Boxturret posted:

what's worse: twittering or going on to news websites and reading the comments on the articles

quote:

A former employee says when Tron was pilloried on a popular Reddit thread, Tron paid the moderator, “perogies,” to allow the company to erase negative posts. A former employee said perogies was actually “a hardcore-loving-Redditor to the bone, all about free speech.” Free speech is part of the ideology of decentralization, where ideas flow without gatekeepers. Tron started deleting any post it wanted. Bristling, perogies threatened to reveal his payments publicly. The Beijing office took over, the former employee said, “and he disappeared into the loving night, never heard from him again.”

quote:

Even though Sun went to extremes to control Tron’s public image, his own app store, called the Tron Network, was a free-for-all. Users purchased some apps with Tron’s cryptocurrency, and the company sometimes took a sliver of the app’s revenue. The most successful were gambling apps, employees told me, and Tron preferred to “squash” any app by imitating it. Sun eventually built an office in Shenzhen, China, where programmers worked on copycats. Meanwhile, questionable developers gathered on the Tron Network like ants to sugar. “We didn’t know who they were. We had zero way of contacting them. So these people would get on our blockchain and scam. Scam all day, 24/7. It never ended,” a former employee said. Complaints streamed in, like, “Hey, I just lost my life savings!” A former employee recalled Sun and the senior Beijing employees ignoring the scam warnings during weekly meetings and sometimes mocking English-only employees’ ideas in Mandarin, before telling the interpreter, “Don’t translate that.”

Scammed users tried to fight back. Letters from the Better Business Bureau arrived in Tron’s San Francisco office one month. “They were coming in quite frequently,” said a former employee, “like, piles building up.”

NearlyNearly everyone I talked to said the cornerstone of Sun’s business wasn’t necessarily technology, but using marketing to extract money from users. In a meeting, Sun once compared the marketing team’s objectives to the business of a “whorehouse.” With the failure of the Tesla stunt, the answer, to Sun, was to pursue a bigger, even flashier stunt: be the highest bidders at a charity auction for lunch with Warren Buffett.

“He thrived on just doing anything for attention and clout,” a former employee says. “Clout-chasing, as the kids call it.”

Sun won the auction, costing him $4.57 million — roughly the value of 130 Teslas. When the marketing department asked Sun how high he was willing to bid, Sun replied, “I don’t care, I want to win it regardless.” There was no cap. “It’s hard to get him to pay a bill but it’s easy to get him to spend money.”

The media hype was considerable. But as a CNBC interviewer pointed out to Sun, Buffett had “compared Bitcoin to gambling in Las Vegas” and said cryptocurrency was “rat poison squared.” Sun gamely laughed and insisted that one of the world’s most successful investors didn’t have the right sources of information.

A week later, Tron’s Twitter account announced the lunch was postponed because Sun had kidney stones. The next day, Chinese newspapers published stories that Sun was not only suspected of illegal fundraising, gambling, and money laundering, but supposedly detained by Chinese authorities in Beijing.

Employees told me what actually transpired. The Chinese authorities had been calling Sun for weeks, “essentially saying, you can’t have this lunch,” a former employee says, because Buffett was a “capitalist pig symbol.” Things boiled over when Sun invited Trump. It was apparently intolerable for a Chinese citizen to lunch with the US president during the trade war. The Chinese government kept calling Sun, “and he had been essentially ignoring them,” a former employee says.

The authorities targeted Tron. In Beijing, “they raided the office and took six top employees.” They even found Sun’s estranged father in whichever province he was living and detained him, too. Their phones were confiscated, and they were told Justin Sun was under investigation for corruption. One of the detained employees was so scared she began crying. Six hours later, the authorities returned and said, “Here’s your phones back if somebody wanted to call Justin and mention that maybe you shouldn’t have this lunch with Trump.” Their final message: “You can’t mention this to the press.”

Tron convened an emergency “war council,” and they allegedly advised him to concoct a medical excuse to get out of lunch with Buffett. Kidney stones were the result. The stories emerging in the Chinese press were also false. “China decided they were going to get even with him in the state newspaper,” a former employee recalled, “basically saying that he was a crook.”

Sun gathered the company for an all-hands. He sauntered in, laughing. “Now I understand why they say fake news, right?” he said, assuring the workforce the stories were untrue. “My jaw just hit the floor,” an employee said. Only hours before, they were told Sun had kidney stones, yet here he was, in perfectly good health. “It’s like a whole company full of people standing there being lied to.”

The lunch was postponed indefinitely. A day later, Sun made a long and strange post to his millions of followers on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter. “I didn’t sleep all night yesterday, and deeply reflected on my memories and was introspective of my behavior and words — I felt ashamed for my over-marketing,” he said, according to a translation. Sun called Chinese regulators “elders” to whom he would “open my heart” and heralded “the rapid development of socialism with Chinese characteristics in our country’s new era.” He closed with a promise: “I will repair my shortcomings, reduce my vocalizations on Weibo, shut the door and decline visitors, reduce the media interviews” in the name of “national interests.”

It was the most uncharacteristic apology Justin Sun had ever posted. He deleted it shortly after.

unpacked robinhood posted:

Gobbeldygook posted:

https://twitter.com/JennaMC_Laugh/status/1349784715193180160?s=19

this is good for bitcoin because it shows that you can't use it to fund an assault on a foreign country's capital without getting caught

blugu64 posted:

so a buddy of mine is talking up Helium, any effort posts I can read about it?

it sounds like a wireless gateway that anyone can pay to use, and therefore access my home network, which lol

SporkOfTruth posted:

anyone got a definitive takedown of why proof of stake is still loving stupid? I have too many friends morphing into bazingas over this poo poo

Muscle Tracer posted:

*tiktok filter voice* sTaBlEcOiN

Shame Boy posted:

would be kind of an interesting experiment to just like, make a completely transparent ponzi scheme where everyone can see all the variables and fully understand how it works and that beyond a certain point it's going to implode, then see how long it keeps going before it implodes and where that psychological break-even point is

not with actual money or anything of real value though that'd suck. maybe imaginary videogame hats or something?

Cthulhooo posted:

I present you the Hellcoin (HELL). What is Hellcoin you may ask? Well the idea is extremely simple yet innovative. It’s a reverse Ponzi scheme. It rewards latecomers (instead of early investors and founder like in regular Ponzi schemes) and does not collapse from unsustainable growth but instead snowballs into an ever growing black hole indefinitely. It’s like a chicken game on the blockchain. Don’t believe me? Here are the parameters:
The founder stars by depositing crypto in a smart contract. Let’s say he starts by depositing $100 worth of ETH into HELL. This is the initial prize. New investors can start to put their money in now. After new investor puts their money in the timer is set to 72 hours. If no one puts any new money in that timeframe the last 100 contributors (not counting founder) get all the money from the contract proportionally to their contribution. In theory it takes one daring guy to put a single cent (minimal contribution) to get the whole 100 bucks for free. Of course if the system has any money in it there will always be another smartass that will put 1 cent too just to get a part of that cake. If someone new enters the timer is reset again to 72 hours. So in this example we have 2 smartasses who paid 1 cent to get about 50 bucks or more specifically 100.02/2 so 50 dollars and 1 cent. Nice gains. Obviously more will follow (share this on /biz/ and you will have as many “investors” as ponzicoin easily).
Nothing stops you from putting more than 1 cent of course. Like 1 dollar or 10 dollars. You will always be rewarded accordingly for your contribution counting the total pool provided by the last 100 investors. You can compete with others. You can also outsmart them and create 100 orders for 1 cent. Of course other investors may try the same strategy as well. Timer resets every time new money enters the game. Fun times.

KnifeWrench posted:

and also git crimed!

ultrafilter posted:

https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1426926626395332610

https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1426928188874280962

EorayMel posted:

Has anybody made a communismcoin yet

Powerful Two-Hander posted:

first day back in the office and I got in an argument about cryptocurrency with a colleague, in this case about the "helium network", my argument was that if you're standing up a sensor network then someone has to be paying you real money, so money is going in somewhere, and if if each node is not processing 'blocks' to issue tokens or whatever then you have a central authority doing it, so this is not 'an exciting use case made possible by cryptocurrency', it's a mesh network with a central authority that you pay to use.

then we ran out of booze and stopped but I also said that his description of it ( "people are issued tokens for providing the network service to others which is intrinsic value") was a pyramid scheme unless at some point somebody was paying real money to use whatever it did

also I had to laugh at the idea that it was somehow cheaper/better to deploy a chain of sensors on the blockchain to build a network wide enough to "put a sensor in a remote location" vs just sticking in a GSM enabled one where you actually want it

Tokit posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ2qBlrW9vw

drk posted:

I dont know what it is I find so unsettling about this guy, but lol @ him convincing forbes he has a net worth between Rupert Murdoch and Laurene Powell Jobs (yes, that Jobs).

Protos posted:

Over two-thirds of all Tether minted across multiple years went to just two crypto companies — Alameda Research and Cumberland Global

gschmidl posted:

ponzi buddy

Shame Boy posted:

anyway we went out to dinner tonight and in the parking lot there was a car that had a screen across the back window that just alternated showing an astronaut and the words BUY SHIBA TOKEN CRYPTOCURRENCY

DerekSmartymans posted:

I posted last year about how I had a bit of anxiety about this. People with honest to God real amounts of money can manipulate poo poo. Even the “essential” poo poo. It wouldn’t even have to cost a lot of money: The NSA, Microsoft, and Amazon server farms could decide to grab a 51% mining share with their server farms and change everything, including the balances of every exchange and personal wallet. And the infrastructure is already there and paid for… no capital needed except someone to write the software. And there is nothing anyone could do to stop it. It wouldn’t even be illegal because regulation in the space doesn’t really exist except a wrist slap if Biden’s accountant messed up reporting the taxes. I don’t think RICO works, either: is it against the law if you form a conspiracy to do something, um, legal? Every time the Girl Scouts get together to sell cookies breaks the law I guess.

It scares me because my Papa John left a generous amount in his will to pay for my Granny’s care at home. While I laugh at the coin shenanigans, some 27 year old true believer is trying to cover up his loss of half of her retirement and housing American dollars by doubling down on the same process and losing all of it. Institutions see easily manipulated gains in an area only their techbros in the mailroom talk about, and millions and billions are suddenly exposed to real risk of vanishing overnight. Some of these idiots get influence with politicians and suddenly Appleton doesn’t have police, fire, or money for subsidized utilities in the projects and the Country Club. That poo poo could be worse than nuclear winter, just because we can’t afford to harvest wheat, much less buy gas to truck it to the cities. We could have the worst famine in history with billions of tons of rice rotting in a field in Louisiana while New Orleans starves. Anybody dipping their pinky toe in these waters with a hedge fund’s capital should be smacked down. HARD. Even Madoff only devastated a small amount of people who may have lost $100M in one afternoon, but the vastest number of his victim pool weren’t necessarily evicted or inconvenienced much in their standard of living. No elderly couple had to eat dog food under the overpass because even the most brain dead boomer had professional folks to stop that. “Sell your third Learjet, Jeff, we were outbid on the fake meat burger deal!”

It’s not as funny as it used to be.

DerekSmartymans posted:

Yeah that’s the kind of stuff that bothers me, and would have even if the article was about Trump. At least the food riots haven’t started yet: Wait until Chicago or New York has a supply-chain problem with grocery store shelves.

Obviously, it would be good for Bitcoin.

FAUXTON posted:

starboard citizen

Juul-Whip posted:

whoever said america (and its client states) will embrace buttcoins just because China banned them was right I think. all the big media outlets are pumping it this week. we're hosed

bobbilljim posted:

I cant be bothered but somebody make an opensea competitor that does that same poo poo but with like 10c minting fee and just don;t use crypto at all

DerekSmartymans posted:

Wait, so it seems like the white paper was written by the IRS? Imagine if some cabal in 2001 wanted to better track who buys and sells everything of any amount ever, permanently. Not just terrorism finance and drug users, but beer from a machine in El Salvador or hoarding cash-“equivalents” offline.

Dammit, it’s perfect.

coingeek posted:

The express intention of the changes is to reduce the scope for anonymizing technologies which obscure financial transactions—such as Taproot. Taproot removes the ability for businesses such as exchanges to deal in BTC with any kind of confidence that they can collect the information they are required to collect by law.

But the implications of Taproot are much worse than just exchanges running afoul of AML laws. What the Taproot update does is make the responsibility for laundered coins to fall more broadly on the shoulders of every participant in the network. Between a rise in ransomware attacks using BTC and the overall percentage of illicit activity in digital currency—though receding—still remaining high, it is inevitable that your legitimate BTC will rub shoulders with illicit ones either knowingly or unknowingly. Thanks to Taproot, your coins are now at risk of being tied up with illegally-gotten BTC in a much more direct way. This is the design of Taproot: if five legitimate transactions make up a Taproot envelope with one illegitimate transaction, all it looks like to regulators and investigators is one transaction tainted by laundered money.

The people who tell you that code is law will also tell you that this means none of the transaction is illegitimate. The obvious reality is the exact opposite: thanks to Taproot, all of it is.

The effect is to make it impossible for exchanges to compliantly list and transact in BTC. This arguably was the case before the law reforms of the last year, but now is certain: exchanges cannot fulfil their AML and KYC obligations on BTC transactions.

Judging by the frequency with which the heads of these exchanges tend to get indicted, many exchanges will pretend that nothing has changed and continue to enjoy taking revenue on BTC. They can probably get away with this for a time, but the end-destination is the same: prison, as Arthur Hayes has discovered and as Binance’s Changpeng Zhao is about to.

Unfortunately, by happily living in contravention of their global AML obligations, the exchanges aren’t just putting themselves at risk. By keeping BTC accessible and by outwardly promoting it as a compliant asset, the exchanges are duping naïve investors into thinking they are safe to transact. They are not: not only is every exchange an indictment away from total ruin (and therefore by extension, the ruin of their customers), but people who are unfortunate enough to continue to transact in BTC are now exposed to enormous legal risk. In the U.S., federal and state government can seize digital assets which they allege to be traceable to criminal activity: a charitable interpretation would be that all proceeds from a Taproot envelope are tainted, but a real argument could be made that the Taproot update makes every transaction a BTC mixer, with the entire output—even transactions which were originally complaint—are now entirely laundered cash.

BTC is still spoken of as a decentralized system and yet all it took for the legal position of the BTC protocol to change drastically was evidently for the Taproot idea to occur to centralized protocol developer Gregory Maxwell in 2018. A short few years later, and Taproot is a reality. How’s that for centralization?

This is why Dr. Wright’s case against various protocol developers is so important. It can’t be the case that those who rely on digital assets have no recourse against the people responsible for maintaining and developing them. The very existence of Taproot is evidence that decentralization is a fiction, and it’s a fiction that the law—as it exists today—has no time for.

tether papers posted:

As Protos reported in August, market makers Alameda Research (spearheaded by crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried) and Cumberland Global (a subsidiary of trading giant DRW) are still the biggest fish in Tether markets.

Together, Alameda and Cumberland received at least $60.3 billion in USDT across the time period analyzed, equal to around 55% of all outbound volume — ever.

Alameda Research wears multiple hats. It’s the parent company of crypto and crypto derivatives exchange FTX, but it’s also a quantitative trader, and serves as a venture capitalist across the ecosystem.

The firm has led an impressive 18 funding rounds and participated in 71 more, according to Crunchbase.

One of Alameda’s most notable moves was its participation in ‘Ethereum killer’ Solana’s $314 million token sale earlier this year, alongside Polychain Capital and CoinShares.

Alameda Research’s lead brain Bankman-Fried is one of Solana’s most vocal proponents. Solana’s native token SOL has since grown to become the fifth most-valued cryptocurrency at press time, just behind Tether.

ancap left blog posted:

The future of DAOs will probably not be inherently good. They’re part of a wave of super-empowerment tech that could have universal appeal to both the goodies and the baddies and there’s no way to stop the baddies from leveraging it as well. Sure there are VC wealth transfer pump and dump scams6 and nazi fundraisers but you don’t try to abolish books because there are terrible ones. Instead you try to leverage what you can for the good. The train has left the station and we can’t go in reverse. As my friend Jahed said, “You either participate and bend the will of this thing in your direction, or you literally remove your own agency and become a non-playable character. There’s no reason to make yourself an NPC.” Obviously this domain is not accessible or desirable to everyone, but even if you think that crypto is the latest stage of late stage capitalism there’s still a point to actually understanding how it works so you can do more than just mindlessly react to it.

fins posted:

So uhh.. https://tronfoundation.medium.com/justin-suns-open-letter-to-the-community-on-tron-s-decentralization-and-his-personal-journey-853990c3d978

verge posted:

Nearly everyone I talked to said the cornerstone of Sun’s business wasn’t necessarily technology, but using marketing to extract money from users. In a meeting, Sun once compared the marketing team’s objectives to the business of a “whorehouse.” With the failure of the Tesla stunt, the answer, to Sun, was to pursue a bigger, even flashier stunt: be the highest bidders at a charity auction for lunch with Warren Buffett.

“He thrived on just doing anything for attention and clout,” a former employee says. “Clout-chasing, as the kids call it.”

His business ideas don’t aim to enhance decentralization but merely to exploit the idea for profit, regardless of the harm it could cause. What decentralization has offered Sun is a plausible ideology under which he can continue to avoid accountability.

“There’s no bottom to how low he’s willing to go to achieve his goals,” a former employee said. “He doesn’t care about anybody. He doesn’t care about anything.”

The_Franz posted:

of course it's already reuploaded lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf3ajS5me78

e: oh, it's just the animated part without the dorks talking about how awesome their cult compound is going to be

infernal machines posted:

so this is the thing where 4chan decided they were going to "make apes racist" for whatever reason?

infernal machines posted:

you should at least find another source for these, or do your own or something

kw0134 posted:

yeah, the "code is law" idiots are techno sov citizens. the point of law is to regulate behavior and it's not as if the entirety of human history when such structures have been in place that people have tried to evade those controls and the people who oversee it roll over, throw up their hands and go "you got me" instead of poking you with pointing things until you stop moving. rarely a loophole is used but almost every example extant is where people go okay you get that one time but we're gonna slap you if you try that again.