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- Don’t forget the Intelligence Squared panel discussion, next Monday 2 July at 7:00pm at the Emmanuel Centre, London SW1P 3DW — Blockchain: Quantum leap forward or digital snake oil? The other speakers are blockchain academic Primavera De Filippi, author Jamie Bartlett and the founder of Liberland, Vít Jedlička. Moderator is BBC economics editor Kamal Ahmed. Tickets are still available — £30 full price, £15 student.
- The Justice Department targets darknet vendors by tracking particular bitcoins — and 35 innovative entrepreneurs are suddenly enlightened as to the true meaning of “prosecution futures.” When you spend bitcoins, you are spending marked bills.
- Oh no! The US Supreme Court just refused to hear Silk Road kingpin Ross Ulbricht’s final appeal. See chapter 4 of the book for the tale. Sorry for your Ross.
- Bloomberg nails down how incredibly obvious it is that Tether trading is utterly manipulated. None of this will be news to anyone following the Tether saga — Bitfinex’ed posted a video of Tether wash trading on Kraken in November — but it’s nice to see this making the papers, and in an utterly undeniable manner.
- You’ll be almost as shocked to hear that Bitfinex is having banking problems again, even for those customers large enough to deal in fiat — “In other situations, there is no bounce back or deposit, leaving users without a clear answer about what happened with their funds.”
- Scary news: oh no, a double-spend on Tether! What actually happened is that an (unnamed) exchange misconfigured their Tether software — so some transactions were marked “valid” when they weren’t. The consequence is that the exchange thought they had more tethers than they did, and incorrectly credited their customer with tethers. Tether runs as OmniLayer tokens on top of Bitcoin — much as ERC-20 ICO tokens run on top of Ethereum — and Omni is designed so you can’t double-spend the tokens without double-spending the underlying bitcoins. See responses from the Omni developers — “if the transaction is marked as valid and omnicore shows the expected balance, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.”
- Vice: What you need to know about Tether, the cryptocurrency accused of propping up Bitcoin — with a quote from me.
- Expedia stops taking Bitcoin as of 10 June — Bitcoiners finally notice 27 June.
- If you want to watch Bitcoin sinks slowly in the west, GDAX is now Coinbase Pro. I favour this exchange because it’s one of the few that exchanges directly to actual dollars. You can view the BTC/USD pair here.
It's mathematically impossible for Bitcoin to go under 5600. There are no numbers under that.
— Buttcoin (@ButtCoin) June 29, 2018
- Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong has started a crypto charity, GiveCrypto — and if recipients start using cryptos for actual economic activity, all the better, they consider. Armstrong asks you, and whales especially, to please donate. It’s a tax-deductible 501(c)3, via their fiscal sponsor the Pledge Group.
- /r/bitcoin attempts to use the ⚡Lightning Network⚡ — the future of payments! It doesn’t work so well. “Alas, I can only receive $5 via that channel once I’ve spent $5. :(“
the lightning network is in a constant quantum superposition between having existed for ages every time someone criticises bitcoin's transaction rate, and not being released yet every time someone tries to use it
— Buttcoin (@ButtCoin) June 29, 2018
What I love about Bitcoin: the people who love it most have already abandoned it in their hearts, and spend their days fantasizing about a totally new currency network that’s nothing like it.
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) June 27, 2018
- BattBump gets a write-up in Heise Online from Torsten Kleinz: Smartphone-Akkus per NFC laden: Aus für skurrile BattBump-Kampagne — with a quote from me.
- The advertising industry wasn’t so impressed with Hdac’s incomprehensible Bitcoin fan fiction either — Turkey of the week: Hdac scores own goal with weird blockchain spot.
I've spent the last few weeks trying to understand how blockchain could help solve the quagmire that's supply chain management.
I've discovered that the #1 reason why people believe blockchain and supply chain management go together is that they both have "chain" in their name.— Trolly McTrollface (@Tr0llyTr0llFace) June 29, 2018
Look, I get that everything looks like a nail when you're selling the hammers. But maybe, just maybe, people don't want this because it's just not how people want to interact with their money and transactions, and they probably have a point there.
— Chris Armstrong (@DrCDArmstrong) June 29, 2018
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