Ernst & Young wants to move hearings in the Quadriga bankruptcy from Nova Scotia to Toronto (archive), because two of the legal entities requesting documents from them in the case are based there — the RCMP and the Ontario Securities Commission. “The Trustee expects that it would be more cost-effective for future motions to be heard by a court in Toronto, eliminating the need for a significant number of professionals to incur costs to travel from Toronto to Halifax.” EY have also been contacted by government agencies based in Nova Scotia and British Columbia, and the FBI in the US has been sniffing around.
The largest crypto exchange in Thailand, BX.in.th, is closing on September 30 (archive). They haven’t said why — but apparently the SEC Thailand hasn’t given them a Digital Asset Exchange licence for 2020. Scammers are already putting up fake cashing-out pages.
Tethers as ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain are so popular that they’re flooding Ethereum with transactions, and clogging the blockchain — “Yesterday I had to wait 1 and half hours for a standard transfer to go through.” Ethereum is the World Computer, as long as you don’t try to use it for any sort of real application. Another 100 million tethers were also printed today.
March 4th, Tether announces support for Tron. Price goes from $0.21 -> $0.15
May 31st, Tether announces it will be on EOS. Price goes from $8 -> $3.
July 17th, Tether announces it will be on ALGO. Price goes from $0.70 -> $0.38. pic.twitter.com/ZlLRoon8V0
— CasPiancey (@CasPiancey) September 2, 2019
The SEC has charged Dallas company Bitqyck and its founders Bruce Bise and Sam Mendez with defrauding investors in the Bitqy and BitqyM token ICO, with a total penalty of over $10 million.
I wonder which ICO promoter it was who spoke loudly on the phone about pumping his token price, on an Amtrak train in hearing range of SEC commissioner Jay Clayton — which Clayton says is the moment he realised that cryptos “needed to be aggressively policed under the securities laws.”
I am told KodakOne have finally advanced to the stage of sending out copyright-trolling emails — demanding 300 euros to quickly settle an alleged violation. I’ve asked my correspondent (who is in the UK) for more details, as they feel comfortable providing.
had a conversation with a friend yesterday — they have a cool project (banking related), solid working MVP, experienced team, invested close to 1 mill of own funds — crypto VCs all want tokens; non-crypto leery of crypto.
— Palley (@stephendpalley) August 28, 2019
Telegram has told its investors that its plans to issue the Gram token, and have it available in Telegram Messenger, are proceeding according to the timetable — despite my and others’ doubts that they’d have regulatory concerns sorted out properly in time.
A public testnet for the Telegram Open Network was supposed to be up yesterday, 1 September, with code available. Smart contracts on TON will be Ethereum-compatible.
The secondary market in pre-purchase options for Grams proceeds — despite the investors knowing perfectly well that the sales agreement explicitly forbids this before the Grams are issued.
“What did you find on that derelict in deep space?”
“The end of human civilization.”
“Oh, a monster beyond mortal comprehension?”
“Worse… a blockchain.”
“Did… did you have your computer airgapped?”
“The Whitepaper did not decree an airgap.”
“… Oh no.”— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) August 28, 2019
Breathlessly optimistic crypto media reports of an official People’s Bank of China stablecoin have been dismissed by Global Times, an English-language newspaper owned by the People’s Daily, as “inaccurate speculation.” Tencent News says the same.
Silicon Valley venture capitalists Andreesen Horowitz — who have quite a few crypto investments — have been meeting with the SEC and CFTC to try to get crypto regulation loosened, though neither agency is persuaded as yet.
Facebook has also retained Washington, DC lobbying consultants FS Vector for support on “issues related to blockchain policy” — i.e., getting some form of Libra approved. FS vector bill themselves as a “Regulatory Compliance, Public Policy, and Business Strategy Advisory Firm Helping Fintech, Regtech, Financial Institutions.”
Bitcoin ATMs in Nevada now require a state money transmitter’s license.
Things the crypto community was and will be reading:
2015-2016: Dumb internet arguments on forks
2017-2018: Whitepapers
2019: Court proceedings
2020: Draft bills before Congress
— Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor) August 27, 2019
Be your own bank! What’s the worst that could happen? Well, Indian crypto scammer Abdul Shakoor was tortured to death for his private keys by five of his own associates after he told them he’d been hacked and lost their share of the takings.
Overstock’s blockchain ambitions may survive Patrick Byrne’s departure — the interim CEO, Jonathan Johnson, says he’s already “Drunk on Bitcoin’s Kool-Aid.”
Craig Wright is granted a two-week extension of time to challenge Judge Reinhart’s order against him in the Kleiman case, because of … hurricane Dorian!
A quarter of Lightning Network channels have closed since March 2019 — from 36,200 to 28,000. Reddit comment: “And that is what basically no one talks about. In practice, the LN channels are uni-directional. From small players like myself to large players like gatecoin, bitstamp, etc. There is no channel capacity on the receiving side. Only sending.”
The trouble with insuring against ransomware is that doing so makes you … a target for ransomware.
Despite all the hype, it looks like you still can’t buy a Venezuelan Petro. There’s one purported trading pair, against BTC on YoBit — and it’s not clear any actual Petros are present on the exchange.
Alex Moskovi chronicles his attempt to synchronise a full Ethereum node, running Geth. Cost is $210/month on Digital Ocean — “Intel Xeon CPU E5-2650L v3 @ 1.80GHz and SSD w/o NVMe, i.e standard DO droplet and volume” — and he expects it to take about three weeks. Note that this is not a full archival node. (He notes he could have done it on Hetzner for about $45/month.)
“DEPRESSION: ‘I can’t wait until you quit crypto so I get my Dad back’” is a headline on a Bitcoin news site.
The finest rant about Bitcoin that you will read today. “BitCoin still defends itself from all criticism with the bald statement that it is early days and nobody can know how the system will adapt. That is total hogwash. We know how the system will adapt because we have been watching for ten years — it won’t adapt at all.” Posted to the Cryptography and Cryptography Policy list in response to spam for a Bitcoin fork — the list that Satoshi announced Bitcoin to in 2008.
https://twitter.com/karbonbased/status/1166894990699745281
https://twitter.com/gulovsen/status/1167113931992850433
FFS…
When I hear someone say "blockchain will fix…", I get suspicious. When I hear someone argue blockchain will fix elections, I think you're a stooge. https://t.co/Gpht3Ivwti
— Tim Boerger (@timboerger) August 28, 2019
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