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Sunday, December 10, 2023

Links - 10th December 2023 (1 - Crypto/Bitcoin/NFTs/Blockchain)

Meme - Looney @LooneyGee416: "I feel like literature and the metaverse are going to go hand in hand. I imagine writers collaborating with artist for immersive experies we never thought of before. exciting stuff."
Jim Shilander @jimmyshi03: "This is a movie"
Meme - Looney @LooneyGee416: "Yea basically but without needing Hollywood or any kind of production studio. A writer can work with a small team and make a world come to life."
Jim Shilander @jimmyshi03: "You realize that exists now, right? That's what independent film is."

Meme - Adam Cerious @Browtweat...: "that's a pdf. you're describing a pdf"
medved @matimedved: "Literature NFTs will change the world."
Meme - Sir PantsALot @SirPantsA...: "To be fair I don't think literature nfts would be meant to be scarce. In fact they could be free. Using blockchain tech would allow people to support writers, raise funds up front, provide airdrops to collectors, and more. It would be more interactive/cheap than buying at a store"
Laura K. Curtis @laurakcurtis: "Like Kickstarter or Patreon?"
Meme - drstinkerpants @RyanSmi...: "you and I have been using technology, it seems simple. there are plenty of people that don't want to learn about pdfs and shit like that. they just want to push the red button and get their book. so make it that easy" Derek Walsh @funkyderek: "That's a Kindle. What you're talking about is a Kindle."
Meme - "You're conflating ownership with access. literature NFTs will be freely and publicly accessible on the blockchain."
Rob Israel @robisraelart: "Like a library?"
Meme - Crypto-N @cryptO_n:-"You can have books sold as special editions which include NFTs of original art work included in the book. Or Ebooks where they are recorded as NFTs,this in turn means it can be linked to a smart contract which can automatically assign royalty payments and a % resale commission!"
Greg, but with hol...: "Or you could get a publishing contract"

Meme - Mr Jon Kane: "I'm so here for that... not only literature as we know it but merged with visual mediums into multi layered programmable and composable experiences which can adapt and change over time. It's going to be so LIT" The Essence of Woerm Sin: "A web site. You're thinking of a web site."
Meme - AccentlessKiwi @PermieP...: "Similar to OA journals, except you replace the company with an algorithm (ie get rid of the middle- man). OA journals may someday be entirely inclusive, but as of now there is still significant bias and barriers to entry." Knight a la Carte @Knight...: "So, an Open Access repository for research papers, free to access, with no peer review. Well done, you've just invented arxiv.org"
Meme - Pixiekittie @PixieKittie_: "The whole point is that the assets will be on peer to peer network, fully decentralized without a single server to shut it down. It's advocating a new way of how the asset is stored, not the actual asset itself."
Megan Tayles @taylesium: "This is bittorrent. Also, I'm pretty sure that's not how NFTs work. The decentralized part is the record of the ownership, not the owned asset. The asset has to be on a single server, or it's not a unique digital object."

Meme - Looney @LooneyGee416: "I No, I'm talking about something like a Land in the Sandbox dedicated to a fantasy world. Where you can interact and gain background info and other things that may not be interesting enough for its own film/game" Hawkbone - 2% @Hawkbo...: "So like item descriptions in Dark Souls? Or for that matter, literally any video game with a codex of some kind?"

Meme - "Congrats to crypto bros for inventing Islam"
"Crypto Investors Are Bidding to Touch a 1,784-Pound Tungsten Cube Once a Year. You'll have to travel to a storage facility in Willowbrook, Illinois, to touch the forbidden cube."
Meme - Hagai Palevsky @DialHForHagai: "crypto bros are mere steps away from inventing farmville. i can feel it"
Crypto Bros Taking Ls: "It's all so tiring
OWN AN OLIVE GARDEN ON THE BLOCKCHAIN.
Does this confer ownership of or investment in a real Olive Garden franchise?
While every Non-fungible Olive Garden is tethered to a real Olive Garden, ownership is currently limited to the Non-fungible Olive Garden Metaverse, granting owners no rights or privileges in meatspace Olive Gardens. This may change in the future (see roadmap).
Is this affiliated with Olive Garden?
No. We are simply a community of Olive Garden fans invested in both trustless future economies and delicious, reasonably- priced Italian fare.
So am I buying a picture of an Olive Garden?
No. Token artwork is for representation only and confers no ownership over the photograph. You're"
Mirror\

Meme - Bonnie! @BonnieElephant: "I am going to have SEX tonight!"
RicksCEO.eth @RicksCEO: "Alone or with somebody ?"
Bonnie! @BonnieElephant: "I dont accept criticism or roasts from people who invest in CRYPTOCURRENCY!"

Bored Ape NFT Partygoers Say UV Lights Burned Their Eyes - "After returning from a large, exclusive party over the weekend, some Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT owners are complaining about severe eye pain, skin burns, and poor vision potentially caused by powerful UV lights used at the event. Some folks have reported the pain was so bad they had to go to the hospital for treatment.  From November 3 to November 5, Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT owners gathered in Hong Kong for ApeFest, a large party and event that reportedly saw over 2,000 people show up to dance around and pretend the NFT marketplace hasn’t completely cratered in the last 12 months. Only those who owned a BAYC NFT were able to attend the exclusive event. Pictures from the weekend party show a big stage where a concert was held for attendees. But now, many partygoers are dealing with excruciating eye pain potentially caused by UV lights used during the concert."

The FTX jury suffers through a code review - "the prosecution grilled Wang on a single, damning column in FTX’s databases. Called “allow_negative,” it allowed Alameda to have a negative balance. Alameda could withdraw money even when its accounts didn’t have any, and it had an enormous line of credit. Wang added that it could place orders faster than other users, and we already saw evidence that users may have unwittingly deposited money into Alameda rather than FTX... The prosecution doesn’t just allege that Alameda had special, secret privileges — it claims they were used to obfuscate basic elements of FTX’s operations that exposed its supposed selling points as a lie.   For instance, FTX advertised that it had a good liquidation system. In many crypto networks, if someone lost enough money, the exchanges could stick other traders with the losses too. FTX touted its automated liquidation as a way to avoid this, so that one customer going bankrupt wouldn’t affect the others. In the process of liquidating, FTX would try to sell the collateral on the open market, but if it couldn’t finish, then backstop liquidity providers would step in. These were market makers, including Alameda, which could be compensated for the losses they take from a “backstop fund,” Wang said.  But FTX lied about how much money was in the backstop fund, Wang said. In court we saw the code that generated the fake number published on the website: it took the daily trading volume on FTX, multiplied it by a random number, divided it by a billion, and added it to the existing number displayed on the site. It had nothing to do with the actual amount of money in the insurance fund."

The Promises and Pitfalls of Bitcoin - "“Financial censorship, or cutting off access to the global banking system, is one of the most powerful tools that governments have for punishing people.” The actions of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau government’s during the convoy certainly meet the definition of financial censorship. Virtually anyone who tried to make a donation in Canadian legal tender via electronic means found their efforts ultimately stymied. At the same time, St. Louis’ experience with Bitcoin suggests that cryptocurrencies may offer far greater personal privacy and, accordingly, stronger resistance to interference by third parties – including governments intent on exercising politically motivated financial censorship.  Here is what you need to know about how it happened. And why Ottawa wants to make sure it never happens again... If you hold your Bitcoin in a trading platform or online application wallet, your wallet is technically controlled by the third party that manages that platform or app. This unfortunately means a government can issue an order that the funds be blocked or transferred to another, government-controlled wallet address. In this sense, Bitcoin is no different from funds held in ordinary bank accounts or on the crowdfunding platforms Ottawa froze during last year’s imposition of the Emergencies Act. It is, however, much more difficult to take over wallets that entail physical possession of the keys. It was this feature that allowed St. Louis to distribute $8,000 each to 100 truckers between February 15 and 17 in Ottawa. As he explained on Twitter, St. Louis went from truck to truck handing out brown envelopes containing the seed phrases of the individual wallets as well as printed instructions for how each trucker could access their share of the donated Bitcoin using their cellphone. It was a powerful demonstration of Bitcoin’s ability to enable transactions between individuals without government control in specific circumstances... Heavy-handed, knock-on-the-door techniques are not a government’s only option for seizing Bitcoins. Since regulators and other authorities control the interface points where cryptocurrencies can be traded for goods or other currencies, they can simply forbid these sites from accepting payment originating from certain wallets, leaving the Bitcoin stranded.  They can also publish lists of seized wallet addresses and declare that anyone who accepts seized Bitcoins in exchange for goods, cash or other crypto will be charged with money laundering... Not all cryptocurrencies are created equal, particularly when it comes to “fungibility.” This term refers to the ability of a commodity or currency to retain its value in all circumstances, as well as being seamlessly interchangeable and indistinguishable from other units of the same item. All $10 bills, for example, are the same, and will always buy $10 worth of stuff. But the fungibility of Bitcoin can change with the traceability of the wallet that holds it. A “dirty” wallet, in other words, can tarnish the value of the Bitcoin it holds. To use an analogy, this is why kidnappers (at least in the movies) always demand that a ransom be paid in small, unmarked, non-consecutive bills. Knowing that cash can be traced lowers its value. The same holds true for digital currency. To solve this problem, there are “mixing” services that can obscure the paths of Bitcoin wallets, allowing “marked” Bitcoins to be moved into clean wallets. The procedure is quite tedious, however, and the mixing services are not free... while privacy coins may be linked to criminal activity (as is cash), there are plenty of legitimate reasons for wanting to keep your financial transactions anonymous. This can include paying for private medical procedures or psychotherapy, donations to charities, preventing advertisers from collecting your personal details, keeping your net worth hidden from prying eyes and preventing hackers from accessing your information. The list goes on. Unfortunately, the list of reasons now appears to include citizens of democracies protecting themselves against political persecution. One chilling recent example is UK politician Nigel Farage’s ordeal of “de-banking”... With political dissent treated more and more like criminal activity – remember, all of the allegations of violence made about the Freedom Convoy crumbled under scrutiny – we can expect more cases like that of Farage and the truckers.  And that suggests more people will want to explore alternative means of conducting their financial transactions away from government and institutional oversight. A desire to live without constant surveillance while retaining the conveniences of modern life means privacy coins and other crypto innovations will likely have growing appeal for tech-savvy people... A government-controlled digital currency would make it possible for all political dissidents to be treated in the same contemptuous fashion as Farage and the truckers. Such behaviour would become even easier, in fact, since it would no longer be necessary to compel action by intermediaries like banks or crowdfunding platforms. And because it is digital and centrally-controlled, a CBDC’s value is technically programmable. This means it could be used to prefer or reject certain consumption or social behaviour. It could also theoretically be used to enforce future pandemic lockdowns by limiting individuals’ access to their CBDC wallets to certain physical locations. Further, because it will presumably become impossible to convert this digital fiat money back into physical cash, there will be no way around such orders. It might even be possible to automate this entire process using AI bots that sweep social media platforms such as Meta and X to decide who has earned the right to use a CBDC wallet and who has not. It seems a control-minded government’s fever-dream."
Of course, the left cheer Nigel Farage getting debanked despite going on about "empathy". Empathy aside, they can't even imagine that they can and will be placed in the same situation, which is why they are happy to strip away the safeguards that protect them too just to get at their enemies

S'pore-based influencer Irene Zhao's photos generate S$7.5 million in 10 days as NFTs - "A series of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have generated a staggering S$7.5 million transaction volume within 10 days. Launched on Jan. 14, 2022, the images feature Singapore-based Chinese influencer and model Yuqing Irene Zhao, 28... crypto Indonesian influencer Ghozali, who made US$1 million from the almost 1,000 selfies he minted as NFTs on Opensea... the slogan for IreneDAO is SIMP: Simplicity, Integrity, Meaning, and Purpose."

Why bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme | Financial Times - "in calling bitcoin a Ponzi scheme, critics are arguably being too kind on two counts. First, bitcoin doesn’t have the same endgame as a Ponzi scheme. Second, it constitutes a deeply negative sum game from a broad social perspective... By contrast to investments with Madoff, Bitcoin is bought not as an income-earning asset but rather as a zero-coupon perpetual. In other words, it promises nothing as a running yield and never matures with a required terminal payment. It follows that it cannot suffer a run. The only way a holder of bitcoin can cash out is by a sale to someone else... At the beginning of 2021, Stolfi put the cumulative payments to bitcoin’s miners since 2009 at $15bn. At the then price of bitcoin, he put the increase in this sum at about $30m per day, which mostly pays for electricity... Unlike a Ponzi scheme, bitcoin cannot end in a run.   In a crash, the holders of bitcoin will collectively have lost what they have paid the miners for their bitcoin. This sum may be not far from the sum originally invested with Madoff, after accounting for inflation. But bitcoin holders will have no one to pursue to recover this sum: it will simply have gone up in smoke, a social loss. The holders of bitcoin would then only wish it had been a Ponzi scheme."

Justin Bieber's $1.3 million Bored Ape NFT is worth just $58k now

The NFT of Jack Dorsey's first-ever tweet, once worth $2.9M, can be bought for just $4

Meme - Cyanide & Happiness @Explosm: "We don't do NFTs. If you see a Cyanide & Happiness NFT, that wasn't us. If you bought a Cyanide & Happiness NFT, you got scammed, also lol."
OMOGONIX / LS @omogonix: "Don't know why u had to add the "also lol" at the end there, shouldn't glorify vulnerable people being scammed"
Cyanide & Happiness @Explosm: "NFT bros losing money is funnier than any of our comics."

Meme - "Lonely Ape is a dating app specifically designed to match partners based on your crypto wallet, NFT portfolio, and net worth."

Meme - "How it started
How to make money trading crypto
Travellight 6 years ago
How it’s going
I joined onlyfans
Travellight 2 years ago"

Crypto Holders Say It’s Hurt Their Personal Relationships - Bloomberg - "About 60% of crypto investors say their belief or investments in the space have had a negative impact on their personal relationships... there’s a direct correlation between the percentage of someone’s net worth that’s invested in cryptocurrencies and the likelihood they say their personal relationships have been impacted negatively.   “The stress on relationships could come from a number of fronts,” said Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at Oanda Asia-Pacific Pte. “One person in a relationship investing in cryptos when their partner is a vehement non-believer would create natural stresses -- especially when cryptos have such large intraday swings in value and thus, the value of the portfolio.”  What’s more, he added, “money and greed can corrupt. If one person becomes a paper millionaire, or loses everything, the perception of both parties toward each other could change.”... About 25% of those who’ve invested 10% or less of their net worth into crypto say that they’ve seen a negative impact on their personal relationships, according to the survey, which was done with 1,033 Americans and balanced by age and gender. That number rises to 73% for those who’ve invested 10%-25% of their net worth, 94% for those who’ve invested 50%-75% of net worth -- and 100% for those who’ve invested 75% or more of their net worth."
I'm sure their acting like crazed cultists has nothing to do with it

A Crypto-Trading Hamster Is Outperforming the S&P 500 - "A hamster in Germany is redefining "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" author Burton Malkiel's belief that a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a stock ticker list in the newspaper could do just as good as a human investment professional.  The livestreamed hamster, named Mr. Goxx, has been independently trading a portfolio of various cryptocurrencies since June 12, and so far its performance has been impressive. As of Friday, the portfolio was up nearly 24%, according to the @mrgoxx twitter feed that documents daily performance, along with every trade made by the hamster. Mr. Goxx's performance outpaces bitcoin and the S&P 500 over the same time period."

Elaborate ‘CryptoEats’ Food Delivery Scam Steals $500,000 in Minutes - "For the last week, a handful of UK-based celebrities have been talking about a new startup, called “CryptoEats,” that would compete against UberEats by allowing customers to pay for food delivery in cryptocurrency... What makes CryptoEats more interesting than your average rug pull—a type of scam endemic among cryptocurrencies and NFT projects—was the elaborate setup, as well as the speed of its disappearance. Several people who watched it happen in real time suggested that the company disappeared mere minutes after the token sale launch, after a week or so of a concerted, influencer-led hypefest, which was detailed and archived by the YouTuber Scarcity Studios."

Meme - "How it started - Dogecoin to the MOON!"
"How it's going - I'm Starting a Job at Amazon Warehouse ISK"

What Is Bitcoin? Just a Form of Astrology for Men. - "Only around 15 percent of the Bitcoin community are women, while the remaining members are men who view themselves as the new “wolves of Wall Street,” staking their entire livelihoods on cryptocurrency. Bitcoin works just like any stock: You invest when the market is at a certain price, and you make money if the price increases. To a layman investor, which way the market goes is totally out of your hands, meaning that getting a payout is as based on skill as winning the lottery because your horoscope told you you’d be lucky that month. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that 37 percent of adult women in the United States believed in astrology versus only 20 percent of men. Straight guys, however, often fall on the “telling everyone who will listen that it’s made-up bullshit” end of the astrology spectrum.  Katie, a 24-year-old from Falkirk, a town in the Central Lowlands of Scotland, loves learning about astrology and practicing tarot. “It helps me to be a more insightful, well-rounded, and grounded person,” she says. But when she mentions her interests to straight men, they either “outright laugh in your face” or “you’re met with a rant about how silly it is to think you can know someone from their ‘horoscope,’ followed by a lengthy, mansplainy explanation as to why astrology and tarot are ridiculous and you’re an idiot to believe in it.” If cishet guys like something, it’s automatically deemed the epitome of cultural capital, whether it’s beer and sports or cars and war. All the while, boy bands, the color pink, and other aspects deemed “feminine” are considered less worthy—the Twilight series, One Direction, and rom-coms are all incredibly financially successful, but they’re perceived as trashy because teenage girls love them.  The exact type of guy who looks down on interests such as astrology tends to be a different kind of believer, one who is equally as reliant on the fates: a Bitcoin bro"
I like how debunking bullshit and pseudoscience is "mansplaining". But then we know that mansplaining is basically when a man says something a woman doesn't like. Though she is careful to label them as "cishet". It's also curious how disbelief in astrology is conflated with a belief in crypto

San Francisco man who can't remember Bitcoin password says he's 'made peace' with $220 million loss - "Stefan Thomas went viral this week after a New York Times profile revealed to the world his unsettling dilemma: The password to unlock his Bitcoin fortune is locked in a hard drive that gives users 10 attempts before wiping clean. Thomas has just two more tries.   In an interview with our sister station KGO-TV on Wednesday, Thomas said it's now been nine years since he first realized he was locked out of his account, which means he's had ample time to process it.. Ian Sherr, Editor-at-Large at CNET News, explained that Thomas' situation is not that uncommon. "The way that Bitcoin works, and that this technology works, is that it's all meant to be anonymous," Sherr said. "But a lot of this data is actually hidden behind a specific password that you have to get into your account."  Sherr said there are many people who bought Bitcoins years ago back when they were worth very little, wrote down their password somewhere, "and just thought it wouldn't be a thing."."
Not secure enough. He needs even more security, like 5 attempts before wiping the drive

How Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble - "Bitcoin's total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 annualised terawatt hours (TWh), with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours.  The UK's electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the CCAF's best guess for Bitcoin.  And the electricity the Bitcoin miners use overwhelmingly comes from polluting sources.  The CCAF team surveys the people who manage the Bitcoin network around the world on their energy use and found that about two-thirds of it is from fossil fuels... The software ensures it always takes 10 minutes for the puzzle to be solved, so if the number of miners is increasing, the puzzle gets harder and the more computing power needs to be thrown at it. Bitcoin is therefore actually designed to encourage increased computing effort... All the millions of trillions of calculations it takes to keep the system running aren't really doing any useful work.  "They're computations that serve no other purpose," says de Vries, "they're just immediately discarded again. Right now we're using a whole lot of energy to produce those calculations, but also the majority of that is sourced from fossil energy."  The vast effort it requires also makes Bitcoin inherently difficult to scale, he argues. "If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [US] Federal budget to spend on electricity."  "We'd have to double our global energy production," he says with a laugh. "For Bitcoin."  He says it also limits the number of transactions the system can process to about five per second.  This doesn't make for a useful currency... The two essential features of a successful currency are that it is an effective form of exchange and a stable store of value, says Ken Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  He says Bitcoin is neither."

Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by 'entire countries' - "A single transaction of bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as 680,000 Visa transactions or 51,210 hours of watching YouTube, according to the site... Vitalik Buterin, the computer scientist who invited ethereum, told IEEE Spectrum that mining cryptocurrency can be “a huge waste of resources, even if you don’t believe that pollution and carbon dioxide are an issue”, Buterin said. “There are real consumers – real people – whose need for electricity is being displaced by this stuff.” Currently, ethereum’s mining works similarly to bitcoin where the most powerful computers have an edge in getting the most bitcoin as computers compete to complete a transaction first. Ethereum’s developers are working on changing that system so that miners enter a pool and are randomly selected to complete the transaction and receive an ether in return. This method, called “proof-of-stake”, guarantees that less electricity will be used to mine the currency.  But with bitcoin still reigning as the top cryptocurrency and, with endorsements from established companies and investment banks, the currency’s environmental impact is only likely to grow."

sassal.eth 🦇🔊 on Twitter - "40% pullbacks in crypto = "healthy correction, buying the dip here, generational wealth tomorrow"
40% pullbacks in stonks = "the world is literally ending and my wife and kids are going to leave me""

Cryptocurrency's nouveau riche lament sudden losses with Bitcoin in freefall - "With Bitcoin in freefall, many of the newcomers who helped power the cryptocurrency to stratospheric levels this year are also some of the loudest about getting burned."

Bitcoin falls as China declares all crypto transactions illegal

Major Cryptocurrencies—Including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin—Plummet As China Widens Crackdown - "Local authorities claim the latest crackdown has cut the country’s bitcoin production by more than 90%"

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