Whether you believe cryptocurrency is the future of all exchange or snake oil from the past in modern guise, the IRS wants a cut. The feds don’t care if you buy it or hold it or mine it, but if you bought something with Bitcoin or Ethereum or whichever flavor you prefer, that’s a “taxable event,” as is any crypto sum paid to you for some reason. Too bad you can’t pay your taxes with newsbits because these are gold.

The insurance industry has embraced IoT to the point that commercial insurance company Chubb has “billions of dollars of insured properties being protected by IoT-enabled sensors,” with thousands of devices in both commercial and personal properties.

Forbes Magazine describes the new Wiliot Pixel 2, a Bluetooth tag with multiple sensors that includes a way to harvest energy from radio waves. That means no batteries, and a predicted cost measured in pennies when it gets going.

How’s this for an interesting twist? Outlook India lists the “Top 10 Trusted IoT Development Companies in the USA 2022.” Sure, some of the companies have a global presence, but if you’ve been in the biz long enough, you remember all the concerns about outsourcing software to India, and now they’re outsourcing to the U.S.

Analytics Insight takes a quick look at the Internet of Robotic Things, or IoRT.

Semtech, the chipmaker making chips running LoRa networks, just added a satellite connection to its LoRa Edge LR1120 device-to-Edge chip. Multi-band goes global.

One interesting use of LoRaWAN? The group Volunteering Africa struggles to preserve rhinos from poachers and works with Abeeway and Actility to track IoT ankle monitors placed on animals across 25,000 hectares, or nearly 100 square miles.

Financial organizations behind Open Banking are looking at personal IoT devices, such as AI-powered vocal assistants Alexa and Google Assistant, as another way to judge creditworthiness. They’re also looking to IoT to support new authentication options like facial recognition.

Benzinga outlines some of the ways 5G now impacts consumer and other IoT device usage and innovation thanks to faster speeds over Wi-Fi 6 and the like. No mention of millimeter wave 5G installations, so the story focuses on current, not future, installations.

The Free Press Journal from Mumbai reports that Qualcomm captured 38% of the global IoT chipset business in the fourth quarter of 2021 to lead that market, followed by UNISOC and ASR.

Helium may have a low profile to many IT firms in the U.S., but the decentralized IoT network is gaining ground globally, with over 650,000 hotspots in over 47,000 cities in 164 countries.

We may assume that home health devices that report back to doctors are a growth area, but Parks Associates gives us the real numbers on connected health sensors and devices.

The Terabee People Counting M device uses 3D depth sensing rather than a camera to avoid privacy issues, yet still counts people with 95% or better accuracy. Those using the Daizy IoT platform will be happy to learn it now supports Terabee.

From our friends at Hackster.io:

You can build your own Smart Water Meter to track both water consumption and how much energy is used to heat that water for showers and baths.