- Only half of those who pay ransomware were able to get their data back.
- China is still sick of crypto’s garbage, and is blocking some overseas-registered crypto trading platforms on social media. (Original on Caixin in Chinese.)
- Japan’s Financial Services Agency has looked into how professionally run cryptocurrency exchanges are, recoiled in horror, and ordered two exchanges — Bitstation and FSHO — to stop doing business for a month. (This penalty is usually intended as a death sentence.) Five others, including Coincheck, have been instructed to improve internal controls and report back to the regulator.
- “There are two types of countries, just as there are two types of companies: ones that are doing well, and ones that are pivoting to blockchain.” Matt O’Brien on the Petro.
- Bureau of Meteorology staff in Australia misused a weather simulating supercomputer to mine cryptos.
- A security researcher finds 50,000 sites infected with cryptocurrency mining malware. At some point, CoinHive is going to have to do something about the bad actors.
- If you’re dumb enough to waste your money on ICOs, do take the time to check out the “team members” — here’s the ICO that claims Ryan Gosling as its graphic designer.
- ICOs just copying each other’s promotional materials is another popular way to save time getting to market.
- Pervasive irreversibility is the absolutely essential design parameter of cryptocurrencies, and is not actually bloody stupid and a recipe for making fat-fingering let alone thefts permanent and utterly unfixable, and … $500m of ether is stuck in the Ethereum genesis address.
- How blockchain hype works in practice — CoinDesk headline: Sierra Leone Secretly Holds First Blockchain-Powered Presidential Vote. Reality:
As this article was being completed, Agora, a Switzerland-based foundation, was in the process of manually counting the votes and logging them on a blockchain. “Voters complete their votes on paper ballots and then our team with impartial observers register them on the blockchain,” explained Lukasiewicz, who formally joined the foundation in January after first joining as an advisor.
- The UK will shortly be issuing its own cryptid-currency.
- Stephen Palley: “It’s a myth, often repeated, that a new widget is so advanced that laws don’t or shouldn’t apply to it. Virtual currencies like bitcoin are the latest ‘there’s no law!’ echo chamber. Coming as no surprise to lawyers who watch the space, there actually is.“
- Sylvain Ribes on how to spot when an exchange is running fake volume — if trading a large volume would send the price way up or down, well out of proportion to the volume for that trading pair compared to other exchanges. Also, real volume charts are not perfect sinusoids.
- Nouriel Roubini and Preston Byrne: The Blockchain Pipe Dream.
- How will “Enterprise Blockchain” change the way future enterprise applications are architected? Tom Morris gives a superlatively complete and correct answer to this question.
- Technollama: Is the blockchain hype over? “We should rebel against the creation of a system of immutable records where reality is irrelevant, and what matters is the truth as told by whoever entered the data into the blockchain.”
- Expert networks are great, and if you want some business-quality blockchain consulting they’re an excellent way to get hold of me for it. If they won’t listen to you patiently explaining why Blockchain™ is trash, maybe they’ll listen to someone they’ve paid a lot of money to listen to.
- I’m quoted in three recent articles! (All from extensive email exchanges, so they did their research.) Adrianne Jeffries’ great piece in The Verge on how “Blockchain” is meaningless (“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”), Ramona Pringle on CBC News regarding Blockchain and Jessica Binns in Sourcing Journal on blockchain’s lack of readiness for the enterprise.
- My book and David Golumbia’s The Politics of Bitcoin (US, UK) are reviewed (in Czech) on E15.cz.
- If you want to get Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain from a bookshop rather than Amazon, any bookshop in the UK can order it via Bertrams.
https://twitter.com/ashton/status/970676368005574658
Another killer ICO idea: Physical cryptocurrency tokens in the form of 2.6’x6.1’ green paper in various denominations; would be more fungible and anonymous than any current cryptocurrency.
— Ari Paul ⛓️ (@AriDavidPaul) March 5, 2018
i can confirm that favs are "crypto"
— wint (@dril) February 16, 2018
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