With rumours of insolvency still buzzing on social media, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong took to Twitter to announcing that the company "has all funds to cover user deposits." Apparently cryptographic proof is too hard for the company to present to the public. (archived) Irate users quickly responded with calls for independent audits as Ether huffers still wonder why the exchange refuses to credit their Ethereum Classic tokens to their accounts. Armstrong reminded users that Coinbase "is not a wallet" and users can store their funds in a multisig vault – the exact same type of setup that failed to protect users of Evolution darknet market when it collapsed in an exit scam. The official Coinbase site still bills itself as a digital currency wallet, and offers a "wallet app" on the Google Play store. The companion announcement on reddit quickly was upvoated to the front page. Sorry fork, your loss.
Category Archives: Altcoins
Campus Intolerance: Uttering "All Lives Matter" On Social Media Gets Student Sanctioned
Certifiably brown Texas student Rohini Sethi1was suspended from the University of Houston student government after she uttered “Forget #BlackLivesMatter; more like AllLivesMatter.” while not being brown enough on social media. For offering the wrong empathy Sethi faces the following sanctions:
- 50 Day unpaid suspension from her paid2 student government position.
- Compulsory attendance at an August diversity workshop and three university sponsored cultural events every month from September through March with the exception of December.
- Compulsory writing of a "letter of reflection" about how her TweetCrime has impacted the student government and the University of Houston as a whole.
- Mandatory public presentation on September 28th, 2016 on “the knowledge she has gained about cultural issues facing our society.”
Handing down the punishment white Student Government Commisar Shane Smith3 (WOT:nonperson) attributed the intensity of Sethi's sanctions to her failure to acknowledge just how much more the class of black lives matter at the moment compared to the class of all lives.4 Smith was granted one time powers to punish Sethi as he saw fit in a vote that only required a simple majority, because kicking her out of her paid Government club gig would have required mustering a 3/4 majority and a trial5 in front of Student Supreme Court.6
Shane Smith on the implications on his decision on speech at the University of Houston offered:
The first amendment [sic] prevents a person from being jailed by the governmetn [sic] for what they say. But [it] does not prevent people from receiving other consequences for what they say.
Apparently you can't get a university education in Texas.
Vice President of the University of Houston's Student Government association and WOT:nonperson ↩
~700 United States Dollars monthly ↩
Self declared 3.4 GPA anticipated graduation Spring 2017 with a major in economics. Considering graduate school and full time employment according to his LinkedIN. ↩
In fact lives do not matter all that much. ↩
Shane Smith is a member of the University of Houston Mock Trial Association. ↩
And everyone knows Supreme Courts are clogged with old white men with names like Clarence Thomas, Sonya Sotomayor, Elena Kagen, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and son of an immigrant Samuel Alito. ↩
Bleeding Coinbase Raises Fees
Coinbase continues to exhibit signs of bleeding funds, having announced on their website that fees will increase to 3.99% for credit and debit card purchases in most countries where their service is offered beginning August 5th. (archived) It is not known if the decision to change their fee structure is due to losing money from their recent etherape. Sorry fork, your loss.
Brian Armstrong Still Has Hard On For Harkforks
Hoping to climb to the top of the "fork all the things" subculture, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong (WOT:nonperson) is now intent on a push to hardfork reddit's r/bitcoin, calling on reddit CEO Steve Huffman to remove /u/theymos as moderator and turn control of the subreddit over to persons more aligned with Coinbase's business interests. Huffman attempted a neutral take stating: “We’ve seen that with the Bitcoin community, I don't disagree with you at all. Right now, our opinion is that we try to stay hands-off unless they’re breaking other, site-wide rules." Speculation still abounds that Roger Ver is helping to finance the lulz, going so far as to offer a bounty in order to have theymos removed. Ver is widely known for quoting himself and paying mercenaries to spam links to his forum across various social media sites. Armstrong publicly weeks prior that he was unsubscribing from r/Bitcoin and instead getting his news from r/btc instead, though as other reddit users point out, listening to redditards can have real-life disatrous consequences. Reddit has a history of censorship aimed at promoting other Y-Combinator associated ventures. Peace in our time.
Ether Huffing Gossip Continues, Exchanges Risk Insolvency
Ethereum vs. Ethereum Classic continues to be top on the gossip list on this week's shitcoin roundup. Beleaguered fiat-to-cryptocoin exchanges Coinbase/GDAX and btc-e have both declared the "Classic" fork a scam,1 and have declared they will not release user funds on that particular side of the fork. Classic continued to have more volume overall in the past 24 hours, moving $ 38,714,800 compared to Ethereum's $ 19,722,200. Ethereum project collaborators such as MIT and now Cornell are frantically hoping to use their new magic mutable blockchain powers to convince users that this is really how crypto works, with Cornell sponsoring a "Ethereum Blockchain Bootcamp" with Pope Vitalik Butterin himself in attendance. (archived).
The actual scam is that in spite of being enlightened as to how hard forks work, the leaked numerous tokens on the chain that was initially in the minority and now they have a hole in their books that can only be filled by playing fiat with declarations the coins never existed when in fact they lost them. ↩
Monsanto Led Dicamba Enthusiasm Raises Tensions Among Farmers
The debut of Monsanto's "Roundup Ready Xtend Crop System(TM)(R)" is raising tensions among soybean and cotton farmers who have and have not adopted the seed component of the system, especially in the American Mid South (archived). This year's combination of weather and desperate tillage has lead to ideal conditions for Palmer's Amaranth to flourish in soybean fields threatening to greatly reduce yields by shading soybean plants and consuming soil nitrogen1 far more aggressively than the soybeans can.
Glyphosate resistant Palmer's Amaranth after its debut in 2006 has swiftly spread across the country and this year's proliferation of the weed has forced farmers who planted "Roundup Ready Xtend Crop System(TM)(R)" cotton and soybeans to spray their fields with Dicamba. The twist is that Monsanto isn't done bringing the herbicide portion of "Roundup Ready Xtend" to market so farmers who planted seeds from this Monsanto crop system are just spraying and dumping Dicamba on their fields out of desperation. Farmers who lack these seeds are watching their soybeans curl up and suffer, because Dicamba is especially effective on legumes.
The fallout from this year's soybean season will likely include the consumption of immense amounts of various EPA and Department of Agriculture functionaries time, substantial monetary penalties and torts against the farmers who manage to harvest soybeans this year, and pain for Monsanto as restrictions on applying Dicamba increase and diminish the point of marketing Dicamba resistant soybeans. Sorry for your loss.
Most plants take soil nitrogen and pump it into growing above the soil. Palmer's Amaranth isn't content with that. It takes soil nitrogen for growth and then takes still more soil nitrogen and stores it as nitrates. At one point Palmer's Amaranth was grown as a staple grain, but in the contemporary farm environment the level of nitrates accumulated turn the plant toxic. ↩
Royal Dutch Shell Shocked! Losses!
Declining oil prices significantly impacted the profits of Royal Dutch Shell, which reported the lowest earnings in over a decade. Reported profits sank 72 percent, for a total reported profit of $1.05 billion. Company leadership cites low oil prices, which traded around $44 per barrel last week which is up from $35.21 earlier this year, and $63.50 a year ago. The oil industry has shown no signs of recovery. Sorry for your loss.
Coinbase Fumbling Through Ether Huffing Fork Experience
Early this morning on Twitter, Coinbase's "exchange" GDAX announced they will temporarily maintain sole custody of the Classic portion of their Ether huffers' forked tokens for several weeks. The exchange released an announcement:
100% of ETC associated with ETH balances at the time of the hard fork are secured in GDAX cold storage.
We plan to allow withdrawal of an amount of ETC that corresponds to ETH balances at the time of the hard fork. We'll be working on this feature over the coming weeks and will provide updates via this Twitter account.
The freeze has some users on social media wondering if early post fork shenanigans at Coinbase might have threatened the firm's solvency. Sorry fork, your loss.
Ether Huffing Ecosystem Loses 10% Mining Interest Overnight, Hashrate On Bailout Free Chain Climbing
Since Ethereum "Time Travel" hard forked away from Ethereum "Classic" the total mining interest in the two chains is down ten percent. Similarly ten twenty percent of the mining interest in the Buterin blessed1 chain featuring a time-travel hard fork attack to "undo" the whole DAO episode appears to have moved to the Classic chain. Mircea Popescu published a guide to pricing the various forks of the original Ethereum scam coin this morning.
At the point Ethereum forked it was still very much like its predecessors Dogecoin and Litecoin in being of little utility beyond service as a vehicle for disposing of actual forms of money. Like those two, Ethereum has Buterin while Litecoin had Charles Lee and the Dogecoin had Jackson Palmer and Alex Green/Moolah.io serving as their chiefs of inviting the herd to tour the woodchipper. Thanks to the passage of time blessing it with a history, Bitcoin is unlike its alternatives in many ways2 that make projecting their fork experience on to Bitcoin untenable. Sorry fork, your loss.
This is the other reason why you can't have Altcoins. Any Altcoin is going to be far too new to develop the adversarial relationships between various interests that protect the chain. ↩
Gresham's law is a thing. ↩
US Standards Institute Prepares To "Ban" SMS 2 Factor Authentication
Following their brief foray into the clandestine manufacture of methamphetamine, the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology is prepared to "ban" SMS based 2nd factor authentication schemes. What will replace it in their next guidance is yet to be determined, but almost certainly biometrics, more Google-esque one time password schemes, or both. With the IRS completely having to scrap their system which failed in authenticating tax filers, the United States is forced to Microsoft their own systems iterating their holes to be more selectively exploited.