I wasn’t aware that they made Paolo the CEO until reading this article. Initially I thought Amy made a typo and had to google it. I guess JVL was sick of doing all of those media appearances /s.
by now i suspect there’s plenty enough of these sleazes that were given an offer that they can’t refuse. not like crypto was supposed to last forever anyway
There’s a particular judge in the Northern District of Texas who has a track record of insane rulings, I forget his name. Anyway, someone on bsky pointed out that this stupid complaint may be written for this guy in the hope they win the lottery for Worst Ruling Ever.
Reed O’Connor, we’ve just added a new bit to the article:
Update April 28: One possible reason for Consensys filing this bizarre complaint in the Northern District of Texas is that it’s likely to go to Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee known for his history of such bizarre rulings that even the present Supreme Court has consistently knocked them back. O’Connor might plausibly go for the complaint’s good ol’ boy hollering about the evils of fed overreach.
Consensys is weirdly vague about precisely when they moved to Texas. There wasn’t a press release. CoinDesk says Consensys’ office is in a WeWork, though WeWork only has the fourth floor of 5049 Edwards Ranch Road, Fort Worth, TX 76109, and there are other companies in the building. Various sources give their move date to Fort Worth as December 2023, though they were sending out press releases datelined Forth Worth as early as June 2023. [CoinDesk]
Did Consensys move to Forth Worth specifically to try to win a bizarre ruling from O’Connor with this weird filing as their judicial lottery ticket? This is almost too crypto an idea to seriously posit, but it’s less nonsensical than any other interpretation we have. Ideas welcome!
And then Consensys admitted it on the Unchained podcast:
Laura Brookover on Unchained: “We moved to TX because it’s a wonderful laboratory for innovation. TX celebrates individual freedom. Celebrates technology. It’s a great opportunity for us, being here to call on the courts to please help us because what the SEC is doing is unlawful.”
Meanwhile, Tether has printed 11 billion tethers just since the start of 2024. It’s at 103 billion tethers and counting.
We suspect the tethers are being printed out of thin air and accounted as loans — the fresh USDT is “backed” by the loan itself.
I am not a financial expert by any means, so maybe I’m totally missing something here, but I really do not understand how Tether isn’t the most obvious scam of all time.
It feels like the type of scheme a high schooler would come up with and call it an “infinite money glitch” while patting themselves on the back for just outsmarting Warren Buffett.
This is part of why I never got into mining BTC. Even if I have a decent business plan and I can afford all of the externalities, I’d still be profiting almost entirely from the bad choices of retail investors. (And isn’t “retail investor” such a nasty euphemism?)
Remember that after Binance got hit with the compliance hammer, traders’ details are no longer safe from US anti-money-laundering agencies.
What I like about this is that it contains multitudes. Specifically I like the multitude where libertarians thought BTC would deliver them from government scrutiny/taxes but failed to understand, well, everything.
reading about the North Dimension bit[0], it keeps being amazing how absolutely banal and outright obviously bullshit all the scam operations were, and that any of the people involved in it could try to go “who, me?” after the fact is astounding to a degree I barely have words for
[0] for a couple of years from around 2017~2018, my city had a bad case of coiner startups (even with its own mini collective of ICO hopefuls), so I stayed away from the space as much as I could because they all made my skin crawl. resultingly there’s some intermediate details that I missed
I think that’s literally the reason they designed it this way lol. At least it’s been the line from as far back as I remember. Because we all know inflation is bad, so surely a strongly deflationary currency must be really good!!! It’s just free value!!!
“If inflation is bad, deflation must be good” was a notion I had when I was like 12, my dad (an economist) swiftly disabused me of that notion.
I think there’s a (deliberate?) confusion about the interwar years. People know 2 things:
the Great Depression
hyperinflation in Wiemar Germany
They think those are connected (they are, kinda) and think that inflation caused the great Depression, when in fact it was characterized by deflation.
Back in the early days of Bitcoin there was this weird Mellon-esque view that debt==bad and that a deflationary economy would encourage savings. This is one of the many ways that Austrian economics is childish and shallow.
Another thing I’ve had thought about - if the gold standard is so superior, why doesn’t a country base its currency on it and outcompete everyone else? If you ask that you’ll inevitably get conspiracy theories about how (((they))) won’d allow it.
I'm of the opinion that the gold standard was obsolete around the time when the railroad and the telegraph were being rolled out on a wide scale and that shiny metal fetishism was heavily responsible for the longer and deeper economic crises of the 1800s and early 1900s.
I’ve had someone try to bully me into buying Luna a couple months before it collapsed because they understood economics and I was a fool for not wanting free money and letting my vast welfare ressources get eaten by inflation. I don’t think crypto can function without this narrative.
Also I’m wondering now how they square their Ponzi scheming with the popular libertarian slogan about free lunches, and I imagine the answer is something like “by not thinking about it”.
On top of the libertarian agenda there is this gambling/betting agenda that is in the DNA of all this stuff. For example, immutability is a bet that the bad reasons for modifying something will always be more prominent than the good reasons. The reasons for modifying something in the future is an unanswerable question, but they’ve bet on an outcome. I remember reading the Arweave documentation about how they feel they can claim that it is a permanent storage solution based on tokenomics and all that shit. Just like the halvening, it’s a bet that the thing will exponentially increase in relevance, usefulness, importance etc. The bet is that more people are mining bitcoin because it is becoming more important for life. It’s like they’re so sure of the usefulness they never bother to talk about it, instead they talk about the nitty gritty around an imaginary world where the bet has paid off.
It’s like picking numbers for a lotto ticket you’ll buy in 20 years time and spending the next 20 years planning how to properly manage all the money you will win.
Funnily enough, a big cheese in the early Bitcoin era is noted crazy person Luke-Jr, who released his own fork of a client that censored SatoshiDice because he is a sedevacantist Catholic who hates gambling.
I’m low-key fascinated by Luke-Jr’s craziness, but it’s kinda sad because apparently he has multiple kids.
he opposed “big blockers” (the proposal to increase the Bitcoin block size beyond 1MB) because he lives in rural Florida and has bad bandwidth. (The big blockers subsequently created “Bitcoin Cash”, tried to get it the ticket BCC, but did not succeed because that was used by scamcoin Bitcoin Connect. They also missed registering /r/BCH, which was instantly squatted on by anti-Bitcoin Cash people)
in the beginning of Covid he washed all fresh produce in bleach
Fair warning, I’m not a Yank and am culturally Lutheran (but personally areligious), so take this editorializing with a pinch of salt, but it does seem like performative tradcath is a facet of weird online culture
Maybe I’m remembering this wrong, but isn’t block difficulty adjusted depending on how much computing is thrown at the blockchain? Which means the incentive for miners would be, uh, just power through and hope your competitors fold before you do? Like the car scene in Rebel Without a Cause but boring and stupid.
Correct, the difficulty (official term) adjusts every ~14 days so that the average time between blocks remains 10 minutes or so. But the rewards of each block is constant within each halving period. So you can outcompete other miners by purchasing better hardware, or getting cheaper power, but it’s a slow grinding process.
The halvening instantly halves the block reward, so everything is twice as expensive per bitcoin. If your margins are thin now, they’re even thinner after the halvening.
Here’s a chart of the difficulty over time (no endorsement of blockchain.com, this is public info):
Yeah, and even worse for bitcoin, when all the miner competitors fold (and the block difficulty goes down) the old mining equipment still exists. So this could be cheaply gotten by bad(er) faith people who want to fuck with the mining (for which you wouldn’t need to run the rigs constantly, or in the case of some bad faith miners they are not really bound that much by budgets). Of course the utility of this is a bit low, as most you can do (I think) is disrupt parts of network for a while (which could open up some financial fraud things) but still, if I was a state looking to disrupt crypto because some of my enemies are using it, getting large mining capacity at pennies for the dollar would be a potential move (I don’t think states actually see crypto at large as a threat to anything btw, which if I was a diehard gold standard anti state cypherpunk crypto bro would make me worry).
I do wonder if the price of mining will eventually fall so low that only state backed miners or fraudulent miners can still mine (mining is easy if you don’t pay for your power).
The physical coin thing. I recall the moment coiners were all gloating and mocking the TSA agent who was looking for physical bitcoins on some person traveling with bitcoin paraphernalia. ‘silly idiot doesn’t he know that cryptocurrencies are virtual’, but yeah of course they are also making physical coins with the magical numbers in/on them. But surely this isn’t too complicated for the normal unbanked people to understand and safely use. (The number is going down right, so we are back to banking the unbanked right?)
I once worked for an enterprise blockchain startup, it’s all part of my origin story, and my first competitive analysis presentation was about how we were making a blockchain SaaS that competes with industry giants that could bolt on blockchain in a weekend if it had any legs. I’d say every enterprise blockchain product suffers the same fate
Woah, my origin story is also rooted in working for a blockchain startup. At one point I had to try to explain to the (technical gifted but financially reckless) founders that making a private blockchain was the worst possible way to do the thing they wanted to do. I can’t remember if I was mostly ignored, or if they understood my point but went ahead with the project anyway because they still figured VCs would care. Either way the project was shelved within a month.
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