News: SEC busts EtherDelta, SWIFT not using RippleNet, another Galt’s Gulch scam, Craig Wright claims to be Satoshi again

Well, this was an incredibly obvious thing that was going to happen — SEC Charges EtherDelta Founder With Operating an Unregistered Exchange. EtherDelta facilitated trade in ERC-20 tokens, many of which are almost certainly securities, in the period Zack Coburn owned it (November 2016 to December 2017). Here’s the admin order — Coburn has paid a $388,000 penalty and promised to be good and helpful henceforth. And here I was thinking it would be FinCEN who would nail him for not doing KYC …

The SEC says that plain-English guidance on ICOs is coming — evidently quite a few prospective ICO promoters did the sensible thing and gave them a call.

800% is an impressive-sounding risk factor for crypto assets! But it’s not amazing — in Switzerland, the Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) has told banks and dealers to assign crypto-assets a flat risk-weighting of 800 per cent. What this actually means is 800% of 8% — that if a bank buys cryptos, they can only pay 36% from debt, and the other 64% has to be equity capital — so cryptos are risky, but not 100% risky or 800% risky. The risk-weighting is to keep the banks stable It’s abstruse, but not very weird.

The Marshall Islands’ plan for a SOV cryptocurrency have prompted a no-confidence vote in the president, who was pushing the scheme.

In Bulgaria, creative Bitcoin entrepreneurial innovators fall afoul of tedious regulator oppression when evidence that they were taking bribes in bitcoins to issue Bulgarian passports is found on a permanent immutable ledger.

A new Forrester report says that the shine is off the world “blockchain,” that a “blockchain winter” for funding is coming — analogous to the AI winter of the 1980s, when the wheels came off that hype — and you should say “distributed ledger technology” instead. Which means it’s time to find yet another backup euphemism to attach the same fabulous promises to. And me telling you that just cost you a lot less than the $499 that Forrester is charging.

No, SWIFT will not be integrating with RippleNet, despite rumours spreading amongst XRP holders.

B2C2, a UK-based crypto firm, was doing multi-million dollar bitcoin deals in 2017. Then the bubble popped.

Bitfinex/Tether’s bank in the Bahamas, Deltec, has confirmed the Tether letter is authentic. Coincidentally, Deltec is having a spot of bother with US authorities over the proceeds of massive bribery.

Yet another Galt’s Gulch But On The Blockchain plan turns out to have been straight-up fraud — it turns out Morgan Rockcoons didn’t actually own the land he was selling for bitcoins (archive).

ICO scamception — ICO token Oyster PRL was exit-scammed by its founder, “Bruno Blocks” — who nobody has ever met — who took 3 million tokens via a deliberately-maintained back door in the smart contract code. How does this keep happening? Fortunately, the developers are on the case … by printing 27 million new tokens for themselves. By the way — one of the Oyster Pearl developers is also the technical guy on Woolf University.

A couple of unknown ERC-20 tokens that nobody’s trading, ODF and CKC by Omniscience Dedication Financial, were using 10% of the public Ethereum blockchain’s gas a couple of days ago.

There can only be 21 million forks of Bitcoin — so Bitcoin Cash is doing the full-history fork thing, and Poloniex is already trading futures on the tokens. Bitcoin ABC (the current software) is the hot favourite, and Bitcoin SV (“Satoshi’s Vision,” backed by Craig Wright) is not. But the really interesting bit about that story is that Coindesk has listed the journalist’s positions in cryptos at the end. 10/10 to Coindesk and Sam Ouimet, and let’s see this become standard in crypto journalism.

Further Bitcoin Cash excitement — Craig Wright is claiming to be Satoshi again.

 

 

How to hack an “unhackable” site whose incompetent programmer thinks he’s unhackable because he used a blockchain — but never learnt about cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.

EOS is not a blockchain, rather a distributed homogeneous database management system, a clear distinction in that their transactions are not cryptographically validated.” To be fair, this was sponsored by Consensys, so it’s actually “Ethereum dev shop funds study to say EOS sucks.” Still true, though.

Quartz: All the things I learned about cryptocurrency from Goop. There is not in fact a jade egg ICO yet.

Daniel Goldman has made a stablecoin tracker: Are We Stable Yet?

Vox quotes me on Initiative Q, and namechecks the book. And Tom Rodgers at Crypto News Review interviews Saar Wilf.

Paul Johnston did a “what is blockchain?” talk heavily based on my talks on the subject. Looks good! (The “Christian” bit is because it was to a Christian conference, the Premier Digital Conference.)

“you know, it’s never going to get less weird to see MPs and newspaper financial editors and BBC reporters holding up my weird robot drawing” — Alli Kirhham, cover artist for Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain.

 

 

 

 

 



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