Monthly Archives: February 2017

US Likely To Reimpose Tariffs On Canadian Softwood Lumber Soon

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As the Trump administration enters its third week, it appears the first substantive action by the Trump administration on trade may be looming.1 Loud whisperings are that overdue anti-dumping tariffs against Canadian softwood lumber are set to be restored.

The core of the dispute is over the fact that low administratively determined stumpage fees charged by the Canadian government for harvesting timber are a de facto subsidy for timber production. The arrangement leads to cushy long term land tenure arrangements where Canadian lumber producers get to enjoy cheap trees and multi generational harvests for a pittance. By contrast the right to harvest timber in the United States is sold at market determined prices.

Beyond the market impact tariffs would have, they would create a substantial point of leverage in a future effort to renegotiate NAFTA.

  1. Withdrawing from masturbatory talks about creating a treaty which isn't yet a treaty, is merely sanity. Not really substantive.  ↩

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Climbs ~7.43% In Latest Adjustment – Yet Another All Time High

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The Bitcoin network mining difficulty has climbed to 422170566883.83685303 in an approximately 7.43% increase over the previous level. Two weeks ago, the last adjustment took the network mining difficulty up ~16.64% in move that represented a substantial purchases of computing equipment good at hashing double rounds of SHA256 and nothing else. As with most recent difficulty adjustments this is yet another all time high Bitcoin mining difficulty.

Death Cult Propagates Among Some Chinese Miners

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As mentioned in Shinohai's latest shitcoin Roundup, a few single language Chinese miners have taken to expressing an unjustified degree of loyalty to yet another doomed anti-Bitcoin forking effort. In the same week the fork effort's defective client unintentionally fell out of consensus due to its inherent slop, Andrew Quentson (WOT:nonperson) published a purported "cosmetically corrected" interview with Jiang Zhuoer (WOT:nonperson) where among other things Zhuoer confesses to "SPV mining" while asserting to have 100 million dollars1 committed to destroying any actual Bitcoin network which remains after splitting his favored altcoin from Bitcoin.

If Zhuoer's intent actually corresponds to what the words printed in English mean,2 it represents a paltry counter to the deterrent presented by Mircea Popescu and other lords of the Most Serene Republic, which has thus far damped off earlier social engineering attempts to fork Bitcoin into something else before they could root.

Continued imprudence among mining pool operators suggests that a solution to the mining bug3 in order to disabuse certain activist factions of their imagined participation in Bitcoin. Importantly, recent efforts by the People's Bank of China to bring sanity to their local fiat/Bitcoin interfaces does not preclude future statal attempts to attack Bitcoin via the mining vector from the People's Republic of China.  Sorry for your loss.

  1. A mere 10,000 Bitcoins today, less tomorrow ↩

  2. Such is the least of the curses handicapping the monophone single language speaker.  ↩

  3. Some solutions have been proposed to constrain the impact of the bug  ↩

Shinohai's Saturday Shitcoin Roundup: "100 Million US dollars" And More!

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Certain factions within the Chinese mining cartels threaten to spend $100 million USD1 to kill off any competition to Bitcoin Unlimited. The announcement was made by a previously unknown pool known as "BTC.TOP" which alleges to have 6.8% of global hashrate at time of this article.

Buttfinex users were elated that their "Hacker credit" token rose to a roughly 76 cent high, leaving some with hopes they might not get totally scammed after all. A twitter user by the name of "Bitcoin Nemesis" released an open letter on pastebin in which he claims to be the only person able to recover the missing funds, in addition promising the prosecution of the scammers running the show. The shadowy user further threatens to dump a list of "Bitcoin people" on the 15th "to law enforcement, intelligence agencies, to tax authorities."

Users of the scammer paradise btcjam reported withdraw errors on the platform earlier this week, leading redditards to speculate Mt. Gox 2.0 is imminent.

Venezuelan Fiat/Bitcoin interface SurBitcoin advised users to withdraw their balances after the company had it's account with Banesco shuttered for unknown reasons. No reason for the sudden halt in operations was given, though officials said they hoped to resume operations in roughly 2 weeks. Users were encouraged to use localbitcoins in the interim, which has been a popular platform in the South American communist haven to facilitate p2p trades.

The SEC published a notice “to solicit comments on the proposed rule change from interested persons” regarding Barry Shillbert's "Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT)" fund, which he hopes to trade on the NYSE.

  1. A figure notably denominated in the wrong kind of unit  ↩

Tor Based Hosting Service Hacked

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Freedom hosting II, the webhost that offered website hosting for tor and "Deep Web" users, has reportedly been breached by unknown "Anonymous" hackers. All webpages hosted by the company were displaying the following message Friday morning:

Hello Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked

We are disappointed… This is an excerpt from your front page ‘We have a zero tolerance policy to child pornography.’ — but what we found while searching through your server is more than 50% child porn…

Moreover you host many scam sites, some of which are evidently run by yourself to cover hosting expenses.

All your files have been copied and your database has been dumped. (74GB of files and 2.3GB of database)

We are selling all data (excluding cp) for 0.1 BTC. Send 0.1 BTC to 14iCDyeCSp12AmhVfJGxtrzXDabFop4QtU and send your transaction id to fhosting@tt3j2x4k5ycaa5zt.onion or fhosting@danwin1210.me and We’ll get back to you with a full dump.

Up to January 31st you were hosting 10613 sites. Private keys are included in the dump. Show full list

We are Anonymous. We do not forgive. We do not forget. You should have expected us.

No Bitcoin payments had been reported on the address associated with the above message at the time of this article. Freedom Hosting is notorious for hosting fraud, scam, and child porn sites in both iterations of it's services.

US Postal Service Posts Curious Job Ad

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The United States Postal Service is stepping up efforts to combat "darknet" market sales by hiring cybercrime investigators. The official title will be “Intelligence Gathering Specialist" and would be expected to trawl onion sites as well as popular clearnet gathering sites seeking to obtain information to help stem the flow of so called contraband through USPS channels.

An excerpt from the listing stated:

“Candidates shall be capable of performing a prioritized assessment of the data to identify the most critical and reliable data in order to identify , bitcoins, locations, accounts, services, travels, email addresses, IP addresses and other pattern of life data in an effort to determine physical attribution of an Internet identity. Candidates shall be capable of creating intelligence and investigative reports which represent the steps taken, the data sources reviewed and the conclusions drawn from the evaluation of the Internet information.”

Violence Today: Leftists Beat And Burn UC Berkeley

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Activist agitators under the cover of a protest against noted homosexual and Breitbart technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos speaking at a campus event started a number of fires, beat presumed attendees, and trashed the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Center on the University of California Berkeley campus. The university and anglophone press covering the event expressed a tremendous amount of unfounded certainty that ~150 violent leftists who obscured their faces were not students at the school.

The University rescinded Yiannopoulos' invitation to speak several hours before the event was scheduled and the log cabin republican was safely ensconced in his hotel room as the leftists terrorized one of their own supporting institutions. President Trump suggested in response that the university could face a withdrawal of Federal support if it can not safely protect the free expression of ideas on its campus.

US Pork Belly Inventory Falls To 50 Year Low

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Bacon reserves in the United States fell to a record low in December,according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Frozen pork belly inventory totalled 17.8 million pounds, the lowest in 50 years. The result is a 20% increase in bacon prices, with demand outside the U.S. accounting for 26% of total volume. The Ohio Pork Council assured consumers that while prices of the crispy ambrosia may increase, supplies are in no danger of running out.1(archived)

  1. Which is different from would be consumers being priced out.  ↩