Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily look at the stories shaping our digital world.
A solo bitcoin miner just hit the lottery — pulling in roughly two hundred thousand dollars using just one hundred fifty dollars worth of equipment. It sounds improbable, but solo mining has quietly been gaining ground, with twenty-four blocks found in the past twelve months, a forty-one percent jump over the year before. The odds are long, but apparently not impossible.
Shifting to a story with broader implications — AI tools are now being used to discover security vulnerabilities in Android, and the GrapheneOS project is documenting ongoing changes to security patches as a direct result. This matters because it signals a new phase where AI isn't just writing code, it's finding the cracks in the code we already depend on every day.
And finally, a cautionary tale about prediction markets. Therapists in Los Angeles say they're seeing a growing wave of young patients with gambling problems, and many are pointing directly at Kalshi, the regulated prediction market platform. The line between informed speculation and compulsive betting, it turns out, is thinner than the industry would like to admit.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
