### **Missouri Man Arrested for Bitcoin Extortion**

A **Missouri man**, **Daniel Rhyne**, has been arrested for allegedly trying to **extort his former employer**, a New Jersey-based industrial company, using **Bitcoin**. On **November 25, 2023**, Rhyne sent an **extortion email** claiming he had locked out the company’s IT administrators and deleted server backups. He demanded a ransom of **20 Bitcoin**, valued at approximately **$750,000** at the time of the threat.

Investigations revealed that Rhyne had **unauthorized access** to the company’s systems, where he altered administrator passwords and scheduled server shutdowns. He now faces serious charges including **extortion**, **intentional damage to a protected computer**, and **wire fraud**, which could lead to a maximum of **35 years in prison** and **$750,000 in fines**.

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Since 2015, **Bitcoin.com** has been a global leader in introducing newcomers to crypto. Featuring accessible educational materials, timely and objective news, and intuitive self-custodial products, we make it easy for anyone to buy, spend, trade, invest, earn, and stay up-to-date on cryptocurrency and the future of finance.

A Missouri man, Daniel Rhyne, was arrested for attempting to extort his former employer, a New Jersey-based industrial company.

Missouri Man Faces 35 Years for Bitcoin Extortion Scheme Against Employer

## Arthur Hayes on Bitcoin's Potential

**BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes** believes that **Bitcoin (BTC)** is poised to reach a significant value before the current market cycle reaches its peak. In a recent interview with **Kyle Chasse**, Hayes discussed the potential for Bitcoin to experience a series of rallies due to an increase in monetary supply.

> “I think Bitcoin is going to hit a **numerically interesting number**. Now, obviously, I put a **$1 million Bitcoin** out there. I hope it hits a $1 million, but maybe it’s like **$666,000**, **$500,000**, or **$250,000** – some round number that in the human mind is significant for some arbitrary reason.”

Hayes further elaborated that this level will likely be reached before we see significant changes in the pace of **fiat money creation**, suggesting it might be time to sell at that point.

### Shifting Market Dynamics

He also posited that Bitcoin's price movements are now more influenced by **fiat liquidity** rather than the traditional halving cycles. 

> “I think that the four-year Bitcoin halving cycle made a lot more sense when Bitcoin was a much smaller asset class... But now that Bitcoin and crypto are a bona fide asset class, they are discussed in every major financial network around the world.”

Hayes argues that Bitcoin has become a critical indicator of **fiat liquidity** globally, a role once held by gold.

> “Now I think Bitcoin has transitioned from this sort of technological digital asset into the best smoke alarm for fiat liquidity that we have globally.”

As of now, Bitcoin is trading at **$84,152**, reflecting a **3.7%** decrease in the last 24 hours.

![Arthur Hayes](https://dailyhodl.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Hayes-Says-Bitcoin-Will-.jpg)

[Watch the full interview here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzSJilpCzWs)

BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes says that Bitcoin (BTC) will likely hit a massive value before the current market cycle peaks.

Arthur Hayes Predicts Bitcoin Could Soar to a 'Significant Number' Before Market Peak

### Bitcoin's Recent Price Movements
Bitcoin and crypto prices have **dipped** as concerns about inflation and threats of tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump loom large. The price of Bitcoin has fallen back to approximately **$80,000** after reaching nearly **$90,000** earlier this week, despite the confirmation of significant advancements in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

### Predictions from Crypto Experts
Legendary crypto trader **Arthur Hayes** predicts that the Federal Reserve's actions could trigger a Bitcoin price surge in **April**. This comes as Bitcoin has been outperforming major stocks like **Tesla**.

### Federal Reserve's Strategy
Hayes notes a shift in tone from **Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell** at the latest meeting, suggesting that inflationary concerns related to tariffs are **transitory**. The Fed's recent decision to maintain interest rates after initiating a **rate-cutting cycle** indicates a potential return to **quantitative easing**, even amidst the **$36 trillion** U.S. debt crisis.

### Impact of Tariffs on Bitcoin
Trump’s impending tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico, and China, set to start from **April 2**, may further impact Bitcoin and the broader market. Meanwhile, **Markus Thielen**, founder of **10x Research**, believes a combination of Trump's softened tariff stance and a dovish Fed could set the stage for a Bitcoin rebound toward **$90,000**.

### Conclusion
Overall, the shifting landscape of tariffs and monetary policy from the Fed could play a pivotal role in determining the future trajectory of Bitcoin prices, with increased optimism for a potential recovery in the coming weeks.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell could be about to trigger bitcoin price and crypto market mayhem...

Is a $36 Trillion Fed Move About to Ignite Bitcoin's Next Bull Run?

### Bell County Bitcoin Scam Alert

The **Bell County Sheriff’s Office** is currently investigating a **Bitcoin scam** that is using the department’s name to deceive residents. Two victims have already reported being contacted by scammers who falsely claimed they had an arrest warrant for missing jury duty or other legal matters.

The scammers are employing various tactics, including using the names of actual department personnel and creating fake identities to lend credibility to their schemes. In one recent incident, a victim received a voicemail urging them to call back.

### Details of the Scam

The current scam involves a **request for $25,000** to be moved into a **Bitcoin Kiosk** located at South Ann and Veterans Memorial Boulevard in Harker Heights. Victims reported receiving **text messages** that included instructions on how to transfer the money.

Victims are typically required to stay on the phone throughout the duration of the scam. Some phone numbers associated with the scammers include **682-281-6021** and **254-263-9924**, but authorities warn that any number can be manipulated by scammers.

### Important Reminders

- The Bell County Sheriff’s Office **does not collect money for fines** and **will never ask for payments in Bitcoin or gift cards**.
- If contacted by someone claiming to be from the BCSO, residents are encouraged to **verify the identity** of the caller.

In a recent Facebook post, BCSO urged the public to remain vigilant against such scams and to ensure their safety when interacting with individuals claiming to be law enforcement officers. 

For any inquiries, residents can contact the Bell County Sheriff’s Office at **254-933-5412** or reach out to their local law enforcement.

The department says two victims have come forward saying they’ve been contacted by scammers claiming they have an arrest warrant for either missing jury duty or another legal process.

Beware: Bell County Residents Targeted by Bitcoin Scam!

Twice rejected by American voters in favor of Donald Trump, the **Democratic party** now faces its most severe **crisis of identity** in four decades. Nowhere is the party’s search for relevance in Trump’s America more desperate than in its embrace of **cryptocurrency**, a sector whose existence depends upon its ability to circumvent the financial regulatory state the Democrats spent a century constructing. 

How else to explain the Democratic representative **Ritchie Torres** – whose **South Bronx** district is the poorest in the United States – joining forces with the Republican **Tom Emmer** to champion cryptocurrency through their **newly formed congressional Crypto caucus**?

Congressional Republicans have always been uniform in their support for cryptocurrency: in May 2024, just three Republican House members voted against a bill to significantly relax regulations on digital tokens. But since 2016, the cryptocurrency industry has made **steady inroads** into the Democratic party. That convergence, if it continues, will represent a return to the **pre-New Deal financial politics** that the party spent a century rejecting.

Throughout American history, the politics of money and financial risk have been central to party coalitions. Not since the election of 1896, however, have the Democrats been the party of **deflationary, restrictive “hard money”**. As the historians **Anton Jäger** and **Noam Maggor** explain, the de-facto fusion of the **Populist party** with the Democratic party transformed it into a vehicle for those who saw money not as a neutral store of value, but as a political instrument that could serve developmental ends – in this case, directing investment to credit-starved regions of the country.

William Jennings Bryan’s defeat drove the party to moderate its more radical monetary positions. But notwithstanding the occasional inconsistencies, Democrats generally maintained the **anti-deflationary stance** established in 1896. Thirty years later, the **Great Depression** provided Franklin D. Roosevelt with the mandate and the crisis necessary to complete this transformation: the United States abandoned the **gold standard** in 1933.

“Consumer protection” in its contemporary form only truly entered the American political lexicon in the 1960s, but this period established the contours of America’s politics of financial risk. The **Banking Act of 1933** (often referred to as **Glass-Steagall**) separated commercial and investment banking to protect ordinary depositors from speculative excesses. The **Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934** imposed disclosure requirements on financial markets and established the **Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)**. Most critically, the creation of the **Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)** ended the era of devastating bank runs by insuring deposits.

Collectively, these measures represented a fundamentally new relationship between citizens, banks, and financial risk: the state would actively shape financial markets rather than simply enforcing contracts within them.

The post-war era saw the Democratic party further articulate that approach to **“market-making”**. The **Employment Act of 1946** declared it the government’s responsibility to maintain “maximum employment”, while the Federal Reserve, treasury, SEC, and FDIC enforced financial stability through interest rate caps, capital controls, and heavy regulation of financial institutions. While occasionally inefficient, these policies contributed to remarkable stability. As the economists **Carmen Reinhart** and **Kenneth Rogoff** have documented, the period from 1945 to 1971 saw virtually no banking crises in advanced economies.

The **Clinton administration’s financial deregulation** – culminating in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and the deregulation of derivatives in 2000 – represented a significant retreat from these principles and ended in the catastrophe of 2008. But, if only to offset the mounting risk they allowed the private sector to assume, the Clinton administration frequently sought to expand the FDIC’s responsibilities.

Pro-crypto Democrats, from Torres to the disgraced New York City mayor **Eric Adams**, argue that cryptocurrency aligns with progressive principles. “**Blockchain technology** can liberate the lowest income communities from the high fees of the traditional financial system,” Torres said at an industry-organized summit last year. **Kamala Harris** herself appealed to cryptocurrency as an opportunity for Black men. But cryptocurrency, at its core, subverts the tools for economic management Democrats have championed for decades.

The FDIC was created precisely because uninsured deposits catalyzed routine bank runs; cryptocurrency exchanges offer no comparable protection. The Federal Reserve’s sovereignty over the American monetary base enables it to expand the money supply during downturns to maintain employment; Bitcoin’s fixed supply explicitly rejects this responsibility. The SEC was established because unregulated securities markets harmed ordinary investors; cryptocurrency’s decentralization enables exchanges to operate outside its protective frameworks.

The industry’s **“political investments”** – to borrow the political scientist **Thomas Ferguson’s** terminology – are an undeniably defining force in American politics. By some counts, nearly half of all corporate campaign contributions in 2024 came from the crypto sector. But despite Kamala Harris’s substantial concessions to the industry, the top three crypto PACs leaned red by a margin of nearly 2:1. Harris’s promises to the industry were never enough to outweigh the Trump campaign’s proposal, running since late July, to enshrine crypto as a **“permanent national asset”** through a national bitcoin “stockpile”.

Modest deregulation is simply not what crypto is in the political game for. It requires nothing less than the **seizure of the American state**. And until Democrats can outmatch Trump’s handouts to the sector, crypto will stay with the **Republican party**.

Volatility is the basic roadblock to crypto’s further adoption. It is simply too risky for most people. No amount of regulatory tweaks will change that fundamental affliction: as long as cryptocurrencies are predominantly held as investments rather than used for transactions, their prices will remain highly sensitive to investor demand fluctuations. And the absence of traditional stabilization mechanisms, like central banks or reserve assets, contributes to the high volatility of crypto tokens. Put simply: if crypto is to grow, it’ll need both state backstopping and displacement of the traditional banking system altogether.

Trump has set about doing exactly this. His administration’s recently established **“strategic bitcoin reserve”** is, in effect, a state backstop for cryptocurrency. But the Trump administration’s designs extend far beyond “de-risking” crypto: their goal, as the political economist **Martijn Konings** observes, appears to be the destabilization of the traditional banking system itself.

At the behest of **Elon Musk’s** so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) – itself named after Dogecoin, Musk’s cryptocurrency of choice – the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” packages and layoffs have already reduced the FDIC’s workforce by 10%. And Trump issued an executive order in mid-February requiring that the formerly independent agency submit to **White House oversight**.

The Trump team has floated replacing the already enervated FDIC with a gutted insurance scheme housed in the treasury, merging it with the office of the comptroller of the currency, or simply defanging it through mass layoffs and employee transfers. In either case, tighter executive control over banks’ balance sheets will render the financial system’s solvency contingent upon whether a particular bank is favored or disfavored by the president. It’s easy to imagine a resulting loss of confidence in the traditional banking system – an outcome that crypto advocates believe would work to their advantage.

If the Democrats wish to outcompete the Republican party for crypto dollars, then, they’ll need to offer the “industry” much more than deregulation. They’ll have to become active participants in engineering a return to the **pre-New Deal politics of money and financial risk** – the very positions against which the modern Democratic party defined itself. That would be a capitulation unprecedented even in the Democratic party’s long history of betraying the American working class.

The Democratic representative Ritchie Torres joined forces with a Republican to form the Congressional Crypto caucus. That’s a dangerous move

Why the Democratic Party's Embrace of Cryptocurrency Could Backfire

Bitcoin price **stabilizes around $87,000** on Friday, with its RSI indicating **indecisiveness** among traders. Meanwhile, Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP) are showing signs of weakness as they confront resistance at critical levels this week.

## Bitcoin’s RSI Indicator Signals Indecision
Bitcoin has broken above its **200-day Exponential Moving Average (EMA)** at approximately $85,580 and rose by **4.45%** until Monday. However, it has since stabilized around **$87,000**, finding support at the 200-day EMA. If Bitcoin breaks above the descending trendline, it could reach the psychological level of **$90,000**, with a successful close above potentially leading to a rally towards **$95,000**.

![BTC/USDT daily chart](https://editorial.fxsstatic.com/miscelaneous/BTCUSDT_2025-03-28_08-13-35-638787317835671071.png)
*BTC/USDT daily chart*

Conversely, a rejection from the trendline or a close below the **200-day EMA** may push Bitcoin down to its next support level at **$78,258**.

## Ethereum Displays Weakness
Ethereum has found support near **$1,861** for two weeks, recovering nearly **7%** last week. However, it has faced a **4% correction** over the last three days, trading below **$2,000** at the moment. If this downward trend continues, it might retest its support at **$1,861**.

![ETH/USDT daily chart](https://editorial.fxsstatic.com/miscelaneous/ETHUSDT_2025-03-28_08-50-25-638787318495582156.png)
*ETH/USDT daily chart*

## Ripple Faces Potential Downtrend
Ripple's price broke above its **100-day EMA** at **$2.32** last week but has since declined **5.74%**. Currently, it is nearing its **100-day EMA** of approximately **$2.31**. If Ripple closes below this level, it could drop to its next support at **$1.96**.

![XRP/USDT daily chart](https://editorial.fxsstatic.com/miscelaneous/XRPUSDT_2025-03-28_08-16-48-638787319171658488.png)
*XRP/USDT daily chart*

If the **100-day EMA** holds, Ripple may recover to test its resistance level at **$2.72**.

## FAQs
- **Bitcoin** is the leading cryptocurrency by market cap, designed to function as money without centralized control.
- **Altcoins** are all cryptocurrencies except Bitcoin, with Ethereum sometimes excluded from this definition.
- **Stablecoins** are cryptocurrencies pegged to a reserve asset to maintain price stability.
- **Bitcoin dominance** reflects Bitcoin's market cap relative to all cryptocurrencies, often signaling investor sentiment.

**Disclaimer:** This article contains forward-looking statements and should not be construed as investment advice. Always conduct thorough research before making investment decisions.

Bitcoin (BTC) price stabilizes at around $87,000 on Friday, as its RSI indicates indecisiveness among traders. 

Missouri Man Faces 35 Years for Bitcoin Extortion Scheme Against Employer

Summary:

Daniel Rhyne arrested for extorting former employer with Bitcoin ransom.

Demands included 20 Bitcoin, worth about $750,000.

Accused of unauthorized access and causing significant disruptions.

Facing charges that could lead to 35 years in prison and hefty fines.

Missouri Man Arrested for Bitcoin Extortion

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Why the Democratic Party's Embrace of Cryptocurrency Could Backfire

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