?" Crypto booster Tyler Winklevoss, onstage with Sacks, said the U.S. government should acquire more bitcoin, prompting applause from the audience. Don Jr. and Eric Trump predicted at the conference that bitcoin's price would keep rising to record highs. And Vance, who said he still owns bitcoin that he's held for years, urged conference attendees to get involved in politics including the 2026 midterm elections, or else face a potential crackdown by crypto skeptics. 'Don't ignore politics, because I guarantee you, my friends, politics is not going to ignore this community,' Vance said. Panel moderators did not raise the subject of the $TRUMP meme coin onstage with Sacks, the Trump brothers or others from Trump world. The subject appeared not to come up at all in the conference's official programming, even though many attendees had closely followed news about the coin with concern. Some bitcoin holders said that the depth of the Trump-crypto alliance made them a little uncomfortable. They noted that bitcoin was invented in 2008 to be independent of any government or other central authority. 'The people that are in politics are kind of the bandwagoners,' said Dustin Lee, a conference attendee who said he's been working in crypto for eight years and has his own meme coin, called Quai Boss. He said he was OK with the politicians' presence, though. 'We need the stragglers to get into the space, to bring on the rest of the people,' he said. Geiger said that although she likes Trump and his policies, she's still pessimistic in general about politicians and their intentions toward bitcoin. 'I don't want to be blindsided. I don't want to be like, 'Oh, everything's all right now, because the orange guy won.' It's not that. Some of the things are moving slowly in a direction I love. But on the whole, politicians are gonna politician. They're gonna do their thing.' David Ingram David Ingram is a tech reporter for NBC News.
