Ryan Selkis, known on social media as @TwoBitIdiot, has begun concern trolling over "wealth concentration" in Bitcoin and proposed moving Bitcoin to a permanently inflationary reward schedule by 2020. Such a change would of course never be implemented in actual Bitcoin, but the fact that it is being introduced by someone titled "Director of Investments" at some organization calling itself the "Digital Currency Group" strongly suggests that fiat interests in the United States that would like to not only inflate the blockchain in order to force centralization. It suggests United States based fiat interests would like to destroy the very image of what Bitcoin is. Continue reading
Category Archives: Altcoins
Karpeles Facing Charges in Japan?
Mark Karpeles the CEO of the infamously defunct Mt. Gox is facing charges on fraud based on a
report released this week. An anonymous translation of the report can be seen below: Continue reading
Gawker Media Shutters National Security Blog Less Than 4 Months In
William Arkin announced that he is leaving Gawker Media. This comes as a part of the turmoil facing Gawker Media following their now retracted article on David Geithner, the brother of former Obama treasury secretary Timothy Geithner. In his letter Arkin criticizes Gawker for making the world a worse place and marks the Geithner story's retraction as signifying the end of a long internal fight at the company which is being decided in favor of a "kinder" Gawker Media. A new kinder Gawker Media that refocuses on Celebrity and "Public Figures" and doesn't want Arkin's writing on the internals of the American National Security state. Continue reading
Grooveshark Cofounder Dead at 28
Josh Greenberg a cofounder of the late music streaming service Grooveshark was found dead in his Florida home, and according to the BBC and his mother he had no ongoing health concerns. Grooveshark was founded in 2006 and closed this April after years of legal harassment by agents of the copyright regime culminating in a United States court finding Grooveshark liable for up to nearly three quarter of a billion dollars in damages. At its peak Grooveshark provided 145 people with employment.
Ashley Madison Hacked
Extramarital dating site Ashley Madison has been hacked according to a report by Brian Krebs. The hack also affects other niche social networking properties operated by Ashley Madison's corporate parent Avid Life Media. The actors behind the attack call themselves "The Impact Group" and along with releasing corporate data on Avid Life Media they have claimed that one of Ashley Madison's more profitable services, a $19 charge for fully deleting one's account, is a complete lie as the company retains user information. According to the Impact group in 2014 "Full Delete" netted Ashley Madison 1.7 million US dollars in revenue while they were still retaining user's real names, addresses, and full billing information. The Impact Team demands Avid life take Ashley Madison and another site "Established Men" offline permanently in order to prevent the release of all information taken from Avid Life's servers.
This incident is just another blow to the world consumers have come to expect. In a world with strong and readily accessible cryptography there is no longer any compelling reason for users to depend so entirely on a service like Ashley Madison and leaving their interests in and activities oriented towards extramarital dating exposed.
Tsinghua Unigroup Flirts With Acquisition of DRAM Maker Micron
Chinese state owned enterprise Tsinghua Unigroup is rumored to be flirting with an acquisition of Micron Technology, the last maker of DRAM based in the United States. At the moment prevailing wisdom in the mainstream financial press appears to be that the US Treasury's "Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States" would block a sale to the state owned enterprise and if they don't the Department of Defense would likely block Tsinghua Unigroup or any Chinese firm from purchasing Micron. Continue reading
Another Post BIP 66 Fork Dies after 3 Blocks
A second fork has followed the initial post BIP 66 fork further highlighting the continued danger of so called "soft" forking changes to the consensus code of Bitcoin network clients. The second fork persisted from 21:50 through to 23:40 on July 5th, 2015. Implementing the rather non-controversial change proposed by BIP 66 to enforce strict DER encoding on ECDSA signatures has without a doubt increased the fragility of the Bitcoin network such that users of all Bitcoin clients ought to consider waiting beyond the traditional 6 mined blocks before considering a transaction confirmed. Unless all major miners begin mining with fully validating node software, this instability is likely to continue indefinitely into the future with users of the latest versions of "Bitcoin Core" at risk of finding themselves stranded, maybe even permanently on the short side of an enduring fork.
Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis Resigns in Failure
Greek banks continue to struggle beneath the onerous burden of financial debt imposed by their left-leaning welfarist government and as such are teetering on the brink of insolvency.1 Despite a slew of highly restrictive capital controls and out-of-the-blue "bank holidays" designed to maintain some modest levels of liquidity in the face of branch and ATM queues across the country, the condition of Greece's banks is less than ideal and quite possibly insufficient for long-term survival. Continue reading
The prospect of Greek debt default isn't just weighing down the local economy either. Inextricably intertwined as the global fiat economy is, the Euro has taken some damage, as have a number of stock markets around the world, as many are wondering aloud whether Greece is the canary in the coalmine of paper promises. ↩
Further Reddit Outrage as Unpaid Moderators Rebel
Beginning yesterday Reddit's volunteer moderators have been rebelling over the firing of the one administrator that they liked. This latest crisis for Reddit follows a previous blunder which last month saw a substantial influx of users moving from Reddit's platform and settling on Reddit competitor Voat. Voat has been down intermittently as they massage and further expand their infrastructure to accommodate the influx of new users.
Current Greek Capital Controls
Last Friday, Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras made a televised statement calling for a referendum on whether to accept the latest bailout deal offered by creditors. There were over 500 million euros withdrawn from ATMs on Saturday, with around 35% of ATMs running out of cash and being restocked at some point during the day. Continue reading