Need to catch up on what’s been going on in cryptocurrencies? From clumsy authoritarianism to Bitcoin user research, here are the top five stories that made news this week.
5. Airport security allegedly hassled French traveler after he mentioned Bitcoin
Redditors were divided as to whether this story was apocryphal, but Pierre Etheve’s tale of out-of-line questioning at Charles de Gaulle certainly sounds believable. The poster said he missed his flight to Heathrow because guards detained him after they heard him speak to a friend about Bitcoin and demanded to know how many Bitcoins he was travelling with [sic].
4. r/NASCAR is seeking to sponsor a driver through Dogecoin
More fun from Reddit. People on the r/NASCAR subreddit have begun collecting donations in Dogecoin for the No. 98 car, driven by Josh Wise. With two months left of the campaign, only about 4% of the amount has been raised.
3. No Austin Powers jokes: BitPay becomes a gold member of the Bitcoin Foundation
Payment processor BitPay, a company that has been on an absolute tear over the last year, joined Circle as the only other gold member at the Bitcoin Foundation.
2. David Seaman lambastes the IRS’s tax classification of cryptocurrencies
Tip of the hat to Jon Matonis, who tweeted the original link to this one on Thursday: podcaster and journalist David Seaman made a convincing argument that the IRS is going to stifle American innovation in the cryptocurrency economies.
Top Leader. Putting together a profile of the typical Bitcoin user
An ongoing survey of Bitcoin users has given us a glimpse into who is using the technology. To no one’s surprise at all, the average user is a 32-year-old male who leans libertarian and whose primary motivations are curiosity, then profit, then politics.