The crypto thread

What do you prefer?

  • Bitcoin

    Votes: 3 9.7%
  • Ethereum

    Votes: 6 19.4%
  • Binance Coin

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Cardano

    Votes: 1 3.2%
  • Fiat

    Votes: 6 19.4%
  • Go away, I deal in coke and gold bars

    Votes: 14 45.2%
  • Privacy coins

    Votes: 1 3.2%

  • Total voters
    31
  • Poll closed .
We have had years to regret not buying bitcoin when it was a penny, now we can regret not shorting it:

ProShares, the issuer of exchange-traded funds with around $65 billion under management, has launched the first short Bitcoin exchange-traded product in the US, offering a way for investors to make money from the ongoing crypto-currency meltdown.
Dubbed the ProShares Short Bitcoin Strategy, the funds are set to launch on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BITI. Bitcoin declined to $17,601.58 [I am not convinced] over the weekend, according to Coin Metrics. It has lost 70 percent of its value since last November's highs.​
 
It is not a good thing when anyone gets scammed, especially when it ends so badly and the scammers are clearly worse than the victims, but there is a certain humour in the nutty QAnon stuff being used for scamming:

Research firm Logically published an investigation into two QAnon influencers who successfully convinced their followers to put more than $2 million into crypto scams. Telling their followers that they could predict the success of cryptocurrencies because of access to "secret military intelligence", they capitalized on QAnon conspiracy theories to defraud their followers through various schemes. The influencers made claims including that they had personal connections with Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and John F. Kennedy, Jr. (who died in 1999, despite some QAnon theories), or that "aliens want us to trade cryptocurrency 'as an on-ramp to familiarize ourselves with the quantum financial system until we can evolve into 5D and trade assets with our consciousness'".

According to Logically, the "vast majority" of people following the influencers' investment advice "lost anywhere between several hundred and tens of thousands of dollars".
Spoiler Trigger warning: as bad as it can get from scams :
One man lost more than $100,000, resulting in him also losing his house and construction business. The man ultimately died by suicide.
 
Bitcoin and other cryptos have two applications I considered good:
- Direct conversion from energy to money. Let's say you built a solar farm. If you want to sell the energy, you either sell it to the government or convert it into bitcoin then selling it. The first option gonna be rough: tax, corruption, dependent on policy,... The second option has drawback of extreme crypto market fluctuation. Building solar, if I know it right, is a tool to decrease the variance of investments.
- Easy transaction of capital into oversea regions.
People buying crypto as investment should consider to go to asylum since:
- It does not create any industrial value.
- The value it represents should be proportional to economic growth. They should forget about any kind of halving since the amount of miners left cryptos is something real.
- If investing in crypto, one would be better if owning above 2 million USD. Then put it into a hedge fund.

Stupid humans trying to hunt other humans being hunted by hedge funds.
In my opinion, hedge fund presence in crypto market is generally good since it allows people to transact money via crypto(keep the volume of crypto market high, they are the market makers).
I also think someone should adjust the "halving" process of crypto to something resembling the economic growth more.
Or just simply remove "halving".

w28967.pdf (nber.org)
Someone might try to use the framework above to evaluate the cryptomarket?

One man lost more than $100,000, resulting in him also losing his house and construction business. The man ultimately died by suicide.
People suiciding because of financial problems aren't in their right mind. Imagine:
- Kidney worth around 262k USD.
- Paying 100k USD for debt, have 162k left but losing life expectancy
- If they move to a third-world country and start dollar cost average the financial markets and use the dividend to survive.
- They probably can't buy a house where I live(a third-world country city) with 162k, but they just need to buy a house in the countryside which is 20x cheaper.

Extreme situations require extreme measures anyway. Think a little bit rational then people can see the value of time, 80 years = a multiplier of 100 anyway, average hedge fund return is 13.7% so it might be a multiplier of 28895.
Nowadays, there's a dangerous trend of romanticizing depression and suicide. People should be aware of how precious their body is, by just summing their organ cost, which is a lower bound since human are equipped with a highly advanced intelligence.
 
It is not a good thing when anyone gets scammed, especially when it ends so badly and the scammers are clearly worse than the victims, but there is a certain humour in the nutty QAnon stuff being used for scamming:

Research firm Logically published an investigation into two QAnon influencers who successfully convinced their followers to put more than $2 million into crypto scams. Telling their followers that they could predict the success of cryptocurrencies because of access to "secret military intelligence", they capitalized on QAnon conspiracy theories to defraud their followers through various schemes. The influencers made claims including that they had personal connections with Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and John F. Kennedy, Jr. (who died in 1999, despite some QAnon theories), or that "aliens want us to trade cryptocurrency 'as an on-ramp to familiarize ourselves with the quantum financial system until we can evolve into 5D and trade assets with our consciousness'".

According to Logically, the "vast majority" of people following the influencers' investment advice "lost anywhere between several hundred and tens of thousands of dollars".
Spoiler Trigger warning: as bad as it can get from scams :
One man lost more than $100,000, resulting in him also losing his house and construction business. The man ultimately died by suicide.
Liked @ 1st thought it was funny but had to unlike cuz of spoiler. Pretty sad actually. The qanon stuff is a proper mental illness.
 
Bitcoin and other cryptos have two applications I considered good:
- Direct conversion from energy to money. Let's say you built a solar farm. If you want to sell the energy, you either sell it to the government or convert it into bitcoin then selling it. The first option gonna be rough: tax, corruption, dependent on policy,... The second option has drawback of extreme crypto market fluctuation. Building solar, if I know it right, is a tool to decrease the variance of investments.

This may be beneficial to the person doing it, but it is it is not beneficial to society, when that electricity could have been supplied to the grid and used for something useful.
 
I thought it was a really useful insight! There is always alternative use for energy, but renewable energy is use it or lose it and we constantly export products in orders get income, regardless of the actual utility of the export.

An economy requires a lot more infrastructure to make good use of energy resources than might be available. And they will need an income in order to develop those infrastructure.

Like imagine the ideal scenario, an entrepreneur uses crypto income in order to build local renewable energy. They then spend their profits locally, stimulating the economy, and then when the value of crypto drops that infrastructure is still available to supply local output. The counterfactual is that the renewables weren't made, because the society couldn't profit enough to justify them.

If we view crypto like Rob is suggesting, similar to a Beanie Baby, the country that is wasting energy to produce beanie babies for export is doing it for the income. And the buyer is buying for the delight of ownership more than anything else . The supplier benefiting from the income from that export and they are benefiting from the infrastructure development to generate those exports.

I have seriously considered mining crypto in the winter, since I already use electrical heat in some parts of my house. This seems to be a variant on that.

I had never considered that it was a way of exporting energy resources in exchange for money.
 
This may be beneficial to the person doing it, but it is it is not beneficial to society, when that electricity could have been supplied to the grid and used for something useful.
Let's think that you are minting coins for foreign exchange tool.
I'm against crypto overall since it doesn't follow my speculation on it.
I have seriously considered mining crypto in the winter, since I already use electrical heat in some parts of my house.
Imagine someone mine crypto whenever they got public energy source and exchange immediately into fiat.
 
Politicians do not get github shocker

After announcing their crypto-friendly proposed legislation earlier in June, Senators Lummis and Gillibrand have uploaded it to Github to solicit feedback, as was apparently widely requested of them by crypto advocates.
As one might expect, apparently-unmoderated open comments from some of the most online people out there has been off to a chaotic start. The first comment on the proposal, by a user with a Pepe the Frog avatar, is titled "Taxation is theft!" and reads, "Why should we pay any taxes to a corrupt government that prints money out of thin air and gives it away for free! Eliminate the FED!!! BITCOIN FOREVER!"

Another comment thread begins, "Feds are not looking post floppa" and accumulated over 100 replies containing photos of caracals within half an hour.

A different person submitted a pull request replacing the entire text of the bill with "cryptocurrencies are banned lmao".
Just looking at the first few lines of the RFIA:

echo "# RFIA-bill" >> README.md
git init
git add README.md
git commit -m "first commit"​

Yeah, they have copied the instructions they give you when you first set up a project (though got it wrong, should not the init be before the initial creation of the file?) into the main document of the project for reasons

*Section-by-Section Overview: https://www.lummis.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Lummis-Gillibrand-Section-by-Section-Final.pdf*

 

A bill to provide for responsible financial innovation and to bring digital assets within the regulatory perimeter.
What format do they think they are using that you need 3 lines between lines of text, and one of those lines has a non-breaking space? I have on occasions used   in webpages to get the formatting right, but it was a bodge when I did it, let alone some of the most important and well funded people in the world. Seriously, these are supposed to be the pro-crypto politicians, if they understand computers so little as to put this into the public domain then seriously we are $%£*&*.

More issue titles:
  • bill does not address lack of dinosaur genital models caused by unregulated crypto market #90
  • This bill will make peepeepoopoo coin obsolete #77
  • Limit on slurp juices per ape #63
  • All my doom wads gone #45
  • Bill does not contain the term "yeet" #43
  • Can We Add A Rider To Revalue The Iraqi Dinar? #33
  • This bill is missing a provision to jail all crypto businesspeople, scammers, and cult leaders #30
The main project has this image attached. I do not understand it, but I do not think it is complimentary.
Spoiler Image saying something :
 
Just looking at the first few lines of the RFIA:

echo "# RFIA-bill" >> README.md
git init
git add README.md
git commit -m "first commit"​

Yeah, they have copied the instructions they give you when you first set up a project (though got it wrong, should not the init be before the initial creation of the file?) into the main document of the project for reasons

The order of git init and the creation of the file does not matter. Until you do a git add, git will ignore the file, anyway (except for printing messages that the file is untracked on git status)
 
Coinbase really getting on the idea that crypto is independent of government

COINBASE, THE LARGEST cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, is selling Immigrations and Customs Enforcement a suite of features used to track and identify cryptocurrency users, according to contract documents shared with The Intercept.

A new contract document obtained by Jack Poulson, director of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, and shared with The Intercept, shows ICE now has access to a variety of forensic features provided through Coinbase Tracer, the company’s intelligence-gathering tool (formerly known as Coinbase Analytics).

The contract also provides, provocatively, “Historical geo tracking data,” though it’s unclear what exactly this data consists of or from where it’s sourced. An email released through the FOIA request shows that Coinbase didn’t require ICE to agree to an End User License Agreement, standard legalese that imposes limits on what a customer can do with software.

Coinbase has in recent years made a concerted effort to pitch its intelligence features to government agencies, including the IRS, Secret Service, and Drug Enforcement Administration. Earlier this month, Coinbase vice president of global intelligence John Kothanek testified before a congressional panel that his company was eager to aid the cause of Homeland Security.

The Coinbase Tracer tool itself was birthed in controversy. In 2019, Motherboard reported that Neutrino, a blockchain-analysis firm the company acquired in order to create Coinbase Tracer, “was founded by three former employees of Hacking Team, a controversial Italian surveillance vendor that was caught several times selling spyware to governments with dubious human rights records, such as Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan.”​
 
The contract also provides, provocatively, “Historical geo tracking data,” though it’s unclear what exactly this data consists of or from where it’s sourced.​

Is this not just geotracking data from the website and the app? I am not sure why they think the origin is "unclear". Is it really not clear that many websites will try to track you?
 
Bitcoin and other cryptos have two applications I considered good:
- Direct conversion from energy to money. Let's say you built a solar farm. If you want to sell the energy, you either sell it to the government or convert it into bitcoin then selling it. The first option gonna be rough: tax, corruption, dependent on policy,... The second option has drawback of extreme crypto market fluctuation. Building solar, if I know it right, is a tool to decrease the variance of investments.
I would definitely categorize that as interesting before good.

But its incentivize investment into its infrastructure is roughly good in a general industry growth perspective. From power to graphics cards..

But it's also bad because we had enough cards for video games, and enough motive to improve them, without building out volume for coin minting.
 
Is this not just geotracking data from the website and the app? I am not sure why they think the origin is "unclear". Is it really not clear that many websites will try to track you?
I suppose they mean "They are not explicitly saying they are giving LE complete unfettered programmatic access to their logs, but they probably are".
 
A short-term pulse of demand side stimulus into a specific industry will necessarily cause waste. But, it also will cause an increase in Supply that can then be retasked once the demand ends.

For awhile there, Americans were directly subsidizing the Chinese high-tech industry. Now, I'm sure that all of those individual entrepreneurs in China ended up not coming out ahead. But that's the nature of investment. The trickle through benefits on their economy is probably real.

I had noticed that while I was noticing that the Tik Tok generation was helping build a surveillance state dictatorship. But the stimulus for energy infrastructure had just never occurred to me. It will have been a net loss, because of all the fossil fuel that was cranked up, but the real world is messy
 
It is all fraud:

Ruja Ignatova, also known as the "missing Cryptoqueen", has been placed on the FBI's top ten most wanted list.

https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/world/2022-07-01-missing-cryptoqueen-joins-fbi-ten-most-wanted/

The Bulgarian woman is wanted for her alleged role in running a cryptocurrency scam known as OneCoin.

Federal investigators accuse the fugitive of using the scheme to defraud victims out of more than $4bn (£3.2bn).

She has been missing since 2017 - when US officials signed a warrant for her arrest and investigators began closing in on her.

Ms Ignatova is wanted for her role in running OneCoin, a self-described cryptocurrency that beginning in around 2014 offered buyers commission if they sold the currency on to more people.

But FBI agents say OneCoin was worthless and was never safeguarded by the blockchain technology used by other cryptocurrencies.

According to allegations made by federal prosecutors, it was essentially a Ponzi scheme disguised as a cryptocurrency.

"She timed her scheme perfectly, capitalising on the frenzied speculation of the early days of cryptocurrency," said Damian Williams, Manhattan's top federal prosecutor.

She was also smart enough to plan an escape route!
 
W3C push through web3 crypto identifier tech when both Google and Mozilla think it is a bad idea

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has rejected Google's and Mozilla's objections to the Decentralized Identifiers (DID) proposal, clearing the way for the DID specification to be published a W3C Recommendation next month.

The DID specification describes a way to deploy a globally unique identifier without a centralized authority (eg, Apple for Sign in with Apple) as a verifying entity.

"They are designed to enable individuals and organizations to generate their own identifiers using systems they trust," the specification explains. "These new identifiers enable entities to prove control over them by authenticating using cryptographic proofs such as digital signatures."

The goal for DIDs is to have: no central issuing agency; an identifier that persists independent of any specific organization; the ability to cryptographically prove control of an identifier; and the ability to fetch metadata about the identifier.

These identifiers can refer to people, organizations, documents, or other data.

DIDs conform to the URI schema: did:example:123456789abcdefghi. Here "did" represents the scheme, "example" represents the DID method, and "123456789abcdefghi" represents the DID method-specific identifier.

What Google and Mozilla object to is that the DID method is left undefined, so there's no way to evaluate how DIDs will function nor determine how interoperation will be handled.

"DID-core is only useful with the use of 'DID methods', which need their own specifications," Google argued. "... It's impossible to review the impact of the core DID specification on the web without concurrently reviewing the methods it's going to be used with."

However, there is a point of centralization: the W3C DID Working Group, which has been assigned to handle dispute resolution over DID method specs that violate any of the eight registration process policies.

Mozilla argues the specification is fundamentally broken and should not be advanced to a W3C Recommendation.

"The DID architectural approach appears to encourage divergence rather than convergence & interoperability," wrote Tantek Çelik, web standards lead at Mozilla, in a mailing list post last year. "The presence of 50+ entries in the registry, without any actual interoperability, seems to imply that there are greater incentives to introduce a new method, than to attempt to interoperate with any one of a number of growing existing methods."

Google and Mozilla also raised other objections during debates about the spec last year. As recounted in a mailing list discussion by Manu Sporny, co-founder and CEO of Digital Bazaar, Google representatives felt the spec needed to address DID methods that violate ethical or privacy norms by, for example, allowing pervasive tracking.

Both companies also objected to the environmental harm of blockchains.

"We (W3C) can no longer take a wait-and-see or neutral position on technologies with egregious energy use," Çelik said. "We must instead firmly oppose such proof-of-work technologies including to the best of our ability blocking them from being incorporated or enabled (even optionally) by any specifications we develop."​
 
The problem with technology solutions looking for a problem is that they often create problems to justify their existence.
 
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