News: Financial Times, UK Parliament, SEC, Overstock, GDPR, France, Kleiman vs Wright, Lightning Network, IOTA

  • The Financial Times event on Tuesday was great fun. Alex Batlin and me up front, with Kadhim Shubber and Hannah Murphy from FT asking our thoughts on various topics related to cryptocurrency, ICOs, investing and blockchain (or Blockchain™). Nearly a full room too, a hundred audience members. Sadly there isn’t a recording up — though I think they got one — and I forgot to bring either books to sell or even business cards. Talked to lots of people afterwards, though. Boy did you miss out.

 

 

  • The SEC is finally sick of your ICO rubbish. Eighty or more subpoenas so far — and not just to the companies, but to their advisors and lawyers. Everyone told you this was coming.
  • One of those was Overstock.com, concerning its tØ securities trading blockchain ICO. In an 8-K filed today, they disclosed that in February, the SEC had requested “certain documents related to the Offering and the Tokens in connection with its investigation.” Their stock proceeded to drop 10%.
  • In France, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers has announced that it considers “the offer of cryptocurrency derivatives requires authorisation and that it is prohibited to advertise such offer via electronic means” — that cryptos are covered by MiFID II. “The AMF concludes that a cash-settled cryptocurrency contract may qualify as a derivative, irrespective of the legal qualification of a cryptocurrency.” As well as no more online ads, crypto businesses will have to meet much higher standards of conduct and reporting.
  • The estate of Dave Kleiman, the guy who Craig Wright claimed was involved with him inventing Bitcoin, is suing Wright for ripping Kleiman off. All those documents that Wright produced to support his claim? Dave’s brother Ira Kleiman has taken them seriously. Sadly, WizSec have noted that none of the claims hold up — “Neither Wright nor Kleiman owned any of the bitcoins claimed in the lawsuit.” Still, the font bit, claim 79 in the Kleiman estate’s complaint, was particularly awesome:

 

 

  • Rick Falkvinge: “In this video, I present new data showing that the Lightning Network does not work at all as a real-time decentralized payment routing network, as every single transaction invalidates the global routing table.” LN never did solve the path-finding problem — how to reliably find a path from random user A to random user B, so they can exchange money. Advocates, and indeed the original white paper, claim that if BGP, the routing protocol for the Internet, works, then LN could work. This comparison is frankly inane, as BGP relies entirely on trustworthy actors, and when someone misbehaves — e.g., that time when Pakistan, trying to censor YouTube locally, accidentally took over all routes to YouTube — it’s solved by the telecoms’ network engineers rapidly getting together to kick the offender out of the network until they stop doing that. I’m pretty sure that’s the polar opposite of the cryptocurrency value proposition. If you know even a bit about how networking works, the fun bit is from 10:00. (Contains salty language.)

 

 

  • Cynthia Lee has made a browser extension for Chrome that replaces the word “blockchain” with “multiple copies of a giant excel spreadsheet.”

 

https://twitter.com/cynthiablee/status/969112616827170816

 

  • uMatrix is from Raymond Hill, the author of uBlock Origin, the best ad blocker for web browsers. It’s a sophisticated personal web filter, like uBO but much more powerful. I like his choice of example web page.

 

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/gilesgoatboy/status/967900942036189184

 



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3 Comments on “News: Financial Times, UK Parliament, SEC, Overstock, GDPR, France, Kleiman vs Wright, Lightning Network, IOTA”

  1. If Cryptocurrency transactions fall under MIFID II – directly, or as derivatives – then rumours of trading activity intended to mislead or distort the marketplace must automatically be investigated.

  2. Those who push for bitcoin hype should be prohibited to go to court: they invented their “smart contracts” and claim how those “smart contracts” are superior to that old corruptible court system, so they should resolve their issues using those contracts

  3. For the discerning connoisseur of paid for articles and crypto projects being launched in a second language – ‘Unicorn’ really does take Crypto BS to levels you never thought possible.

    “The bad order of bitcoin mining has provoked many miners, while the system itself cannot address this crux. The Unicorn has many possibilities to address these pain points, because it is born to eliminate the data fabrications by exploiting smart contracts technology to imbed certain advertisements into the Unicorn so as to exterminate the fabricated data and furnish a better evaluation of advertisement results.”

    https://coinidol.com/uincorn-make-beautiful-breakthroughs-ethereum-cannot/

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