Prices are very volatile at present with bitcoin dipping below $35,000 USD and ETH below $2,500 USD. 

 

Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan were arrested in February over money laundering charges of $4.5 Billion USD worth of Bitcoin linked to the 2016 Bitfinex hack. It's the largest seizure in US DOJ history and all eyes are on the US to see if funds will be returned to the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange. The couple have not been charged with the original hack as the Department of Justice concentrates on the money laundering evidence which is extensive. They are alleged to have used every type of money laundering known to man including, buying physical gold, using non-KYC exchanges, using mixers, but it was buying $500 gift cards that brought them unstuck. Full DOJ deposition here. 

 

Mass media is full of warnings of imminent war in Ukraine. Putin seems like he is making a case for war and blaming Ukraine for attacking separatist regions of the country while this month recognising the separatist areas as autonomous. The conflict has seen both countries become friendlier with crypto as a way to gain donations (Ukraine) and potentially get around sanctions (Russia). The Dumas plans to ban Bitcoin have been shelved for plans to regulate and allow crypto investment. Facebook has been full of crypto wallets to donate to the Ukrainian cause. 

UPDATE:

War has begun, soldiers have landed on Odessa, strategic bombing in Kiev and Kharkov has begun and Ukraine's navy is almost completely destroyed already.
 

 

The Fed is pushing on with reduction of stimulus. Rate rises are expected as early as next month. The equity market is already suffering (5.2% down in the last 5 days) as a result, and the jury is still out on whether the Federal Reserve will be able to continue their policy or will the markets force a U turn back to stimulus, like we've seen in the past.
 

4. El Salvador tourism up by 1/3

Crypto is a journey to self sovereignty and it is a mission at Stormrake to help people on this journey.  
Today I'll explain what it is to "Custody" your coins and the service Stormrake provides.

Where is bitcoin?
Bitcoin (or other crypto assets) can be thought to exist both everywhere and nowhere. There is no concept of a "location" for bitcoin; bitcoin is just a record on a public, decentralised ledger.  
This decentralised ledger is a public database that is distributed globally on thousands of computers.  

Who owns a bitcoin?
The concept of 'owning' bitcoin is really just the ability to send/spend the bitcoin, and the network will accept any transaction that complies with the consensus and meets the cryptographic signature requirements.
Therefore to truly own bitcoin, you must be in control of the ability to create a valid cryptographic signature.  

Creating a valid cryptographic signature
The ability to transaction and sign on the bitcoin network is based upon mathematics which all starts from a 256 bit random number.
I'll explain the mechanics of this in a little more detail, but a simple way to sign your own transactions is to use a hardware device such as a Ledger Nano

Entropy (Randomness)
It is important that your random generation includes enough entropy that to be truely random. To write it in decimal it would be: 1.15 x 10^77 or 115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,853,269,984,665,640,564,039,457,584,007,913,129,639,936.  
This is roughly the number of atoms in the universe. Fortunately, the simple way to achieve massive amount of entropy is to roll a dice 100 times. You can also combine entropy from multiple sources so a truly random input alongside compromised inputs will still give you a truly random output.

Generating an address
Each address uses your entropy to create a pair of numbers on an Elliptic Curve. This pair is known as a "public" and "private" key.  
Your bitcoin address is derived from the public key, and the private key is used to "spend" those coins.


source: https://medium.com/coinmonks/what-is-a-bitcoin-address-6c822c857004

Managing funds and safely storing your secret
Now that you have carefully generated the entropy, there are a number of ways it can be stored and managed.

1. Mobile or Computer Wallet
These are useful and simple, but can be compromised by malware/viruses.  Great for play/spending money, similar to amount of cash in your wallet. Two good wallets to experiment with are Muun and Bluewallet

2. Hardware wallet
A hardware device, dedicated to the purposes of managing private keys, and never directly connected to the internet. We'd recommend Ledger

3. Multi-sig wallets
Multiple secrets can be combined to require multiple signers to create transactions. This can be done using Elliptic Curves or the more beautiful Schnorr signature scheme.

4. Backups and Paper wallets
Your wallet can written down or stamped into steel plates. These methods will store the secret but you'll still need a computer or device to sign the transaction.
It is important to mention if you plan to create your own wallet, your backup method should be safe from accidental loss and safe from theft (or hacking). For example, if you securely generated your private key but then took a photo on your phone then the digital copy on your phone massively undermines the safety of your wallet. 

So what does this all mean? 
At Stormrake, we've taken a number of steps to safely and carefully manage all aspects of custody so that those looking to invest in bitcoin don't need to worry about this. However as people travel down their crypto journey, and crypto tools improve and become easier to use, we expect (and hope) that people will eventually start to become more "self-sovereign".  

There is a lot more to talk about on this topic so please keep sending your feedback and suggestions.  
If you're mathematically curious, I strongly recommend looking into Elliptic Curve Cryptography.  Some further reading here:  
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signature_Algorithm
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Invoice_address

The stock to flow shows we are still way below trend this month. This is what I would call "oversold territory". This is the biggest deviation from model since its inception in 2017.



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