A news report that Venezuela owes Russia some $3.15 billion over the next 10 years.
Reuters reported Tuesday that Konstantin Vyshkovsky, who heads Russia's Finance Ministry state debt department, told reporters that Venezuela had not offered to pay some of the amount it owes using the petro, which launched in February.
Vyshkovsky's remarks come days after Time Magazine reported that Russian president Vladimir Putin approved of the petro as a tool to evade U.S. sanctions, and described the process of launching the cryptocurrency as "a collaboration" between the two nations."
Deputy director of the Information and Press Department of the Foreign Ministry Artyom Kozhin pushed back against the claims that Russian government officials aided Venezuela in developing the petro.
Further, Time reported that Russian billionaires Dennis Druzhkov and Fyodor Bogorodsky aided in the petro's development.
However, this report is "fake news," Kozhin claimed, saying that Russian financial authorities never "participated in this project," adding that a meeting between Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov and Venezuelan minister of economy and finance Simon Zerpa was largely unrelated to cryptocurrencies.
Kozhin added:
"During the course of the meeting held on February 21, 2018 in Moscow, Venezuela's Minister of Economy and Finance Mr. [Simon] Zerpa indeed handed over a booklet on the cryptocurrency to the Russian Finance Minister exclusively for the purpose of informing Russian partners about this project."
The petro's sale is ongoing, as previously reported. While Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro has made claims of raising more than $5 billion to date, the country has released no evidence to support these claims. It is unclear how much money the government has actually brought in to date.
On March 19, U.S. president Donald Trump signed new sanctions against the petro, legally codifying efforts to prevent Americans from investing in the controversial cryptocurrency.
For my opinion, the state coin could make some new views in cryptocurrency market.  But the cryptocurrency market may be affected by this.
Let’s keep following with Petro to see the subsequent development of it.

Social media website Reddit is no longer accepting bitcoin as payment for its Reddit Gold membership program.
On Friday, users began commenting in the /r/BTC subreddit that the only available payment methods for the service are credit cards and PayPal, whereas previously people were able to pay for gold using bitcoin.
A Saturday post in the same forum attributed to Reddit administrator "emoney04" explained that the change was due in part to Coinbase's decision to discontinue their Merchant Tool product in favor of Coinbase Commerce, which will enable "merchants to accept multiple cryptocurrencies directly into a user-controlled wallet."
The administrator went on to explain:
"The upcoming Coinbase change, combined with some bugs around the bitcoin payment option that were affecting purchases for certain users, led us to remove bitcoin as a payment option."
They also indicated that Reddit has yet to decide if it will reintroduce crypto payments after Coinbase implements its new Commerce service.
"We're going to take a look at demand and watch the progression of Coinbase Commerce before making a decision on whether to reenable," the administrator said.
As previously reported by CoinDesk, Reddit first started accepting bitcoin in its now-defunct merchandise store, Reddit Market, in 2015.

Actor Steven Seagal made headlines in February when he endorsed the "Bitcoiin" cryptocurrency, but his role as brand ambassador has apparently come to an end.
In a March 26 statement, the group behind the Bitcoiin cryptocurrency said that both Seagal and the "founders" of the project are exiting in light of the token sale's completion.
The post stated:
"As Bitcoiin goes through the conversion phase from token to mineable coin we wish to advise that Bitcoiin will join the likes of the original Bitcoin and become a truly open source. Therefore a big thank you to the Founders and to our Brand Ambassador whom we wish all the best in their future endeavors. However, from this point on Bitcoiin will function within its ecosystem and become a genuinely anonymous cryptocurrency with no individual or individuals having control over the entity!"
As previously reported, outside of Seagal, it hasn't been clear who is exactly behind the project, though BehindMLM, a blog that covers multi-level marketing schemes, has profiled some of the efforts to promote the token sale following a cease-and-desist order from regulators in New Jersey. A now-deleted webinar, originally posted to YouTube, had previously claimed that the team behind Bitcoiin wished to remain anonymous.
The exits also come days after regulators in the state of Tennessee issued a warning to investors about Bitcoiin, citing the action in New Jersey.
Seagal has made no public comment regarding his exit via Twitter, where he has posted a number of promotional messages during the Bitcoiin token sale. The last one teased news about a forthcoming exchange listing, though it's not clear which market he was referring to.
No staking here, says Bitcoiin
The statement issued Monday highlighted the push toward open-source development, though efforts to do this publicly seem to have only begun earlier this year. A GitHub page associated with Bitcoiin features a fork of the Go-Ethereum (geth) client, listing changes that appear to be largely cosmetic.
For example, a commit from nine days ago features changes like adjusting the email address for ethereum founder Jeffrey Wilcke from "[email protected]" to "[email protected]."
The press release also emphasized that, following the token sale, "neither STAKING nor REFERRALS will exist in the blockchain or the Bitcoiin ecosystem." The group blames "the media which believe in sensationalism instead of reality" for spreading this idea, though Bitcoiin's own statement from February 5 outlined how "Bitcoiin Staking" would let "anyone holding Bitcoiin in their wallet...receive interest on their balance in return for helping maintain the security of the network."
"The 1% reward is generated through our mining eco-system and hence we are able to provide the guaranteed monthly return," the statement explained at the time.
It's not clear how much money has been raised during the ICO, though the group claimed earlier this month that its $75 million "soft cap" had been reached.

Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of Ripple (XRP) and Stellar (XLM), as well as the creator of the infamous Mt. Gox cryptocurrency exchange, claimed that cryptocurrency and its underlying technology, Blockchain, should remain decentralized in order to succeed in the future, CNBCreported Friday, March 23.
In an interview on CNBC’s Fast Money, McCaleb said that the only other successful decentralized network he has ever seen is the Internet. In a fairly open critique of Ripple – a payment protocol company he co-founded in 2013, but has since left – McCaleb stated that the deployment of a centralized financial payment protocol in crypto would lead to “a system that is no better than SWIFT or PayPal.” He continued his Internet and Blockchain comparison, saying:
"The real vision is that you have a network, much like the internet, that anyone can participate in [...] That's the key thing to make these things successful."
Earlier this week, McCaleb explained his vision for a Blockchain-powered “universal payments network”, also noting he thinks all equity will be tokenized by the year of 2028.
McCaleb is not the only high profile person making public comments on crypto and Blockchain this week. On March 22, Edward Snowden expressed concerns during an interview that the Bitcoin (BTC) Blockchain is “devastatingly public”, calling BTC’s public ledger its “long-lasting flaw”.
Earlier this week on March 21, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and payment service Square, told mainstream media that he sees a single future currency emerging for the world and Internet, adding “I personally believe that it will be Bitcoin.”

Blockchain could be a solution to the battle social media users face over misuse of personal data and content, RBC Capital Markets said March 21.
Speaking to CNBC in the wake of the ongoing Facebook privacy scandal, RBC analyst Mitch Steves said Blockchain is “where we’re going long term” with regard to data integrity online.
“In the future, someone like yourself no longer has to give their photos to Facebook,” Steves told the network’s Fast Money segment.
“Instead, you could just share that photo specifically with people, and then you'd be able to track it and make sure it's not shared with someone who gets access to your information.”
While Blockchain technology has so far not made inroads into mainstream social media technical setups, dedicated Blockchain-based alternatives continue to appear, from dating networks to communities such as Steemit.
As Steves notes, however, as much as the technology offers transparency, Facebook users would still not have full power over how their data spreads across the internet.
“The one problem that it does not solve is that it does not allow you to stop it,” he continued about third parties sharing content which unwittingly became accessible to them via a user’s privacy settings.
“Let’s say Facebook decided to sell your photo to some advertiser… you would be able to see that that transaction happened but you would not be able to prevent that transaction from occurring in the first place.”
In what may now be viewed with a hint of irony, in January, Facebook banned cryptocurrency advertisements throughout its platform over what it described as “deceptive promotional practices.”

IBM announced today, March 19 that the world’s smallest computer – its dimensions less than a grain of salt – will use Blockchain technology and soon be “embedded into everyday devices”.
In a summary of its annual 5 in 5 report, in which IBM details what technological innovations could occur within the next five years, IBM Research Head Arvind Krishna gave the lead to a Blockchain implementation.
The announcement comes on the first day of the IBM Think 2018 conference in Las Vegas.
“Within the next five years, cryptographic anchors — such as ink dots or tiny computers smaller than a grain of salt — will be embedded in everyday objects and devices,” he wrote.
“They’ll be used in tandem with blockchain’s distributed ledger technology to ensure an object’s authenticity from its point of origin to when it reaches the hands of the customer.”
The release marks a further step in IBM’s now several-year journey into Blockchain experimentation.In an increasingly competitive market for supply chain security, IBM’s nanochip will have the same computing power as an equivalent, much larger one from the early 1990s.
This will nonetheless allow it to perform data handling on the required scale, various sources report, including to “monitor, analyze, communicate, and even act on data.”

In recent days, cryptocurrency prices are still slowly falling. However, the enthusiasm of cryptocurrency mining investors has not cooled.
Here are two news about Bitcoin Mining
One is 
Bladetec, a British IT hardware supplier, has recently revealed plans to build a Bitcoin (BTC) farm in the South East of United Kingdom, The Sunday Telegraph reported March 17.
The project dubbed the Third Bladetec Bitcoin Mining Company Ltd (TBBMC) aims to raise  £10 mln or roughly $13.9 mln from investors to build and operate the farm over the next two to three years. The developers then plan to sell off the mined coins as well as the mining equipment to provide investment returns, says the funding platform for the project, Envestry.
According to the project, the TBBMC facility will cover 3,500 square feet at three locations in London, Surrey, and Suffolk. Considering the high price of mining one bitcoin in the UK, which reportedly amounts to about $8,400, most of the raised funds would be spent on energy costs, as the company is planning to mine 1,280 bitcoins, writes The Telegraph.
Another one is
Cryptocurrency mining is perfectly legal in Europe and only subject to standard electricity rules, according to an EU commissioner.
In a statement released last week, Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, addressed concerns about the power-intensive nature of cryptocurrency mining, while clarifying the regulatory status of the industry.
Gabriel said:
"If the energy consumed for this activity is produced according to law, there is no legal basis to forbid or even limit it. ... As mining of cryptocurrency is not an illegal activity, the Commission did not put in place any means to track it, so far."
However, as an electricity-consuming economic activity, mining is subject to EU rules regarding "energy efficiency, the power sector and greenhouse gases emissions," she added.
Mining activity, she pointed out, is still currently concentrated in China, despite hints that regulators there may move to clamp down on the industry. "Nevertheless, it cannot be excluded that some part of the mining is done in the EU," Gabriel said.
As reported by the Washington Post recently, Iceland, which generates most of its own electricity through hydroelectric power stations, now has more prospective cryptocurrency mining projects than the island's energy supply could support. Iceland, however, is not a full EU member, but is part of the European Economic Area.
Anyway, we still need some time to continue to observe the potential of cryptocurrency mining.

Hi guys =D  May I know what are your plans on your Bitcoin in the future? Do you plan to keep on investing on Bitcoin related businesses or do plan to convert it into fiat and ventures on new business?
Actually, there is no much places to invest, and we can see the prices in these days. The price has been falling slowly, also we can see a lot scams related Bitcoin etc.
We may can discuss about the coins there.