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Crypto exchange hacks are incredibly rare, and only happen every month or so. This week’s are Bithumb and DragonEx — Bithumb was taken for $12.7m in EOS tokens on Friday, apparently by insiders, and DragonEx was hacked last Sunday for an as yet unknown amount, and some funds have been recovered.
LocalBitcoins adopts Know Your Customer rules, so as to meet new Finnish anti-money-laundering laws.
Anyone remember that time the @krakenfx CEO proposed exporting SF’s homeless to Texas? Like building a whole camp near “The Wall?” Man that was crazy. pic.twitter.com/P6g4aJ4McM
— Francis Jervis (@f_j_j_) March 25, 2019
More Quadriga fun from Amy Castor — one lawyer for Quadriga withdrew citing a conflict of interest because he also represents Gerald Cotten’s estate and Jennifer Robertson, WB21 has a track record of intimidating journalists and have rebranded to Black Banx, and Ernst & Young should be issuing their fourth Quadriga monitor’s report shortly. Amy’s also recorded a podcast with CoinSpice on the whole Quadriga mess.
This is Ernst & Young Canada’s page of documents from Quadriga’s CCAA — if you don’t read anything else, read the Third Report of the Monitor. It reads like an extremely annoyed forensic accountant bending over backwards not to straight-out call every single person involved in Quadriga a crook.
Bloomberg also comes straight out and says that Quadriga co-founder Michael Patryn is Omar Dhanani — “Patryn changed his name from Omar Dhanani to Omar Patryn with the British Columbia government in March 2003. Five years later, he registered a name change to Michael Patryn in the same Canadian province.”
Christine Duhaime, the financial crime lawyer who called in February for a government bailout of Quadriga’s creditors (archive) … finally reveals that she is one of said creditors, to the tune of over $100,000. And that she helped set up the legal structure of Quadriga, before Gerald Cotten turned the exchange into a one-man show.
In the wake of Quadriga, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) and the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIRO) have released a Proposed Framework for Crypto-Asset Trading Platforms as a consultation paper. They would like comments by 15 May 2019.
I found an early Bitcoin Magazine article from when #WB21 (now Black Banx) first started accepting Bitcoin deposits in June 2016 with the help of BitPay. I wonder how many bitcoiners never saw their bitcoin again? https://t.co/eQVtSMZxdG
— Amy Castor (@ahcastor) March 25, 2019
MetaMask in its default configuration reveals your Ethereum address to sites you visit. Metamask isn’t fixing this because it might break older dapps, though there will be an optional setting to switch it off.
Calvin Ayre says that Craig S. Wright “has started filing lawsuit against those falsely denying he is Satoshi”— no names or legal filings have yet emerged. “craig wright is not satoshi, in the exact same way that you or i are not satoshi” — Boxturret.
A failed ICO, Sponsy, is trying to flog itself on eBay. Their number one regret — “We hired a lawyer and that was a big mistake for us.” Everything about this is as good as you can imagine. How does Jemima Kelly find these things? Update: Why security tokens are categorically and absolutely not crypto tokens, if you just say so loud enough.
South China Morning Post has an excellent piece on the rise and fall of Bitmain, and how their way-too-late IPO failed.
Geoff Golberg’s quantified just how the XRP (Bot) Army works. Coverage in Trustnodes and news.bitcoin.com.
TRON, however, is completely on the level, and over half of its Twitter followers are actual humans, not bots! Probably.
The Australian real estate market is crashing, and agents are trying anything to keep from having to admit what the market prices are lately. It’s bad enough that one estate agent thinks that auctioning a house for Bitcoin, or maybe BinanceCoin, via blockchain payments startup NuYen, in early 2019 is a step up in terms of publicity — 1 Beech Lane, Casuarina NSW 2487, just south of Tweed Heads. The house appears to be a freshly-built 1970s-style spaceship. There’s a terrible video too.
Innisfil, Ontario will be accepting cryptos for property taxes in a one-year pilot project, via payment processor Coinberry. I wonder if anyone will use this.
Not even bits of Amazon accept cryptos — Twitch.TV just removed BitPay from its payment options. (I told my handy in-house Twitch streamer and she giggled.)
Everledger’s “blockchain” for provenance actually runs on Oracle — all nodes hosted on the Oracle Cloud “Oracle Blockchain” offering, all the work done in an Oracle database.
ANZ Bank goes full buttcoin on “blockchain,” cataloguing its extensive list of non-use cases. Bank of America’s CTO, Cathy Bessant, is similarly unimpressed.
the fact that databases are a thing that exists https://t.co/PIA7c0TtIe
— Buttcoin (@ButtCoin) March 31, 2019
Coinflict-Of-Interest will tell you whose tweets you can dismiss on the basis that they’re a shill for a coin that isn’t yours! I didn’t know that I was a Bitcoin Cash shill — in fact, I still don’t. “brb gonna make 10k twitter bots follow craig right and rodger ver and prove that they are biased in favour of each others bcash forks” — Boxturret.
Jackson Palmer’s done a good interview with Epicenter Blockchain Podcast, on the history of Dogecoin and the state of cryptocurrency in 2019 — well worth your hour.
The Bank of England’s Bank Underground blog writes on algorithmic stablecoins, and specifically Basis.
Martin Banov: Szabo’s Law, Crypto-Libertarianism, Techno-Utopias, & Decentralized Governance Part 1 — extensively referring to my work, particularly in Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain.
My Foreign Policy piece on how neo-Nazis lost big in Bitcoin has been translated for Newsweek Japan! (No, I don’t get paid again.) The Foreign Policy version also made their list of best weekend reads.
The 4chan /biz/ response to being called out as a crypto/Nazi crossover point was … “I did some reading Golumbia after his article was published here and was SHOCKED to learn that he was a Jew.” And “Our anti-semitism is far more nuanced and deeply rooted in reality.” Nice one, guys. You keep winning big on those altcoins. The main effect on my Twitter was lots of spam for Chainlink.
Blockchain Lord of the Rings, but instead the rag tag team of heroes who set out to destroy the ring gradually realize they *are* Sauron
— Sarah Friend (@isthisanart_) March 30, 2019
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