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Bitcoin is making headlines, as the regulators have finally approved a way to invest that doesn’t require a crypto wallet, an unregulated exchange intermediary and a “crypto key” that might be easily lost or stolen.

In short, Bitcoin has joined the league of major asset classes now that Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) will be available to the general public through stellar names like Fidelity, Invesco, Wisdom Tree and more.

These ETFs will trade based on the spot, or immediate, price of Bitcoin. Notably, Bitcoin futures have been trading on the CME Group platform since December 2017. (Full disclosure: I serve on the Board of Directors of CME Group.)

Securities regulators delayed starting actual price trading on regulated securities exchanges to protect investors. In hindsight, the many and well-publicized issues with Bitcoin exchanges validated their concerns.

But now the time has come for regulated, public trading of Bitcoin. So, for my readers, the big question is: Does Bitcoin belong in your portfolio? read more

SeaWorld Entertainment Inc., just a month after filing plans to build its first hotel at SeaWorld Orlando, has revealed that it intends to build a second hotel on park property, GrowthSpotter reports.

The plans, which refer to the hotel as “Project Canopy,” call for a 250-room hotel within the Discovery Cove part of SeaWorld, on a 50-acre property that’s currently a parking lot and vacant land. The hotel, which will span 288,637 square feet over six stories, will hold fewer rooms than the 504-key hotel that SeaWorld announced in December.

Initial plans show a large amenity area on the ground floor of the hotel, with a pool, a bar, a fitness center, and retail space. Additional features include a 7,000-square-foot meeting space and a nearly 11,000-square-foot spa.

The initial concept also includes a 7,000-square-foot restaurant called “Tree Top Restaurant.” While the plans don’t describe the restaurant in any more detail, its name aligns with the hotel’s “Project Canopy” concept. read more

By BARBARA ORTUTAY (AP Technology Writer)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Newly unredacted documents from New Mexico’s lawsuit against Meta underscore the company’s “historical reluctance” to keep children safe on its platforms, the complaint says.

New Mexico’s Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Facebook and Instagram owner Meta in December, saying the company failed to protect young users from exposure to child sexual abuse material and allowed adults to solicit explicit imagery from them.

In the passages freshly unredacted from the lawsuit Wednesday, internal employee messages and presentations from 2020 and 2021 show Meta was aware of issues such as adult strangers being able to contact children on Instagram, the sexualization of minors on that platform, and the dangers of its “people you may know” feature that recommends connections between adults and children. But Meta dragged its feet when it came to addressing the issues, the passages show.

Instagram, for instance, began restricting adults’ ability to message minors in 2021. One internal document referenced in the lawsuit shows Meta “scrambling in 2020 to address an Apple executive whose 12-year-old was solicited on the platform, noting ‘this is the kind of thing that pisses Apple off to the extent of threating to remove us from the App Store.’” According to the complaint, Meta “knew that adults soliciting minors was a problem on the platform, and was willing to treat it as an urgent problem when it had to.” read more

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE (AP Technology Writer)

Apple says it will disable a blood-oxygen monitoring feature on its two most popular watches in the U.S. beginning Thursday to comply with a court-ordered revival of a sales ban stemming from a patent dispute.

The decision to turn off the blood-oxygen sensor for consumers who buy either the Apple Watch Series 9 or Ultra 2 in the U.S. came after a federal appeals court on Wednesday refused to extend an order that had allowed the watches to remain in stores during a battle over the rights to some of the technology.

A temporary stay issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals three weeks ago had allowed the two watch models to return to stores in the U.S. after Apple pulled them from shelves and websites just before Christmas as part of a long-running battle with medical technology company Masimo.

The U.S. International Trade Commission in late October ruled a blood-oxygen sensor in the Apple Watch models infringed on Masimo’s patents, a finding that Apple is trying to overturn in appeals court. But that process could take at least a year to unfold, forcing the Cupertino, California, company to find another way to keep its premium watches available in the U.S. read more