- This blog runs on sponsorship — nothing is paywalled, but your monthly contributions keep things going, pay minor expenses and so on. $5 a month is the cost of a pint of beer — if you’d buy me a drink at least once a month for what this news blog gives you, please do sign up!
- In any case, enter your email address in the box under “Get blog posts by email” — and you’ll get each new post the moment it’s up.
Finally, Initiative Q gets its first proper mainstream press coverage! “Initiative Q: an elementary pyramid scheme with grandiose ideas” … oh. Meanwhile, Shocked Sockets gives $100% confirmed details on how to profit from Initiative Q, in five easy steps.
Why you can’t cash out, part Poloniex — the Poloniex exchange want you to sign a non-disclosure agreement before they’ll give you back your own money. Here’s the NDA.
How is Bisq going to make their “decentralised” cryptocurrency exchange really decentralised? They’re going to set up a DAO — a decentralised autonomous organisation, free of the taint of human control! In information security, the term for “immutable smart contract, immune to human interference” is “sitting duck for hackers,” as The DAO demonstrated in 2016. Chapter 10 of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain is an exhaustive writeup of why immutable smart contracts are a bad idea for pretty much every reason, and real-life smart contracts keep demonstrating this, over and over — so I look forward to someone draining Bisq shortly after it goes fully autonomous.
You’ll soon be able to send Lightning Network payments from inside an Excel plugin! And about half a second after that, we should see Excel macro viruses that steal money over the Lightning Network. Remember the ICO white paper with embedded macros that stole all your ether when you read it? Now that’s what I call a smart contract.
Bitcoin is so clunky to use on its own blockchain that a pile of crypto companies and exchanges want to trade it on the Ethereum blockchain instead — WBTC is an Ethereum ERC-20 token backed by Bitcoin, with BitGo as custodian. At least it makes a change from the flood of “stablecoins,” tokens backed by the US dollar — the most exciting news in cryptocurrency is … a bunch of coins that utterly rely on the existing financial system and the US dollar.
The Royal Mint was going to do a gold-backed cryptocurrency — but the UK Treasury said no. With a side order of “what on earth were you thinking.”
Digital Rights Management doesn’t work — so Sony will add a blockchain that doesn’t work either! Sony first filed patents on this in April this year — hopefully they’ve patented enough aspects of this stupid idea that others effectively can’t try it.
New research paper: Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump Schemes by Tao Li, Donghwa Shin and Baolian Wang — “We find that P&Ds lead to short-term cryptocurrency bubbles featuring dramatic increases in prices, volume, and volatility.”
“So it is no surprise that whenever ‘blockchain’ has been piloted in a traditional setting, it has either been thrown in the trash bin or turned into a private permissioned database that is nothing more than an Excel spreadsheet or a database with a misleading name.” Nouriel Roubini doesn’t like “blockchain” any more than he likes cryptocurrencies.
Let’s go to Wikimedia Commons for an encyclopedist’s opinion on Everipedia: “WAIT A MINUTE, 30 MILLION DOLLARS FOR THIS?”
Having a lot fun reading @davidgerard's 'Attack of the fifty food Blockchain' – in particular the conclusion to the segment on DogeCoin, which induced an audible chuckle. pic.twitter.com/fhdnYmq5AH
— J A Earley (@AlbyEarley) October 24, 2018
Follow David on twitter too. pic.twitter.com/y1WCoZkbJi
— Alex G Smith (@alexgsmith) October 25, 2018
Q: How many bitcoin miners does it take to change a light bulb?
A: 51% to replace it with a soft light bulb, 70% to replace it with a hard light bulb, and 0.1% to fork off a new light bulb.
— Jorge Stolfi (@JorgeStolfi) October 16, 2018
Imagine, if you will, a parenting moment that includes the thought, “My child needs to know more about blockchain!”. pic.twitter.com/FsKS1cz299
— Rachel Coldicutt (@rachelcoldicutt) October 17, 2018
Your subscriptions keep this site going. Sign up today!