US investors have seen about $1.7 billion — of actual money — in realized Bitcoin losses. And there’s an additional $5.7 billion in unrealized losses — that is, hodling has cost them $5.7b.
I’m just shocked to hear that Tron’s $1 Million dapp contest looks like it was just a price pumping scheme.
I’m sure your funds are $100% safe in (checks notes) Cryptopia, the exchange that never saw a [engage euphemism substitutor] minor altcoin it didn’t like. Thread from Larry Cermak.
QuadrigaCX’s CEO and founder died in India in December — and the exchange only announced this highly material fact this week. Meanwhile, users still can’t reliably get actual money out.
“Starting in October, a large number of holders who hadn’t touched their Bitcoins for between six months and more than 2½ years began moving their coins.” Some of this is exchange wallets being shuffled … but not all of it.
The Lightning Network proves its superiority as a cryptocurrency facility — by thoroughly centralising right out the gate. One entity runs 20 nodes (0.7% of total nodes), with 64% of the network’s capacity.
Developers Point Out Flaw in Lightning Network’s Cross-Chain Functionality — you can arbitrage if you delay settlement on one chain that’s paying off differently to another chain. This was known early on in Lightning Network development, but advocates still talk up this angle. I love that the fix is … a trusted third party! Much like crypto in general, the Lightning Network will only work when it’s finally evolved into an inefficient, unreliable copy of the correspondent banking system.
A tragic tale of kidnapping, murder, and Bitcoin — it turns out yet again that doing crimes on a permanent immutable public ledger is still not the brightest idea.
“And one day, Bitcoin will become big oil, and all who dabble in it will be reborn as enemies of the environmental movement, seen as plunderers of the planet and the bad guys in the fight against climate change — just like oil.”
In November, CoinCenter — a Bitcoin lobbyist group who actively sought out economists to tell the world that Proof-of-Work was good and not reprehensible, actually — put out a paper: The Bitcoin Mining Network – Trends, Marginal Creation Cost, Electricity Consumption & Sources — with some remarkable claims about how good Proof-of-Work was, actually. Maximilian Fiege has written a comprehensive rebuttal: Bitcoin Doesn’t Incentivize Green Energy. Here’s the Tweetstorm version, if you want a summary. I still get bozos tweeting the CoinCenter report at me claiming “Bitcoin mining uses green energy!” and I have to tweet back “yes, they displace the previous users to coal, for a net increase in carbon.” Which I already covered in my post from May last year.
https://twitter.com/fiege_max/status/1082681545905688576
Tether presently accounts for 5% of daily Bitcoin transactions.
Amy Castor wrote up a timeline of Tether for Bitcoin Magazine last year — she’s now updated it for her new crypto news blog, and will be adding more to it. Contribute details!
Did I mention you should subscribe to Amy Castor’s new blockchain blog? You totally need to.
BitMEX Research: Tracking US$24 billion Of Tokens ICO Teams Gave Themselves. How the “print your own private money” scam works.
I’m told by one of the implementors of an early version that the blockchain bit of the HSBC “FX Everywhere” puffery doing the rounds is absolutely minimal — it’s pretty much just a Merkle tree ledger bolted on the side. The phrase “blockchain technology” is what utter weasels say when they can’t even claim their thing is actually a blockchain.
“So only 5/10 countries where Binance wants to start trading fiat are literally listed as top 20 tax havens.”
Ben Munster at Decrypt Media has updated his KodakOne article with further confusion — and is gaining added insight into how my coverage ended up being a year-long series.
Chris Zappone, The Age: Cryptocurrency is radical — but who does the radicalism benefit? With extensive quotes from David Golumbia and his book The Politics of Bitcoin (US, UK).
Academic paper on blockchain in music by Nancy Baym, Lana Swartz and Andrea Alarcon: Convening Technologies: Blockchain and the Music Industry in the International Journal of Communication — quotes me, so it must be brilliant.
At coffeeshop. This dude is pitching VR on the blockchain to an investor who is trying not to laugh.
They just got into burn/projections, investor cant keep laugh in anymore. He just asked dude if this pitch is a joke. Dude is now angry.
OMG. stop having these mtgs in public.
— Alex Marshall (@grlalx) January 17, 2019
https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/1085661065663340544
“I’m not a money launderer, I just do everything money launderers do.” https://t.co/nNtG3GwnvC
— Trolly McTrollface (@Tr0llyTr0llFace) January 13, 2019
Yes. pic.twitter.com/Ck8Kl35Q6J
— Nick Stenning (@nickstenning) January 13, 2019
Crypto is a tax on libertarians the same way lottery is a tax on the poor.
— Trolly McTrollface (@Tr0llyTr0llFace) January 11, 2019
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