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Significant Digits For Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2018

$349

In the final two months of 2017, the price of the cryptocurrency monero quadrupled in value to $349, and is up a further 7 percent this year. It grew faster than the top cryptocurrency, bitcoin, which is saying something.

Criminals were once a core customer base for bitcoin, but as people have gotten better at tracing where the currency comes from and where it goes, it’s fallen out of favor.

That’s left an opening for monero — which encrypts recipients’ addresses — to scoop up that core crimedoer demo. [Bloomberg]

19,000 pound

The Tiangong-1, a 19,000-pound Chinese space station that the nation reportedly lost control of two years ago, will likely come crashing down to earth sometime in March 2018.

If the when is iffy, the where is even worse: scientists know that it’ll come down somewhere between the 43° North and 43° South latitudes, but that is a massive range encompassing every inhabited continent on the planet. [CBS New York]

5 billion

Amazon announced Tuesday that it shipped upwards of 5 billion items in 2017 to Prime subscribers alone. One of the hot items of the year — Instant Pot multicookers — was one bellwether of the digital giant’s reach. Amazon delivered at least one Instant Pot to two out of every three U.S. zip codes. [Quartz]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/signific...cid=SigDig

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