LocalBitcoins has just quietly removed in-person cash trades — so much for the “business deals in parking lots” market. Users are presently working around this by selecting “Cash deposit” as a trading method, and adding a note that handing cash over is what they mean. That’ll fox ’em for sure.
Coinbase users can finally spend cryptos using a Visa card! Izabella Kaminska doesn’t expect it to last long — unless Coinbase tighten up their KYC remarkably. Tighter.
Chainalysis tells a seminar that 64% of ransomware attackers cash out on exchanges. They didn’t reveal who the exchanges were.
In one of those amazing coincidences that just keeps happening with questionable Bitcoin exchanges, Cryptopia was “hacked” on the same day that the death of Gerald Cotten from QuadrigaCX was announced. (Amy Castor’s first piece for Decrypt — click early and often!) There’s more on Cryptopia in Amy’s newsletter.
Amy and I did a podcast with Sasha Hodder of the HODLCast on the collapse of Quadriga. It came out great, you should listen!
Bitcoin seasteaders: When your sovereign nation gets towed.
Number go up, down and sideways! Never mind the fact that almost nobody actually uses Bitcoin — it’s just something to speculate on.
When I call Bitcoin an apocalyptic death cult, this (archive) is the sort of thing I mean:
I think $100,000 transaction fee is not impossible in a far distant future. It is also not unreasonable to believe that over 50% of all world electricity will be used to mine those transactions. Those transactions may trustlessly secure 100,000,000$ payments for 100,000 people. https://t.co/qhRGsKKKZa
— Frλ͎ncis ☩⚔ (bullbitcoin.com) (@francispouliot_) May 28, 2019
Civil — the failed ICO for journalism on the blockchain — has lost its banking. Before it can get a non-Delaware bank, it apparently needs to get around to doing its 2017 taxes.
The Block on what it’s like getting banking for a crypto firm in Europe. More good news, as Bitcoin is progressively freed from the lead weight of the legacy system! Barclays apparently have this one guy who helps compliance risks “slip through.” I’m sure the bank will be delighted.
From the Australian banks inquiry — I will concede that crooks in regular finance can be every bit as hilariously dumb as crooks in crypto.
https://twitter.com/coinyeezy/status/1133854850813444096
Another resignation from Digital Asset Holdings, this time of a senior product manager for DLT/Smart Contracts. I wonder how the Australian Securities Exchange blockchain thing is going?
Bundesbank and Deutsche Boerse try settlements on the blockchain. You’ll be amazed to hear that it was slower and more expensive. “Despite numerous tests of blockchain-based prototypes, a real breakthrough in application is missing so far.” But at least it “in principle fulfilled all basic regulatory features for financial transactions.”
Jaguar is not putting IOTA into its cars. “The press release was allegedly motivated by a last-ditch effort to draw some sort of value (a.k.a. temporary buzz) out of an otherwise failed investment.”
Telegram releases a test client for its planned TON Blockchain — the one those $1.7 billion of GRAM tokens will be released on. Hopefully before October 2019.
Wirecard is a German fintech. It’s partnering with Telegram for TON and its GRAM tokens. Wirecard also tried to get the Financial Times into legal trouble for daring to report on questionable contracts. It turns out Wirecard has likely been an important payment processor for online scams. Shares dropped sharply on the report.
EOS has launched a social media platform: Voice. “The chief mechanic Larimer showed off was one in which users could stake Voice tokens to move to the top of a chain of comments. If someone else staked tokens to go above them, the first user would get their tokens back and then some.” This appears to be in the vein of other EOS innovations such as Everipedia — in which micropayment incentives resulted in a flood of bot spam. They bought the domain voice.com from analytics company MicroStrategy, who’d left it parked for six years.
https://twitter.com/ThomasAFink/status/1132074667873832960
The US commodity derivatives regulator, the CFTC, is in the “early stages of conversations” with Facebook over its planned Facebook GlobalCoin. I still don’t understand why on earth this is going to be something where questions relevant to the CFTC even come up.
Kik — and the crypto venture capitalists whose bags of Kik tokens are this heavy — have decided they’re not going to take this “it’s a security” rubbish from the SEC! No, they’ve set up something called “Defend Crypto” to take on the regulator and … force it not to take them to court and swing nearly a century’s precedent at them? Anyway, send them your cryptos. That’s the main message of the page.
We will draw a discreet veil over the
(Preston Byrne would just like to remind everyone that he told you so, in 2014.)
Joshua Davis has created the vastly superior Defund Crypto, at a mere 0.0004% of the cost — and you can see every penny of that $20, right there on the page.
Degenerate Gambler: Let me tell you about sound money.
— CasPiancey (@CasPiancey) May 31, 2019
Wei Liu of crypto market research firm Coinsummer, and former COO of Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool, has registered a US copyright in the Bitcoin white paper. Craig Wright says this is actually good news for Craig Wright.
CoinTelegraph also got a quote from me on the Wright copyright claim.
Ben from Decrypt wrote up the trials and tribulations of the Craig Wright page on Wikipedia. Nice to get the chance to do my Wikipedia media guy thing again.
Cryptovideo isn't meant to be watched, it's a store of film.
— Cristian Rocca 🌐 (@free_shilling) June 3, 2019
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