- The Venezuelan Petro, one of the more weirdly stupid cryptocurrency ideas of late, is apparently a Russian plot to weaken US sanctions in general. Or so Time thinks. Apparently, Russia didn’t want to risk destabilising the actual ruble with a cryptoruble, so they tried the experiment on their good friend Venezuela, who had nothing to lose.
- And President Trump has emphasised that even touching this Petro thing is a sanctions violation.
- Yep, there’s probably illegal pornography on the Bitcoin blockchain. From the research paper:
Illegal and Condemned Content. Bitcoin’s blockchain contains at least eight files with sexual content. While five files only show, describe, or link to mildly pornographic content, we consider the remaining three instances objectionable for almost all jurisdictions: Two of them are backups of link lists to child pornography, containing 274 links to websites, 142 of which refer to Tor hidden services. The remaining instance is an image depicting mild nudity of a young woman. In an online forum this image is claimed to show child pornography, albeit this claim cannot be verified (due to ethical concerns we refrain from providing a citation). Notably, two of the explicit images were only detected by our suspicious-transaction detector, i.e., they were not inserted via known services.
- Bitmex Research is pretty sure that Tether is indeed doing its banking in Puerto Rico. Was Nicholas Prouty right?
- Return of the Tether Printer! 300 million Tethers printed, each and every one presumably backed by a US dollar. Possibly held in Puerto Rico.
Just printed $300000000 USDT! https://t.co/BCgt3SmwG0 #USDT #Tether #Crypto
— Not Tether Backup Printer Go BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR (@eurtprinter) March 20, 2018
- Apparently the Mt. Gox bankruptcy trustee, Nobukai Kobayashi, did not liquidate the Bitcoins by selling them to an exchange — he sold them privately. It looks like it was that buyer that then dumped them. “Following consultation with cryptocurrency experts, I sold BTC and BCH, not by an ordinary sale through the BTC/BCH exchange, but in a manner that would avoid affecting the market price, while ensuring the security of the transaction to the extent possible.”
- First Facebook, then Google — now Twitter is banning crypto ads.
- Prosecution futures: according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA worked to “track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins” as of March 2013. They collected password information, internet activity and your network card’s MAC address.
- New York to upstate Bitcoin mining operations: get knotted — cities can charge a swingeing electricity tariff for local crypto miners. (Original document from the New York Public Service Commission.)
- Kodak’s Q4 2017 earnings call was on 15 March. Mentioned: KodakCoin. Not mentioned: Kodak KashMiner.
- CoinDesk on 8 March, believing everything it’s told by a company that’s about to run an ICO: Sierra Leone totally ran a blockchain-based election, guys! (Note original headline.) National Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone, 19 March: “The NEC has not used and is not using blockchain technology in any part of the electoral process.”
— National Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone (@NECsalone) March 19, 2018
- Scarlett Johansson’s Picture Got My Postgres Database to Start Mining Monero — a file containing both a JPEG image and an exploit binary, picked up by a database left open to the hostile Internet as a honeypot.
- What to do about accidents involving self-driving cars? “The solution we propose uses permissioned blockchain,” because of course it does. Also, it’s yet another proposal that everyone live in a total surveillance panopticon, but with blockchain.
- Why blockchain isn’t ready for primetime. Sometimes one has to patiently repeat what should be obvious.
- The Internet Society is not optimistic either. “Despite early excitement about their general security properties, on closer inspection we find that the original public blockchains are generally not a good fit for Identity and Access Management.”
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau complaints against Coinbase rise as the price goes down.
whuh whuh what do you mean "number go down" THIS IS AN OUTRAGE https://t.co/iDv1fLczgP
— Buttcoin (@ButtCoin) March 19, 2018
- For the first time in my life, I’m in the Daily Express. In the meantime, you should buy a signed paperback to go with your ebook:
Well, now @FredinatorCat is forewarned against falling for any TunaCoin™ scams. Thanks, @davidgerard! pic.twitter.com/iobUkijPYr
— Galen Charlton (@gmcharlt@mastodon.social) (@gmcharlt) March 16, 2018
Got my signed copy of @davidgerard's book. It's brilliant. pic.twitter.com/9kKg6FVgpw
— buhrmi the simp (@buhrmidayo) March 20, 2018
- And now, the weather.
Anyone who earnestly suggests "put medical records on a blockchain" deserves to be immediately and rapidly dropped into a tank of hungry piranhas without any trial or due process.
— Tom Morris 🏳️🌈 (@tommorris) March 20, 2018
Alex is going to get a shock when he walks out of Facebook and finds only abandoned ruins in the outside world, with the word “BLOCKCHAIN” carved into a nearby tree.
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) March 19, 2018
How To Earn 22 million BTC. Yup, 22, not a typo.
Actual conversation that happened. Be careful out there.https://t.co/v9jOdOQO14
— Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor) March 19, 2018
I just wish we would have had some more clear signals the top was close. pic.twitter.com/FfOoUDoexE
— Jebus.finance 👨🌾 (@jebus911) March 17, 2018
A thing I have been doing for fun lately is getting men to explain cryptocurrency to me and then being like “oh so it’s like Tulip Mania” and then explaining Tulip Mania to them until they regret ever talking about cryptocurrency to other humans in the first place
— Angela Serratore (@monodialogue) March 16, 2018
https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/973988660637876224
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If only Tumblr would ban crypto ads now.
OH GOD YES. Does anyone on Tumblr staff even take notice of the spam reports.
“Also, it’s yet another proposal that everyone live in a total surveillance panopticon, but on the blockchain.”
FTFY, guv.