A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
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@topspin Yeah, that thought did cross my mind, but . Now that I've browsed around, the internet is mostly calling BS.
(Paging @stillwater because this was in India and cultural insight would be interesting.)
Edit: whew, longpost is long.
Source: @jespow
NB: Jesse Powell is a co-founder/CEO of another shitcoin exchange, Kraken.
Source: @luca_nabil
Source: @stroanbot
Link goes to this Reddit thread.
Source: @RichardHeartWin
Link leads to this Reddit thread. (Reminder: armchair investigators on Reddit are not forensics experts.)
Source: Katie Moussouris @k8em0
(Reminder: Katie is a security researcher with enough achievements to have a Wikipedia page.)
Mr. Cotten was diligent in other areas of his life. He signed a will on Nov. 27, less than two weeks before he died. He appointed Ms. Robertson as the executor of his estate and outlined the distribution of his assets, including an airplane, property in British Columbia and Nova Scotia, and two pet chihuahuas named Nitro and Gully, along with $100,000 for their care.
Source: Paywalled The Globe and Mail article or archive.is copy
And in that will he completely forgot about the shitcoins.
With apologies to Roger Waters, "this shitcoiner has… shat himself to death".
Source: /r/QuadrigaCX2¹
¹ Not to be confused with
/r/QuadrigaCX
, which is moderated by the staff of the topical exchange and aggressively pruned of any unfavourable content.
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@DCoder Wow.
What's the implied narrative here? He was murdered in India?
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@stillwater Not quite murdered.
- His shitcoin exchange spent all of 2018 in a legal fight against the Canadian Imperial Bank, which froze their assets for good raisins.
- Most of the shitcoins used by that exchange were in cold storage where only he could access them.
- In November, he organized his will, without any instructions for how to access those shitcoins.
- In December, he went on a business trip to India to "open an orphanage".
- In January, the exchange released a statement that "he died on December 9 from complications arising from Crohn’s disease while traveling in India".
- As a result, nobody can access the shitcoins in his cold storage.
As a result, most of the internet are saying he faked his death and bribed some locals to get a fake death certificate, and whatever else needed. Amateur sleuths are digging up whatever they can and arguing themselves blue over it: he is dead, he is alive, his orphanage was a scam, it was real, his wife is in on it, his wife had no clue, and whatever other theory they come up with.
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@DCoder To be fair to the people who say that he faked his death: Crohn's is an eminently treatable disease and if you die due to it then you severely neglected your treatments for quite a while.
Not to mention that if you're that ill due to Crohn's then India with its sanitary problems is the last place you want to be. You're also usually not fit for travelling at all.
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@DCoder Faking a death and getting a certificate is not that big of a deal. Pay the right people is all.
If one has health problems, why would they come to India in the first place? I simply cannot explain this one. Healthcare is a fucking joke here.
Also, a theory that offers an explanation for his death regardless of how wild it might sound in the western world, is perfectly plausible in India. I can tell you that much. Visit the Indian subreddit and read the news posted there and you'll know how bizarre things can be in India.
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@stillwater said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
If one has health problems, why would they come to India in the first place? I simply cannot explain this one. Healthcare is a fucking joke here.
You're missing it. India isn't the easiest place to get treatment for a disease, it's the easiest place to pay for someone to say you have the disease.
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@pie_flavor I assumed it was diagnosed outside India. My bad.
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Bitcoin Is Worth Less Than the Cost to Mine It, JPMorgan Says
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@TimeBandit JPMorgan is Late to the Party, Everyone Else Says
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@pie_flavor
I hear that later in the week, they're planning two earth shattering exclusives, revealing the sky is blue and that water is wet!
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@izzion said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
revealing the sky is blue and that water is wet!
Isn't the water blue?
Is the sky full of water?
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@TimeBandit said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Isn't the water blue?
No, it just is better at refracting light in the blue spectrum.
Is the sky full of water?
Yes, for now.
Not anymore.
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Source: Catalin Cimpanu @campuscodi
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@DCoder He should have put his tattoos on the blockchain.
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@TimeBandit said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@izzion said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
revealing the sky is blue and that water is wet!
Isn't the water blue?
Is the sky full of water?It was. Then God made the water come down and he told some dude to build a boat, (he was literally the only one on the Earth to have such a thing at the time) eventually most of the water disappeared and the earth reappeared instead.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
It was. Then God made the water come down and he told some dude to build a boat, (he was literally the only one on the Earth to have such a thing at the time) eventually most of the water disappeared and the earth reappeared instead.
I fucking hate how insane the backstory for Kingdom Hearts is.
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@Lorne-Kates Sounds more like Anthem to me.
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Is this just a new kind of fool that IBM has found?
This document serves as a proof of ownership of goods, as a receipt of goods and a contract of the shipment, and normally it’s mailed to all parties involved in the shipment, including banks providing trade financing. For the pilot, IBM created an electronic bill of lading, or e-BL, which helped reduce and speed up administrative processes “to just one second” as the document flow is automated, the company claims — while the standard paper-based procedure takes five to seven days.
Eh. OK, I definitely believe that making this stuff electronic can result in a massive speed up. There's nothing new about all that. Is the blockchain aspect of this any different than just storing the stuff in a regular database?
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Is the blockchain aspect of this any different than just storing the stuff in a regular database?
Now when the database gets huge, it plugs up the hard drive of every system that needs to interact with it, instead of staying confined within a datacenter.
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Is the blockchain aspect of this any different than just storing the stuff in a regular database?
1 - It's slower
2 - It takes more computing resources
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@TimeBandit said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Is the blockchain aspect of this any different than just storing the stuff in a regular database?
1 - It's slower
2 - It takes more computing resourcesBlockchain is to storage what JavaScript Everywhere! is to CPUs.
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@TimeBandit right, and this is the supposed benefit:
It also made for a better handling of information, providing a traceable and tamper-proof storage of records for the maritime shipment industry, where document fraud accounts for 40% of all fraud.
But, uh...why is that more tamper proof than anything else? I assume there's still some guy at the port entering stuff into an computer that gets put into the blockchain.
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
But, uh...why is that more tamper proof than anything else?
Because now if you want to tamper with records, instead of breaking or hacking into the database owner's facilities and networks, you only have to rent a botnet long enough to get over 50% of the computing resources involved in the blockchain.
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@mott555 said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
But, uh...why is that more tamper proof than anything else?
Because now if you want to tamper with records, instead of breaking or hacking into the database owner's facilities and networks, you only have to rent a botnet long enough to get over 50% of the computing resources involved in the blockchain.
Yeah, except that’s not how previous tampering worked, so that’s also not what it’s solving.
I have yet to see any use of blockchain that wouldn’t work with a proper database.
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@mott555 said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
But, uh...why is that more tamper proof than anything else?
Because now if you want to tamper with records, instead of breaking or hacking into the database owner's facilities and networks, you only have to rent a botnet long enough to get over 50% of the computing resources involved in the blockchain.
Maybe it's that I assume it's the guy filling out the paper forms who was always the weak link in the chain as opposed to people intercepting mail or something, so I'm unclear on how he suddenly got more trustworthy by entering stuff into a computer. Maybe it's all by barcode or something and his participation is really reduced? But then we're back to Plain Old Database (or shoot, go wild get a webscale one for all I care).
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Maybe it's all by barcode or something and his participation is really reduced?
Using the brand new kind of Oranges
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I have yet to see any use of blockchain that wouldn’t work with a proper database.
Blockchains are great at getting startup money from clueless investors. Databases are too 1980's and boring for that.
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I'm unclear on how he suddenly got more trustworthy by entering stuff into a computer.
Combination of digital signatures and centralised data management. Reduces both the opportunity for shenanigans and for plain old ordinary fuckups.
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@dkf said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I'm unclear on how he suddenly got more trustworthy by entering stuff into a computer.
Combination of digital signatures and centralised data management. Reduces both the opportunity for shenanigans and for plain old ordinary fuckups.
If he inputs wrong data to begin with, your blockchain will now certify that his wrong data is correct, and you've gained nothing.
If he inputs correct data, a database could keep those safe, too, unless something is completely fucked up.
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@dkf said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I'm unclear on how he suddenly got more trustworthy by entering stuff into a computer.
Combination of digital signatures and centralised data management. Reduces both the opportunity for shenanigans and for plain old ordinary fuckups.
I am just a simple cave developer. I fell in some ice and later got thawed out by your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me. Sometimes when I store something on the blockchain, did little demons get inside and type it? I don't know. My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts.
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pictures @boomzilla as a 112 year old little boy... that also yells about his lawn.
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
pictures @boomzilla as a 112 year old little boy... that also yells about his lawn.
KANEDA
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@e4tmyl33t There's even a “B” for @boomzilla on the jacket!
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@e4tmyl33t said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
pictures @boomzilla as a 112 year old little boy... that also yells about his lawn.
KANEDA
http://orig10.deviantart.net/becf/f/2007/100/c/b/boy_in_the_iceberg_by_aaronburr.jpg
I was thinking more of this, but whatever works...
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wat
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@Lorne-Kates said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
wat
That’s giving shitcoins a (w)hole new meaning.
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♪ Quench my thirst with gasoline
So gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire ♫
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@DCoder
When the numbers are so bad, you have to compare at 1:100,000 to even get within an order of magnitude. And even then it still has a bar showing 2.5x more wasted energy than the competitor (which is really 250,000x more energy).Although, to be fair, this metric appears to be using the "value" of mining revenues as the cost of the electricity (like most attempts to measure the energy consumption of bitcoin, AIUI), while assuming exactly break-even mining returns. Which seems a little "mathematically (and economically) challenged" to me... if miners really were only breaking even, you would expect mining to be shrinking at an appreciable rate.
Of course, I have no idea how hard it is to build an actual estimated W per GH/s (since my understanding is that the network hash rate is at least measurable/observable), to be able to do the calculations in the other direction...
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@izzion said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
if miners really were only breaking even, you would expect mining to be shrinking at an appreciable rate.
Not sure how well that turned out for the miners in The Expanse (which is worth a watch IMO)
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@hungrier said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The Expanse (which is worth a watch IMO)
We know. You've said so. Many times already.
https://what.thedailywtf.com/search?term=Expanse&in=posts&matchWords=all&by[]=hungrier&sortBy=relevance&sortDirection=desc&showAs=posts
https://what.thedailywtf.com/search?term=Expanse&in=posts&matchWords=all&by[]=hungrier&sortBy=relevance&sortDirection=desc&showAs=posts
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@Lorne-Kates Not as many times as people who are not me (probably)
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@izzion said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Although, to be fair, this metric appears to be using the "value" of mining revenues as the cost of the electricity (like most attempts to measure the energy consumption of bitcoin, AIUI), while assuming exactly break-even mining returns. Which seems a little "mathematically (and economically) challenged" to me... if miners really were only breaking even, you would expect mining to be shrinking at an appreciable rate.
As I understand, it self-arbitrates to pretty close to that. If the price of bitcoin rises above the expected mining yield, it's profitable to add miners.
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@PleegWat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
As I understand, it self-arbitrates to pretty close to that. If the price of bitcoin rises above the expected mining yield, it's profitable to add miners.
It would seem that sort of estimation is at least good to about the magnitude and first digit of the energy consumption. Which is consequently utterly crazy in any rational world. And this one too…
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@e4tmyl33t said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
pictures @boomzilla as a 112 year old little boy... that also yells about his lawn.
KANEDA
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Switzerland, for one, aims to digitise its border procedures with the EU fully by 2026. A SFr400m ($400m) programme known as DaziT will provide a central online portal for all customs services. This will, for instance, allow travellers to use smartphones and tablets to declare foreign purchases on which duties may be owed.
The security of such systems is likely to be protected by blockchain, the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. A blockchain records transactions on a decentralised register in a way that is difficult to tamper with. Last May Singapore introduced electronic certificates of origin, based on blockchain, for goods travelling into and out of the country. The system, developed by vCargo Cloud, a local firm, allows a mobile-phone app to be used to scan a QR code, a fancy type of matrix bar code, attached to the goods in question. The app will reveal the certificate.
Singapore’s busy port, along with ports in Hong Kong, Rotterdam, Philadelphia and other places, have started to use a blockchain-enabled process called TradeLens. This is the result of a collaboration between Maersk, a big Danish shipping firm, and IBM, an American computer firm. TradeLens provides access to a range of electronic data tracking shipping containers and their contents for importers, freight forwarders, port operators and customs authorities.
I can see the ruskies doing 51% attack on that shit as clear as day.
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@HardwareGeek said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@kt_ said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
vCargo
CloudCultYes?
2.0. vCargo Cult 2.0.
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@kt_ said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I can see the ruskies doing 51% attack on that shit as clear as day.
It's not quite clear to me, is this a global block chain a la bitcoin? Or a separate blockchain for each shipment, where all permit and shipping slip is cryptographically tied together in order but not linked to any other shipment?
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