News: me at Financial Times, SEC vs ICOs, Russia vs ICOs, ICO buyers vs ICOs, crypto scammers on Twitter, IOTA replay attacks, Stolfi vs NIST

• On Tuesday evening, 27 February 2018, I’m speaking at the Financial Times’ event Bitcoin after the bubble: is the crypto revolution here to stay? “Now the peak of the mania has passed, join us to discuss what’s next for bitcoin, blockchain and the crypto revolution with David Gerard, author of the ‘Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain’, Alex Batlin, founder and CEO of Trustology, and previously head of emerging business and technology and global blockchain lead at BNY Mellon, and Hannah Murphy, our FT reporter in London covering crypto.” Looks like there’s still tickets available. I’ll be fighting my way uphill through the snow to be there!

• SEC to ICO promoters: “Look, guys, could you please slow down with this garbage? Thanks.”

• Russia to ICO promoters: “You call tokens currencies and not securities? Fine, currencies they will be.” Promoters will be required to redeem tokens for cash for five years. And have 100m rubles in assets (about $1.7m) on hand before they start. (HT Ciaran Murray)

• It’s not just the SEC that ICO promoters need to worry about — buyers can sue privately to get their money back. Including personal liability for the promoters.

• Twitter Allowed Cryptocurrency Scammers To Hijack Verified Accounts To Take People’s Money. The scammers didn’t actually hijack the real account — they created a new account and got that verified fraudulently.

• IOTA is susceptible to replay attacks, and they’re not going to fix it. Fortunately, this doesn’t matter, because nobody actually uses the network and the price goes up when the network’s not working.

• Greek MEP Eva Kaili, who put forward that absolutely garbage EU motion advocating blockchains, turns out to be an ICO advisor, for Bankera. So is Lithuanian MEP Antanas Guoga. There’s a register where you can check MEPs’ financial interests! You have to go physically to Brussels or Strasbourg to look it up. Looking into this possible conflict of interest further …

 

 

• NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory has published Draft Report 8202: “Blockchain Technology Overview.” It has … a number of deficiencies. Jorge Stolfi has duly ripped it to pieces.

• Michael Seemann: “Why do all blockchain technologies remain in the project phase and none of them finds a market? The answer is that Blockchain is more an ideology than a technology. Blockchain is the libertarian utopia of a society without institutions. If we do not share the libertarian basic assumption that people should mistrust institutions, the blockchain is just the most inefficient database in the world.”

 

so blockchain hasn’t come up with any meaningful technology yet but here are thwelveteen super interesting v̶a̶p̶o̶r̶w̶a̶r̶e̶ technologies that will solve evereything and make blockchain eventually work. just wait until they are actually developed!!11 https://t.co/AUk8C3kJNh

— Michael Seemann (@mspro_en) February 22, 2018

 

• I question one premise of this Guardian article — that blockchains are in fact good, let alone revolutionary — but I thoroughly approve of the first six words and the site they link to.

 

https://twitter.com/stevelord/status/966974973268152321