News: The crypto price crashes further, Tether, nodejs/NPM coin-stealing exploit, North Korea blockchain conference

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Dan McCrum at FT Alphaville thinks the crash is not investors giving up and selling out — but just a lack of interested buyers.

“What follows is a morality tale for the modern age. It stars me, an idiot, and may produce strong feelings of schadenfreude in you, hopefully not an idiot. Ready? Let us begin.” Only a fool would have bought into bitcoin late last year. So guess what I did?

24 November 2018, around 2110 UTC — someone gets squeezed.

 

Another 50 million Tethers went out yesterday. This got the Bitcoin price from $3800 to … just over $4000. For a few hours.

So what do you do with 98-cent dollars? This guy bought 5 million Tethers. Then he sent them over to Bitfinex to withdraw actual dollars … then he discovered the 3% withdrawal fee. Bitfinex has also increased the minimum wire fee from $20 to $60. May I refer Sir to Why You Can’t Cash Out pt 3.

Let’s just be clear that the US criminal probe into crypto market manipulation is totally focusing on Tether.

 

https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/1064596329282904065

 

If you run nodejs, you use packages from npm. The very popular package event-stream had some exploit code snuck into it, targeting Bitpay’s Dash Copay wallets. “It’s basically crawling your dependencies for a peer dependency on the package copay-dash, and it’s an attack basically crafted towards this package. If your overall application has both this malicious package and ‘copay-dash’, then it’s going to try stealing the bitcoins stored in it.” Thomas Claburn has a full writeup at the Register.

KodakOne/KodakCoin seems to be having trouble paying its developers.

US plans to sabotage North Korea by getting them interested in blockchain. This is the Pyongyang Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference that was first talked about in August this year.

The Financial Conduct Authority in the UK has looked into 50 cryptocurrency-related firms this year, including seven whistleblower reports. More fraud is expected to emerge with the price crash.

I’m sure this will work out well: Crimea to Set Up Blockchain University to Help Countries Evade US Sanctions.” Original in Russian — “allows creating investment platforms through which foreign investors can work in sanctioned countries anonymously for everyone.”

Bitcoin Cash wars — Calvin Ayre on why Bitcoin SV won morally against Bitcoin ABC, even if ABC won in terms of, you know, tawdry real-life facts on the ground.

Deloitte Blockchain Chief: “look, could you please stop spooking my prospective suckers with your ‘bad news’.”

Overstock.com is selling its retail side, and Patrick Byrne is going full crypto. The stock price was up 26% on the news. tZero still isn’t actually up and running yet, by the way.

Remember those murders-for-hire that Ross Ulbricht totally didn’t commission? They just caught one of the guys he totally didn’t commission to murder someone.

David Birch on why blockchain won’t fix your data or business relationships — “much of the wishful thinking projected onto the blockchain is really nothing about consensus or immutability but, as in so many other cases, really all about interoperability.”

Wired: This is how politicians should regulate the blockchain — with quotes from me on why legislative carve-outs for particular data formats are a dumb and bad idea, and particularly GDPR carve-outs.

Hey, I think I found out why Bitcoin crashed! WARNING: this is goatse for the ears.

 

 

Here’s a text summary of my podcast with Crypto 101.

 

 

 

 

 



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