- Beg cycle: if you enjoy my crypto journalism, it’s sustained by sponsorship. No paywall, Guardian model. $5/month — the price of a pint — and I’ll love you forever!
Financial regulators don’t like taking bad actors to court, ‘cos they might lose — they prefer admin orders, or, best of all, market participants behaving in a reputable manner. But sometimes, they have a really nice win. This ruling (archive) is against Patrick K. McDonnell and CabbageTech Corp., for running a boiler room investment scam grift. Apart from punishing a fraudster and putting similar fraudsters on notice, the ruling demonstrates that fraud and manipulation in crypto transactions really is in the CFTC’s jurisdiction, and they can bust you.
Two birds with one stone — close a coal power plant, lose bitcoin mining! And Tim Swanson tries to calculate: How much electricity is consumed by Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Monero?
NiceHash returns 60% of the bitcoins that were stolen in the hack! … now that they’re worth 70% less.
China now has a whistleblower tip line for reporting illegal crypto offerings.
The Huobi crypto exchange is trying to buy a public company, Pantronics Holdings, to get a Hong Kong stock exchange listing.
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance promotes openness, distributed systems and open source by … using private repositories to access specifications. And their “public” repos are dead, and what real work there is happens in private.
Indiegogo is the site for projects too scammy for Kickstarter. Its new business strategy — promoting incredibly dodgy altcoins.
In 2011, Buttcoin started Cosbycoin. In 2018, Bill Cosby is rumoured to be getting into Bitcoin. (May not quite be from a Wikipedia-quality Reliable Source.)
Event of the autumn — the Straits Times says that North Korea plans to hold an international conference on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies in Pyongyang in October, according to US-based Radio Free Asia. (Though I can’t find anything on RFA’s site.)
How good a coder is Craig S. Wright, the man who wasn’t quite Satoshi? He turns out not to be able to code “Hello, World” without copying it from StackExchange. Wonder how he’d do on FizzBuzz.
(Not crypto, but here’s how machine learning works: FizzBuzz in TensorFlow.)
High Scalability is a blog about scaling Internet services up, and not specifically about cryptos. But crypto people need to read: What do you believe now that you didn’t five years ago? Centralized wins. Decentralized loses. “Decentralized systems will continue to lose to centralized systems until there’s a driver requiring decentralization to deliver a clearly superior consumer experience. Unfortunately, that may not happen for quite some time.”
A history lesson from Cas Piancey — the MCI WorldCom fraud. The answer to “Why would any of these companies need to perpetrate fraud? They make tons of money!”
You need to watch this quick conference talk. I can’t refute a single claim.
Easily the best talk at CRYPTO. pic.twitter.com/8XYPcT3Ki4
— Jess Sorrell (@OptimistsInc) August 22, 2018
After my Decentraland adventure at the BBC, they also wrote it up as text for BBC News Mundo, and I was on BBC 5 Live Drive this evening to talk about it (2:39:58 on) — archive for non-UK readers.
https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1034279223366565888
Bitcoin is the only currency that fulfils the requirements of sound money:
✅ 95% owned by like 20 people
✅ each transaction costs over $100
✅ price manipulated by fake Tethers printed out of thin air
✅ no more than 7 tx/s
✅ all the network is controlled by 4 dudes in China.— Trolly McTrollface (@Tr0llyTr0llFace) August 28, 2018
https://twitter.com/iamjosephyoung/status/1033744847369191424
Lord give me the confidence of a crypto analyst who called $50k BTC this year and is still offering predictions.
— parker (@pt) August 24, 2018
Why do organisations adopt Blockchain?
CEO: Fashion
Board: 🐑
CIO: Fear of being found out
CTO: Their technical knowledge is years out of date
Tech Arch: For the CV
Devs: The fundamental inefficiencies of blockchain mean your code doesn’t need to be fast, good or even work— Mark O'Neill (@marxculture) August 25, 2018
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