Several days after the Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen announced their coup attempt it is becoming clear that the XT effort is an effort to misrepresent a neutered, less robust, and rapidly changing system as Bitcoin. A number of parties are catching onto the false sense of urgency which has been pushed hard by Gavin Andressen over the past year and supported by a number of flooding attacks presented as "stress tests." Continually the coup's propaganda has been crashing into the hard face of reality as the reaction to the flooding attacks show Bitcoin works as advertised when the attack ends up allowing for a demonstration of transaction fee markets. Continue reading
Author Archives: Aaron 'BingoBoingo' Rogier
Shutdown Notice Startup Shutdownify Lastest Failed Startup
In the world of Silicon Valley startups Shutdownify sought to make the process of failed startups shutting down a cleaner and more uniform process. Today Shutdownify announced it would be following in its customer's footsteps (archived) and utilizing its own services as the failure startup's niche was not sustainable as a business.
No XTCoin Support Committed to the Blockchain Yet
Days after Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen announced a not quite Bitcoin client that when triggered by a particular set of events create an altchain, miner adoption of their forking client remains so low not a single block containing a vote for their coup has been committed to the blockchain. This is in the face of a self declared mining operation claiming a third of a petahash swearing their fealty to Hearn and Andressen's new pet altcoin. In the time since Hearn announced the fork though a pseudonode implementation which passes most tests to be counted as a forking XT node has been published alongside a full node Bitcoin Client which appears to be an XTCoin node in everything except actually forking over to XTCoin if a fork is actually ever triggered. With this early reception to Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen's fork ultimatum the chances of an actual XTCoin creating fork occurring appear to be low.
Hearn Releases Code to Potentially Fork XTC from Bitcoin
This weekend Mike Hearn announced the release of a version of his BitcoinXT client which would hard fork a new altcoin referred to here as XTCoin from the Bitcoin network. Should enough blocks be mined which profess to contain a vote to trigger Hearn's XTCoin fork, the XTCoin blockchain would split from the Bitcoin Blockchain an allow blocks to be mined at a maximum size of 8 megabytes each growing exponentially to a maximum size of 8 gigabytes 20 years after XTCoin forks should XTCoin somehow manage to keep enough hashpower to continue producing new blocks over the entire span of time. As mentioned in the Hard Fork Missile Crisis XTCoin, like any other altcoin forked from Bitcoin and fraudulently misrepresenting itself as Bitcoin would come under devastating economic attack which would almost certainly render further mining on the XTCoin chain a costly money losing endeavor. Continue reading
Released Clinton Email Shows Clinton Requested Book on Deleting Email
ABC News reports that there is a gem among the latest batch of Hillary Clinton emails1 released in a dump by the State Department. Hillary requested the book Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better2 which includes subjects like “The Email That Can Land You In Jail” and “How to Delete Something So It Stays Deleted” and still others like “Stupid (and Real) Email Phrases That Wound Up in Court” noting that orgies of deletion when faced with a subpoena only serve to make the deleting party look guiltier than they do already. Clinton is currently the frontrunner for the presidential nomination in the United State's Democratic party while her family friend Donald Trump is the current frontrunner for the United State's other socialist party's nomination.
Montreal Expo Postponed For Lack of Sponsors
The Montreal Gazette reports (archived) that a local Bitcoin expo being promoted by a group referring to itself as the "Bitcoin Embassy" has been postponed due to a lack of sponsors. Many Bitcoin related ventures which lavishly threw around sponsorship money in the name of "promoting Bitcoin" in the past have been forced to cut back to focus on their business. The expo was scheduled to run from August 21st to 23rd. The Bitcoin Embassy self reports as having been founded in 2013.
Microsoft Issues Third Generation Anti-Stuxnet Patch
Back in March Microsoft issued its second generation of patch which was intended to close a privilege escalation vulnerability used to spread the Stuxnet malware closing a portion of the vulnerability that remained after the original patch in 2010. In a bulletin today Microsoft has announced yet another iteration of the patch (archived) to close this bug as the March patch still maintained sufficient attack surface for this vulnerability to continue being exploited. Microsoft also released a tool for logging attempts to exploit this vulnerability as well as a warning that installing any new language packs after applying this patch will negate any protective effects this patch is purported to have. Windows versions including the new "Windows 10" are effected by this continuing vulnerability.
Implant ID Chips in Citizens Suggests Finnish Politician
Pasi Mäenranta of the True Finns Party has suggested Finland begin implanting identification chips in citizens (archived) when they leave the country in order to prevent Finns from "abusing" the social welfare benefits offered by their Nordic system when they move to a more affordable foreign location. According to Pasi Mäenranta because "the people" happily let Google and Facebook track them with smartphones there's no way this could be considered an invasion of privacy by citizens. Should a system like this be implemented in Finland it remains to be seen whether emigration from Finland through avenues more traditionally associated with far poorer countries would increase, but such an outcome could be reasonably expected.
Copay Multisig Vulnerability Reported
Coinspect has reported the existence of a bug in the Copay multi-signature Bitcoin wallet produced by BitPay. In affected versions of Copay the vulnerability allowed the compromise of one party to empty the shared wallet by submitting a transaction type which would exploit the protocol used by Copay wallets to automatically sign transactions. Coinspect alleges that after reporting the flaw to BitPay on July 20th the flaw was fixed in Copay version 0.4.1 for this particular exploit scenario. Given the nature of this exploit Qntra advises users considering Copay or any multisignature scheme which involves any protocol for automatically engaging additional signers to use extreme caution recommending potential users default to avoiding the shitware involved entirely on first principles. If you trust keys to software that could automatically sign a transaction it could be tricked just as readily into signing a confession.
Zynga Continues Bleeding
A recent filing (archived) with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission show that one once hyped Facebook centric "game" maker Zynga is continuing to bleed both users and money. Zynga has lost more than 73 million United States dollars since the beginning of 2015. From 2012 through the close of 2014 Zynga has lost roughly 472 million United States dollars. Average monthly users of Zynga's products was reported to have fallen from 121 million in 2014's second quarter to 83 million the second quarter of this year, a decline of 32 percent. In spite of Zynga's hemorrhaging wallet and shrinking userbase shares still manage to trade on Nasdaq (archived) at $2.64 per share implying a market cap of $2,072,302,357 on a earnings per share of negative 19 cents.