News: Financial Times, UK Parliament, SEC, Overstock, GDPR, France, Kleiman vs Wright, Lightning Network, IOTA

• The Financial Times event on Tuesday was great fun. Alex Batlin and me up front, with Kadhim Shubber and Hannah Murphy from FT asking our thoughts on various topics related to cryptocurrency, ICOs, investing and blockchain (or Blockchain™). Nearly a full room too, a hundred audience members. Sadly there isn’t a recording up — though I think they got one — and I forgot to bring either books to sell or even business cards. Talked to lots of people afterwards, though. Boy did you miss out.

 

Bitcoin After the Bubble #FTengage @FT — fun to attend with a dozen @UMich students in London! pic.twitter.com/XwmORHd1iw

— Danny Sheridan (@captaindanny10) February 27, 2018

 

• UK Parliament has launched an inquiry into digital currencies. Looks like I’ve got some work to be getting on with, and you do too.

• The SEC is finally sick of your ICO rubbish. Eighty or more subpoenas so far — and not just to the companies, but to their advisors and lawyers. Everyone told you this was coming.

• One of those was Overstock.com, concerning its tØ securities trading blockchain ICO. In an 8-K filed today, they disclosed that in February, the SEC had requested “certain documents related to the Offering and the Tokens in connection with its investigation.” Their stock proceeded to drop 10%.

• Over in Europe, it’s the General Data Protection Regulation you’ll need to look out for — personally-identifiable data is almost certainly incompatible with an immutable blockchain.

• In France, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers has announced that it considers “the offer of cryptocurrency derivatives requires authorisation and that it is prohibited to advertise such offer via electronic means” — that cryptos are covered by MiFID II. “The AMF concludes that a cash-settled cryptocurrency contract may qualify as a derivative, irrespective of the legal qualification of a cryptocurrency.” As well as no more online ads, crypto businesses will have to meet much higher standards of conduct and reporting.

• The estate of Dave Kleiman, the guy who Craig Wright claimed was involved with him inventing Bitcoin, is suing Wright for ripping Kleiman off. All those documents that Wright produced to support his claim? Dave’s brother Ira Kleiman has taken them seriously. Sadly, WizSec have noted that none of the claims hold up — “Neither Wright nor Kleiman owned any of the bitcoins claimed in the lawsuit.” Still, the font bit, claim 79 in the Kleiman estate’s complaint, was particularly awesome:

 

The $10 Billion lawsuit against Craig Wright claims Wright used a computer-generated font called Otto to forge Dave Kleiman's signature and acquire hundreds of thousands of bitcoins. pic.twitter.com/vFA6uowMZa

— Kyle Torpey (@kyletorpey) February 26, 2018

 

• Rick Falkvinge: “In this video, I present new data showing that the Lightning Network does not work at all as a real-time decentralized payment routing network, as every single transaction invalidates the global routing table.” LN never did solve the path-finding problem — how to reliably find a path from random user A to random user B, so they can exchange money. Advocates, and indeed the original white paper, claim that if BGP, the routing protocol for the Internet, works, then LN could work. This comparison is frankly inane, as BGP relies entirely on trustworthy actors, and when someone misbehaves — e.g., that time when Pakistan, trying to censor YouTube locally, accidentally took over all routes to YouTube — it’s solved by the telecoms’ network engineers rapidly getting together to kick the offender out of the network until they stop doing that. I’m pretty sure that’s the polar opposite of the cryptocurrency value proposition. If you know even a bit about how networking works, the fun bit is from 10:00. (Contains salty language.)

 

 

• IOTA: The Brave Little Toaster That Couldn’t: a summary of the numerous technical, social, and ethical problems surrounding the IOTA project, The IOTA Foundation, and the IOTA developers.

• Cynthia Lee has made a browser extension for Chrome that replaces the word “blockchain” with “multiple copies of a giant excel spreadsheet.”

 

https://twitter.com/cynthiablee/status/969112616827170816

 

• m1rko at Geektimes.ru has translated my “Why you can’t cash out” series into Russian.

• uMatrix is from Raymond Hill, the author of uBlock Origin, the best ad blocker for web browsers. It’s a sophisticated personal web filter, like uBO but much more powerful. I like his choice of example web page.

• Blog reviews of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain I didn’t spot at the time: Clive Tong, Maxie Duncan, Roger Burton-West.

 

"Computers yelling Numberwang at each other" is my absolute favourite description of blockchain.

— Justin Warren ⬡ (@jpwarren) February 28, 2018

 

@davidgerard hmmm seems reputable pic.twitter.com/7hoESKZSDO

— Tired Bitterman (@tiredtechpriest) February 27, 2018

 

“Hey,
I've reached out a couple times, but I haven't heard back.
I'd appreciate a response to my email”

Tip – if I’ve ignored five emails about your ICO I may not be interested:

— Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) February 26, 2018

 

Everybody knows that the moon's receding
Everybody knows that the rocket stalled
Everybody got this sinking feeling
Like their home mortgage just got called
Everybody's mining as their new gig
Everybody wants a brand new rig
And a few burritos
Everybody knows

— Buttcoin (@ButtCoin) February 27, 2018

 

https://twitter.com/gilesgoatboy/status/967900942036189184