Bitcoin & Other Cryptocurrencies

[Nosmo King]

Um.
So ... you give real money or resources to a non-existent currency then wait for the "stock market" of that non-existent money to pay you a dividend? And you take (paid) adverts on You Tube etc. as a legitimate reason to give your real money to an online 'name', while they themselves tell you that it's not a regulated market and it's all non-existent ... massaging your half-understanding to "aint you a clever boy?"
While we all get the usual bollocks of "I've taken over your computer, you've been watching porn, give me lots of money via Crypto currency!"
And I'm told I'm being too cynical and "old fashioned" for not thinking investing real money into non-existent money is silly?

Really?

I was told by my old man "don't gamble money you can't afford to lose." And while I think anyone can gamble, we should always consider a 'get out' plan.
You can deluge me with investment-twaddle words, it's still a bet. And you are telling me that adding the word "crypto" while saying it's "too complicated for you to worry your little mind over" makes me really, really want to give money over?

At least twats like Branson et al have so much money that they don't give a shit if they get any back or not.

Investing any 'real' money in any share option is a risk/gamble, shares in a company are just bits of paper that at any point in time could be worth thousands or a day later be worthless

 

[uair01]

Oscar Mayer is doing all its DOGE fans a service by releasing a special Dogecoin hot dog crypto pack.

Getting the memo during the surge in DOGE hodlers from the beginning of the year, Oscar Mayer is combining its signature hot dogs with 10,000 dogecoins (approximately $2,000 USD). Available in a single pack that features the Shiba Inu mascot, the pack is currently up for auction on eBay with 72 bids, and has reached $3,050 USD.

https://hypebeast.com/2021/8/oscar-mayer-ebay-hot-doge-wieners-release

 

[Nosmo King]

The hacker behind one of the biggest crypto heists has returned nearly half of the $600 million of cryptocurrency they stole.

"The hacker behind one of the largest cryptocurrency heists to date has returned almost half of the $600m (£433m) stolen assets.

On Tuesday, the firm affected, Poly Network wrote a letter on Twitter, asking the individual to get in touch "to work out a solution".

The hacker then posted messages pledging to return funds, claiming to be "not very interested in money".

On Wednesday, Poly Network said it had received $260m back.

The company, a blockchain platform which lets users swap different types of digital tokens, posted on Twitter that it had been sent back three cryptocurrencies, including $3.3m worth of Ethereum, $256m worth of Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and $1m worth of Polygon."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58180692

 

[uair01]

The Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid reported a security attack on its hot wallets in an Aug. 19 tweet. Liquid has been operating as a centralized exchange since 2014.

Most centralized crypto exchanges maintain two types of wallets: hot and cold. Hot wallets are connected to the web for allowing quick deposits and withdrawals and can be prone to hacks. In comparison, cold wallets are not exposed to the web and offer much stronger security against attacks.

While it did not say how much funds were stolen, it shared crypto the hacker’s addresses. As per the transactions made by the addresses used by the hacker, the stolen assets are worth over $84 million.

At the same time, it appears that the hacker was unable to transfer all of the assets from the exchange’s hot wallets. The unhacked portion of the funds is now being transferred to its cold wallets, the exchange said.

This is the second time Liquid’s infrastructure was compromised. On Nov. 13 last year, the exchange confirmed a hacker had gained access to its employees’ email accounts and compromised the company’s network.

- - - -

Hacks are not uncommon in the crypto world, but the Liquid attack was notable because MPC – an advanced cryptographic technique in which the private key controlling funds is generated collectively by a set of parties, none of whom can see the fragments calculated by the others – appears to be the technology of choice among banks and blue chip companies looking to get into crypto.

However, the manner in which MPC wallets can be configured is where weakness, namely human error, can creep in, said Michael Shaulov, CEO of Fireblocks, a digital asset custodian.

“Although the attack was on their hot wallets that are based on MPC, my assumption is that this has nothing to do with MPC vulnerabilities,” Shaulov told CoinDesk.

In Shaulov’s opinion, the exchange’s security policy was likely designed in such a way that the original hacker was able to bypass its entire approval process and instruct the wallets to withdraw coins, without affecting the private key.

“MPC is more secure than a hot wallet, but is not enough by itself for banks who need to manage more than tens of millions dollars’ worth of crypto,” Lamesh said in an interview. “But it’s fine to manage, say, 2% or 3% of assets, while the majority of the assets will be managed in a cold vault where they are 100% safe since they’re never connected to the internet.”

 

[EnolaGaia]

This New York county official used his access privileges to install and exploit multiple devices for his own personal cryptocurrency mining. Now he's busted and facing serious prison time for corruption and larceny. I expect we'll see more stories like this one as the cryptocurrency phenomenon evolves.

NY county worker charged in digital currency mining scheme

An employee cost a New York county at least $6,000 in electricity bills by allegedly secretly installing dozens of machines at his workplace in a cryptocurrency scheme, authorities said Wednesday, announcing charges against him.

... Christopher Naples, who worked in the county clerk’s office as a supervisor of information technology operations, is charged with counts including public corruption, grand larceny, and computer trespass. ...

... Naples, 42, who has worked for the county since 2000, had put 46 devices throughout the county center in Riverhead, New York, in locations like an unused electrical wall panel or underneath floorboards. At least some of the devices had been in place since February. ...

Naples ... is accused of using the devices to mine Bitcoin and other types of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency units are created by computers solving complex math equations, and the process can result in heavy electricity usage and high cooling costs.

“Mining cryptocurrency requires an enormous amount of resources, and miners have to navigate how to cover all of those electricity and cooling costs” ... Naples “found a way to do it; unfortunately, it was on the backs of taxpayers.”

Naples faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted of the top count against him.

FULL STORY: https://apnews.com/article/technolo...yptocurrency-e4f64ab6b4880c7af965abbbee8a1392

 

[Nosmo King]

El Salvador is the first country to accept btc as legal tender.

"El Salvador has become the first country to accept Bitcoin as legal tender in a move that has got the nation and the world debating the opportunities and dangers of cryptocurrency.

From today, businesses will be obliged where possible to accept the controversial digital coins as payment.

Millions of people are expected to download the government's new digital wallet app which gives away $30 (£22) in Bitcoin to every citizen."

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58473260

 

[Nosmo King]

And on the back of that bit coins value has crashed.

"Angry protests, technological glitches and a plummet in value marked the first day of El Salvador adopting Bitcoin as legal tender.

The price of Bitcoin on Tuesday crashed to its lowest in nearly a month, falling from $52,000 (£37,730) to under $43,000 at one point.

An opposition politician said the fall caused one of Latin America's poorest countries to lose $3m.

The rollout of bitcoin in El Salvador was far from what President Nayib Bukele would have envisaged when he began his bold experiment.

Platforms such as Apple and Huawei weren't offering the government-backed digital wallet, known as Chivo, and servers had to be pulled offline after they couldn't keep up with user registrations."

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58459098

 

[hunck]

I really can’t see bitcoin becoming useable as currency in a big way - it’s far too volatile.

An investment vehicle, yes - a bank, no.

 

[marhawkman]

I really can’t see bitcoin becoming useable as currency in a big way - it’s far too volatile.

An investment vehicle, yes - a bank, no.

yeah it's really more like commodities trading than currency.

 

[uair01]

A great analysis by the great Adam Tooze:
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-newsletter-15

... But go back to the beginning. What is the nothing that backs fiat money? “Nothing” other than the trifling matter of tens of trillions of dollars in private credit, the rule of law and the power of the state, itself inserted into a state system. In other words the entire structure of global macrofinance. ...

To paraphrase Gramsci, crypto is the morbid symptom of an interregnum, an interregnum in which the gold standard is dead but a fully political money that dares to speak its name has not yet been born. Crypto is the libertarian spawn of neoliberalism’s ultimately doomed effort to depoliticize money....

A minimum condition for an asset to serve as a store of value is that its value cannot go to zero. As so-called “chartalists” and advocates of MMT argue, one of the key foundations of money’s value is that it serves as a means for paying taxes. In the end, along with death, taxes are inevitable. We all need money to pay them.

An entirely private system of money lacks that foundation....

Crypto mining is deeply weird. It is expensive. It is environmentally damaging. It tends to take place where electricity is ruinously cheap. As of April 2020 most of it was done in China, mainly in the North East close to the Mongolian coal fields....

The single most mind-blowing piece on the weird world of crypto mining that I’ve read, came out in the summer of 20202. It’s an essay by the wonderful journalist and writer Alexander Clapp.
I’ll end with Clapp’s glorious final paragraph:

“Elites and unemployed alike (in North Kosovo and along the Dniester River), now huddle around the dying embers of their gutted welfare state—the free electricity that once kept the lights on at battery factories and in mineshafts—to perform a caper on the capitalist world that triumphed over them. How ironic that they are using its greatest symbol, currency itself, to enrich themselves.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/electric-crypto-balkan-acid-test-clapp

 

[charliebrown]

The idea of cryptocurrency seems to me a horrible idea.

I compare it to gambling and loosing all your money in Las Vegas.

In fact it seems worse than gambling.

Just my opinion.

 

[Xanatic*]

It's more like a pyramid scheme. The stock market is gambling.

 

[marhawkman]

It's more like a pyramid scheme. The stock market is gambling.

It has a perceived value since it has a theoretical use. But that use is so esoteric it doesn't really give them intrinsic value.

But it's enough to make them technically not fiat currency.

 

[XBergMann]

The idea of cryptocurrency seems to me a horrible idea.

I compare it to gambling and loosing all your money in Las Vegas.

In fact it seems worse than gambling.

Just my opinion.

Surely you can't claim that to be true for Utility coins that have a defined purpose and operate as the currency of a specific ecosystem?

 

[Mythopoeika]

It has a perceived value since it has a theoretical use. But that use is so esoteric it doesn't really give them intrinsic value.

But it's enough to make them technically not fiat currency.

A friend has tried to persuade me that cryptocurrencies do have a value because they cost money to 'produce'. The cost of labour, cost of machines, electricity, Internet connections etc.

This does not persuade me at all. They have no latent value, as they are fragments of code with no immediate use (unlike software apps). They are not tangible.

 

[Nosmo King]

A friend has tried to persuade me that cryptocurrencies do have a value because they cost money to 'produce'. The cost of labour, cost of machines, electricity, Internet connections etc.

This does not persuade me at all. They have no latent value, as they are fragments of code with no immediate use (unlike software apps). They are not tangible.

Most of the 'money' in the world doesn't actually exist physically, it's all just numbers on a computer, much like crypto currency, when banks 'create' money to stimulate an economy it's not like they print billions of bank notes.

 

[Mythopoeika]

Most of the 'money' in the world doesn't actually exist physically, it's all just numbers on a computer, much like crypto currency, when banks 'create' money to stimulate an economy it's not like they print billions of bank notes.

Yes, but fiat currencies are underwritten/backed by/guaranteed by the country's tax payers.

 

[charliebrown]

It was announced on American News today that Bitcoin was outlawed in China because the Chinese has no control over Bitcoin and this was against their way of doing things.

So, will Bitcoin’s price sink ?

 

[Mythopoeika]

It was announced on American News today that Bitcoin was outlawed in China because the Chinese has no control over Bitcoin and this was against their way of doing things.

So, will Bitcoin’s price sink ?

Bitcoin will move along well enough without China. The Chinese just want to institute and enforce their own state-approved digital currency.

 

[kamalktk]

But can you do better than the hamster?

A hamster has been trading cryptocurrencies in a cage rigged to automatically buy and sell tokens since June - and it's currently outperforming the S&P 500​

https://markets.businessinsider.com...ged-cage-goxx-bitcoin-price-ether-doge-2021-9

 

[kamalktk]

Squid Game cryptocurrency scam had just as many winners as the game itself.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/01/investing/squid-game-cryptocurrency-scam/index.html

 

[Ogdred Weary]

A friend has tried to persuade me that cryptocurrencies do have a value because they cost money to 'produce'. The cost of labour, cost of machines, electricity, Internet connections etc.

This does not persuade me at all. They have no latent value, as they are fragments of code with no immediate use (unlike software apps). They are not tangible.

I completely agree, capitalism is (more or less) a religion and "cryptos" are essentially newer and more extreme cults. Ultimately it's a ponzi scheme, maybe it's not even new, just the format. I daresay they have been numerous new and spurious currencies throughout history; something is perceived to have value so people flock to it, I'm not convinced it's much different to beany babies.

Before anyone bellyaches, communism is also a religion.

 

[uair01]

I was inclined to put this into "great stupidity":

... we enter the metaverse and get into its land sales —in this case, the opportunity to be Snoop Dogg’s neighbor. Well, sort of. Believe it or not, one of the NFTs sold for a whopping $450,000. And yes, you read that right, someone ponied up the cost of a home — or several, in many US markets — for a plot in the Snoopverse. Virtually living next to the virtual doggfather? What a time to be alive!

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/transatlantic-cable-podcast-231/43113/

And also into "great stupidity":

A hacker stole $31 million from the blockchain company MonoX Finance , by exploiting a bug in software the service uses to draft smart contracts.
Specifically, the hack used the same token as both the tokenIn and tokenOut, which are methods for exchanging the value of one token for another. By using the same token for both tokenIn and tokenOut, the hacker greatly inflated the price of the MONO token because the updating of the tokenOut overwrote the price update of the tokenIn. The hacker then exchanged the token for $31 million worth of tokens on the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/12/smart-contract-bug-results-in-31-million-loss.html

 

[Sharon Hill]

I made 31% profit off my etherium purchase!
In context, that is $3.24 since my initial investment was $10 minus fees.
But, hey!

This announcement was followed by a brief dust up with my husband who thinks this is really stupid stuff.
But, HEY! 31% is not shabby!

 

[uair01]

Crypto ฿itlord >>> posted this joke on Twitter


This morning at 5:40am my desktop metamask was hacked and drained of all funds and NFTs. The only thing I did differently was charge a brand new dildo on my computer and installed the app Still trying to wrap my head around this but I think I was just hacked by a fucking dildo

They didn’t get a lot but still a nice amount and some cool NFTs that I was happy to hold for sentimental value. It’s crazy how this shit can happen with just one mistake I kind of knew it wasn’t a good idea but all the other wall chargers were being used.

And some joker posted this as an answer:

Spoiler: NSFW bitcoin dildo

And another one posted this as a reaction:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1473435170120376329

 

[EnolaGaia]

For discussion focused on NFTs go to:

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/non-fungible-tokens-nfts.69038/

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here's an illustrative incident shedding light on Bitcoin's mysterious underlying mining operations worldwide.

Kazakhstan internet shutdown sheds light on a big Bitcoin mining mystery

The curtain just lifted on one of the many mysteries surrounding Bitcoin: How much is being produced using super-dirty coal in Kazakhstan. We knew that the Eurasian nation was a major destination for miners, and that the refugees recently expelled from China were flocking there. Still, it was difficult to establish how much of all the world's coins Kazakhstan was minting. Clouding the picture was the government's recent moves to severely restrict the mining boom that was plaguing its cities via rolling blackouts.

On January 5, the world got at least a rough answer. Violent protests erupted ... President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev sacked his government and declared a state of emergency. Apparently on his orders, the largest telecom provider shuttered the internet to interrupt communications among the opposition's ranks. When the web goes down, miners can't communicate with the Bitcoin network. The "hash rate," the random codes that win fresh awards of Bitcoin, collapses. A few hours into the outage, Larry Cermak of the crypto news and research site The Block tweeted that a full 12% of Bitcoin's worldwide computational power had vanished. ...

FULL STORY: https://fortune.com/2022/01/05/kazakhstan-internet-bitcoin-mining-mystery-crypto/

 

[EnolaGaia]

Cryptocurrency is a subject that remains mysterious to most folks. Some dismiss cryptocurrencies out of hand as suspicious, while some go so far as to claim they're a form of Ponzi scheme. Regardless of what one believes about these fundamental issues, it's clear that the mysteries and ambiguities surrounding cryptocurrencies have provided fertile ground jfor scammers, fraudsters, and Ponzi schemers. This lengthy AP article describes a Brazilian cryptocurrency enterprise whose alleged actions resemble those of a drug cartel.

Bitcoin pyramid schemes wreak havoc on Brazil’s ‘New Egypt’

In April, Brazil’s federal police stormed the helipad of a boutique seaside hotel in Rio de Janeiro state, where they busted two men and a woman loading a chopper with 7 million reais ($1.3 million) in neatly packed bills.

The detainees told police they worked for G.A.S. Consulting & Technology, a cryptocurrency investment firm founded by a former waiter-turned-multimillionaire who is the central figure in what is alleged to be one of Brazil’s biggest-ever pyramid schemes.

Police say the company owned by 38-year-old Glaidson Acácio dos Santos had total transactions worth at least $7 billion ($38 billion reais) from 2015 through mid-2021 as part of a Bitcoin-based Ponzi scheme that promised investors 10% monthly returns.

In hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Associated Press, federal and state police and prosecutors accuse dos Santos and his associates of running a sophisticated racket defrauding thousands of small-scale investors who believed they were getting rich off Bitcoin’s steep appreciation. He is now in a Rio jail awaiting trial on charges including racketeering, financial crimes and ordering the murder and attempted murder of two business competitors. He remains under investigation in the attempted murder of a third competitor. ...

FULL STORY: https://apnews.com/article/cryptocu...azil-bitcoin-2dc801e5e3aa477ce7983d84dc8a64bb

 

[C.O.T.]

Non estate controlled criptocurrencies are inherently inflationary, cause even if you put a limit on the number of emitted currency you cant limit that anyone creates any other new currency and so on. So the total effect is all the bunch trend to a value of 0. People say: i got an increase value of this or that.., a lot of times that increase of value is payed on other criptocurrencies. If only a small but significant amount of investors will try to scape from that bubble burst we will see values dropping to near 0 in almost any of this values.
Well but as in any other bubble , fantasy values will build real destruction on the real world.

 

[C.O.T.]

About El salvador, El Salvador is a failed state. This movements are pure desesperation.