The price of Bitcoin increased 50% — in the last four weeks.

Now priced at $26,579, “Bitcoin is crashing — upward,” quips CNN Business:

The digital currency has a market value north of $500 billion. Think Bitcoin is just a fad? It’s worth more than Visa or Mastercard. Or Walmart…

Its rapid rise has been remarkable — or insane, depending on your appetite for risk. But there’s some logic to the run-up: Investors are pouring money into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies during the Covid-19 pandemic as the Federal Reserve sent interest rates near zero (and expects to keep them there for several more years), severely weakening the US dollar. That makes bitcoin, comparatively, an attractive currency. There’s a set limit to the number of bitcoins on the planet, and investors believe that once the supply runs out, the digital coin’s value can only increase.

Also aiding in bitcoin’s soaring valuation: Big, name-brand investors are stockpiling it, and huge consumer companies are embracing it. That’s adding a dose of validity and appeal to cryptocurrency for mainstream investors. For example, a top executive at BlackRock [the world’s largest asset manager, with $7.81 trillion in assets under management] recently said the cryptocurrency can replace gold, and Square and PayPal have both embraced bitcoin.

The article also includes some advice from Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of the global investment firm Skybridge Capital (who was also, for 10 days, White House Communications Director):
Scaramucci said people have begun to accept bitcoin — and since it appears in so few portfolios, it has plenty of room to grow. Still, bitcoin is a volatile asset and will be a risky holding if you invest in it. “This thing has a tendency to crash up,” he said. “It is due for a correction, and these corrections can be violent.” Scaramucci said bitcoin could suddenly tumble 20% to 50%.
“You have to be very cautious,” he added.

But he also highlighted bitcoin’s staying power over the course of the past decade: If you took $1 and put 99 cents of it in cash and a penny in bitcoin, that investment strategy would have outperformed $1 invested in the S&P 500 over the last 10 years, he noted.
“Bitcoin’s best days are ahead of it, but it’s going to be volatile and I think people need to be prepared for it,” Scaramucci told CNN Business.

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Source: Slashdot – Bitcoin Surges 50% in Just One Month. CNN Ponders ‘Insane’ Record Run

The Verge writes:
Lei Jun, the CEO of Chinese phone maker Xiaomi, has confirmed that its upcoming Mi 11 phone will not come with a charger, citing environmental concerns. While that’s a legitimate argument against providing yet another hunk of plastic that resembles all the other chargers people already have, Xiaomi joined other phone makers who poked fun at Apple a few short months ago for not including chargers with the iPhone 12.

Jun made the remarks on Chinese social media site Weibo, saying people have many chargers which creates an environmental burden, and therefore the company was canceling the charger for the Mi 11.

Apple’s decision not to include chargers with the iPhone 12 was met with some derision, and competitors like Samsung reminded customers in an ad that charging bricks were “included with your Galaxy.” That Galaxy ad has apparently been deleted, however, as rumors continue to build that Samsung won’t include a charger with its upcoming Galaxy S21 phones.

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Source: Slashdot – Should Cellphone Chargers Be Sold Separately?

Phoronix reports:

It’s been a turbulent year and 2020 is certainly ending interesting in the Linux/open-source space… If it wasn’t odd enough seeing Sony providing a new official Linux driver for their PlayStation 5 DualSense controller for ending out the year, there is also a new Linux port to the Nintendo 64 game console… Yes, a brand new port to the game console that launched more than two decades ago.

Open-source developer Lauri Kasanen who has contributed to Mesa and the Linux graphics stack took to developing a new Nintendo 64 port and announced it this Christmas day. This isn’t the first time Linux has been ported to the N64 but prior attempts weren’t aimed at potentially upstreaming it into the mainline Linux kernel…

This fresh port to the N64 was pursued in part to help port emulators and frame-buffer or console games.

And also, the announcement adds, “Most importantly, because I can.”

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Source: Slashdot – Linux Kernel Ported to the Nintendo 64

From a report:

The thought of eating “astronaut food” brings to mind a kind of instant food that is far from “farm to table.” However, recent experiments aboard the ISS are improving our understanding of how to bring the farm directly into space itself.

Astronauts just ran a Veg-PONDS 02 experiment on the International Space Station. The experiment used food that was cultivated in space. Potential cultivations could include tomatoes or other plants, NASA says.

On November 30th, Kate Rubins took about 6 packs of radishes from the lab and stored them in a refrigerated unit after gathering them up — “freshly grown in space. The process opens new doors for microgravity food processing to enable future long-term moon and Mars missions. The radish sprouts will be sent back to Earth early next year on SpaceX’s 22nd Commercial Resupply Services mission, NASA announced…

“There comes a point where you have longer and longer duration missions, and you reach a cost-benefit point where it makes sense to grow your own food,” said chief scientist of NASA’s Utilization and Life Sciences Office at the Kennedy Space Center Howard Levine in a statement.

The APH Chamber uses LED lights to improve plant growth, while an automated control system provides water to the plant. 180 sensors track plant growth and monitoring the temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide levels.

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Source: Slashdot – Astronauts Grow Radishes in a Microfarm on the International Space Station

schwit1 quotes Intelligent Living: Plenty is an ag-tech startup in San Francisco, co-founded by Nate Storey, that is reinventing farms and farming. Storey, who is also the company’s chief science officer, says the future of farms is vertical and indoors because that way, the food can grow anywhere in the world, year-round; and the future of farms employ robots and AI to continually improve the quality of growth for fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Plenty does all these things and uses 95% less water and 99% less land because of it.

Plenty’s climate-controlled indoor farm has rows of plants growing vertically, hung from the ceiling. There are sun-mimicking LED lights shining on them, robots that move them around, and artificial intelligence (AI) managing all the variables of water, temperature, and light, and continually learning and optimizing how to grow bigger, faster, better crops. These futuristic features ensure every plant grows perfectly year-round. The conditions are so good that the farm produces 400 times more food per acre than an outdoor flat farm. Another perk of vertical farming is locally produced food. The fruits and vegetables aren’t grown 1,000 miles away or more from a city; instead, at a warehouse nearby. Meaning, many transportation miles are eliminated, which is useful for reducing millions of tons of yearly CO2 emissions and prices for consumers. Imported fruits and vegetables are more expensive, so society’s most impoverished are at an extreme nutritional disadvantage. Vertical farms could solve this problem.

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Source: Slashdot – 2-Acre Vertical Farm Run By AI and Robots Out-Produces 720-Acre Flat Farm