Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain

News: Tether sued, ether is a commodity, proof of work is still awful, IRS releases incomprehensible guidance

If you’re going to do crimes, don’t do them on a permanent immutable public ledger of all transactions.
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Facebook and Libra’s terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week — everybody’s left, Dave

“In a way it’s liberating” — David Marcus on almost all the payment companies leaving Libra.
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SEC blocks the Telegram ICO — what this means, and what happens now

Telegram’s whole scheme was to skin precisely the retail buyers who securities registration is meant to protect from being ripped off.
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Libra before Libra — the rise and fall of Facebook Credits

Libra wasn’t Facebook’s first foray into payment systems. A decade ago, it set up Facebook Credits — to cash in on pay-to-win games.
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News: EOS settles with SEC, PayPal dumps Libra, digitised gold, Coinbase triples fees, Bitcoin Foundation is dead

PayPal “remains supportive of Libra’s mission” — so that’s nice.
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The Gartner Hype Cycle is … hype. Don’t use it as an excuse.

Advocates of failed technologies grasp at the Gartner Hype Cycle because it tells them their success is inevitable.
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Video debate: “Bitcoin will become the world’s reserve currency” — with me and Vortex

The Trustory debate is now up on Periscope and YouTube!
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News: Bitcoin crashes despite Bakkt, Crypto Research Council, Libra, Tether stay, Kik shuts down Messenger, Craig Wright’s apparent plagiarism, CoinDesk shakeup

Watch me debate Bitcoin as a reserve currency tomorrow!
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UNICEF’s Innovation Fund slides from “blockchain” into cryptocurrencies

One piece of cryptocurrency transparency I’d really like to see from UNICEF — a full conflict-of-interest accounting of the crypto hodlings of everyone there promoting “blockchain.”
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News: Kleiman and Wright settling, Libra, Tether, Initial Sucker Offerings, enterprise “blockchains” as back-end datastores, Marshall Islands, Telegram TON software

Crypto in general is a complicated machine to funnel decreasing supplies of actual-money from retail suckers to about twenty guys.
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