News: SEC v. Kik, Poloniex CLAM disaster, Facebook GlobalCoin, ICOx’s Catholic coin, Lightning Network node profits

Stephen Palley, Collins Belton and Jason Gottlieb write up how they think an SEC v. Kik courtroom fight will play out. Also, here’s Andy Bromberg and Palley on Bloomberg TV — a video segment you should watch.

ShapeShift, Messari and Coinbase aren’t donating actual money or cryptos to DefendCrypto, you understand. “But they do support it ‘ideologically.'”

The Financial Times interviews Joshua Davis over DefundCrypto.

 

 

Crypto traders would bet on two flies crawling up a wall if they could tokenise the flies. Amy Castor writes up Poloniex’s recent CLAM flash crash margin disaster. “Any crypto exchange that socializes losses is begging for a lawsuit,” says David Silver, though Stephen Palley disagrees and thinks their terms of service will protect them.

“The FBI and partners are seeking to identify victims in the QuadrigaCX investigation. If you believe you may be a victim, or have concerns regarding your Quadriga account, complete this brief questionnaire here.

Mark Karpèles, formerly of the collapsed Mt Gox Bitcoin exchange, was reported to be working on a new crypto-related business in which to do nothing wrong. Karpèles says this was misreported, and it’s actually the small business he’s been running since 2016, Tristan Technologies — and it doesn’t even do blockchain.

 

 

Yet another attempt to steal cryptos via a compromised node.js package — “The attack was carried out by using a pattern that is becoming more and more popular; publishing a “useful” package (electron-native-notify) to npm, waiting until it was in use by the target, and then updating it to include a malicious payload.”

Cloud hosting service Digital Ocean had a widely publicised customer service foulup last week, where a customer was cut off entirely based on fraud heuristics. The problem turned out to be that crypto spammers mean we can’t have nice things. Procedures have been tweaked.

 

 

Microsoft has produced some automated tools to audit Solidity smart contracts. This is probably a good idea, given how relentlessly awful most Solidity code is.

After losing its smart contract lead, Digital Asset Holdings pivots to its smart contract language, DAML, as its main product.

Remember Ryan X. Charles of yours.org, who spent several months at Reddit trying to rewrite Bitcoin in JavaScript? He’s produced a video on Craig Wright’s ineffable genius. He also spends forty-four minutes dissecting Twitter response GIFs — the built-in ones that Twitter offers you as canned responses.

 

 

Facebook really does seem to be doing GlobalCoin as a cryptocurrency. They are planning a nonprofit foundation to run it. The network will start with 100 nodes, with node operators paying Facebook $10 million each for the privilege; the $1 billion will be used to back the coin. Facebook also plans to pay employees in GlobalCoin — even though paying wages in company scrip has been illegal in the US since 1938. I still don’t understand why this thing will be a crypto.

ICOx Innovations, hot off the massive* success** of KodakCoin, announces CathIO — a coin for Catholics! With a board of directors including ex-Senator Rick Santorum.
* no
** LOL, no

How good a business is running a Lightning Network node? LNBig provides 49.6% ($3.7 million in bitcoins) of the Lightning Network’s total channel liquidity funding — that just sits there, locked in the channels until they’re closed. They see 300 transactions a day, for total earnings on that $3.7 million of … $20 a month. They also spent $1000 in channel-opening fees.

Simon Liu has left Zcash — specifically, Zerocoin Electric Coin Company — and is suing them over “promised equity,” fraud and “constructive termination” of employment.

 

 

The Financial Stability Board warns that tokenised liquidity could be illusory — just making tokens for an illiquid asset doesn’t make them liquid. You might remember the 2008 financial crisis, where this sort of synthesised pretend-liquidity led to a spot of bother.

Voatz, the terrible voting-on-the-blockchain startup that runs endless pilot programmes and can’t scale up to running a primary, just got $7 million in Series A funding from venture capitalists.

I’m picturing Warren Buffett gritting his teeth and going “it’s for the kids … it’s for the kids” for an hour. You too can feel sorry for the third-richest man in the world.

 

 

I did a Bitcoin Car Talk! This is a scripted comedy piece, I may need a proper autocue. Apparently the only other guest to tweak their script was Richard Stallman.

 

 

Not only has my Initial Nocoin Offering been a startling success — I’ve sold it to US retail customers without the slightest issues with the fine public servants of the SEC.

 

https://twitter.com/gulovsen/status/1136730629964537861

 

 



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