News: IOTA cultists, Ethereum as security, exchange regulation and market manipulation, Wikipedia

- by David Gerard - 1 Comment
  • Crypto traders may not care about market manipulation … but governments do.
  • The Reserve Bank of India cracks down on crypto exchanges in a correct, thorough and effective manner. “India could be left behind in a crucial area of innovation.” Not in this one it won’t.
  • There’s also something odd going on with the Twitter accounts of Whalepool members. See also this link-laden Twitter thread.

 

 

  • IOTA got a long-form writeup in the Financial Times! Mostly about their fan base behaving like belligerent cultists, and documenting the long-running pattern of making threats against people saying anything negative about IOTA. Nicholas Weaver has been having lots of fun with them on his Twitter.
  • The mainstream coverage of IOTA’s abusive behaviour causes fallout — “UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies is no longer associated with the IOTA Foundation. In relation to recent news report, we reaffirm our support for open security research, as a prerequisite for understanding the assurances provided by any blockchain technology. It is inappropriate for security researchers to be subject to threats of legal action for disclosing their results.” (archive)
  • The IOTA article in Wikipedia got recreated and deleted repeatedly on Monday, to the point where it was salted against recreation — because IOTA cultists just couldn’t hold off from being themselves. “If you don’t know, IOTA is an underdog that has its knife lined up the the Kaisers heart; we have enemies.” um, OK. A draft version has been started, to be based on third-party Reliable Sources, and not entirely on IOTA blog entries.

 

 

  • The IOTA cultists — who make the Bitcoin maximalists seem mild — are not so good at this astroturfing thing:

 

 

 

 

  • New York Times cryptocurrency reporter Nathaniel Popper gets an ICO promoter asking him to be an advisor. He demurs. It turns out the ICO, urbit.io, has hijacked the name of another blockchain-ish project, urbit.org … which is most famous for being run by the founder of the Alt-Right strain known as neoreaction, Curtis Yarvin. Cryptocurrency as an overcooked lasagna of crooks, scammers and the occasional neo-Nazi.
  • Yarvin was one of the subjects of Elizabeth Sandifer’s Neoreaction a Basilisk (US, UK), the book immediately ancestral to mine! (Yes, the author is called Elizabeth now. You may congratulate her, and also buy her book. My name is in the first sentence.)

 

 

  • And now, the weather.

 

and the sequel, Blockchains of Dune by Don Tapscott and Kevin J. Anderson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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One Comment on “News: IOTA cultists, Ethereum as security, exchange regulation and market manipulation, Wikipedia”

  1. That Kraken blog post is a treasure trove:

    “We have greater transparency, fewer middle men, instant settlement, irreversible transfers, individual custody, atomic swaps, programmatically enforceable contracts, single assets traded on hundreds of exchanges. Because we have all these things, we have less systemic risk and many advantages over traditional markets.”

    yes, irreversible transfers are -definitely- a good thing to have when you want to avoid scams and fraud…

    Reply

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