Nobody Cares: the Non-Fungible Thread

[Noodles]

Wasn't Libra that one that Facebook created?

Looks like yes, but no.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diem_(digital_currency)

They renammed it.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

LOL: "In contrast to cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin which use permissionless blockchains, Libra was not planned to be decentralized, relying on trust in the Libra Association as "a de facto central bank"."

So the blockchain component was purely cosmetic, it was just a database.

 

[Free]

Just more of the same.

Someone Hacked Paul Krugman's Twitter and Made an Entire Fake Website for the New York Times to Shill a "New York Times Coin" Scam Coin

A vocal crypto skeptic has found his social media account hacked to shill a fake cryptocurrency named after the New York Times.

futurism.com

Look no further than Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, crypto skeptic, and former New York Times columnist who found his X-formerly-Twitter account hacked to shill a fake cryptocurrency last night. "Introducing $NYTC — The New York Times Coin," read a post on his account.

Embedded in the post was a link to a fake article, bearing Krugman's byline and mocked up to look like the real New York Times — except on the domain "newyorkstimes.com."

"In a bold move that redefines the intersection of journalism and digital finance, The New York Times has launched its very own cryptocurrency on the Solana blockchain," the article reads. "This venture signals a transformative shift in how traditional media engages with its audience in the digital era."

 

[Free]

Bybit has got some problems, though apparently they've got the theft funds covered?

Cryptocurrency theft of £1.1bn could be biggest ever, says Bybit

Dubai-based Bybit said it could afford to reimburse customers and that it was working to find the hackers.

www.bbc.com

Cryptocurrency firm Bybit said hackers stole $1.5bn (£1.1bn) worth of digital currency in what could be the biggest crypto theft in history.

The Dubai-based company's founder told users that their funds were "safe" and that it would refund any of those affected.

It said hackers stole from its Ethereum coin digital wallet. Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency by value after Bitcoin.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Just more of the same.

Someone Hacked Paul Krugman's Twitter and Made an Entire Fake Website for the New York Times to Shill a "New York Times Coin" Scam Coin

A vocal crypto skeptic has found his social media account hacked to shill a fake cryptocurrency named after the New York Times.

futurism.com

Wow that doesn't seem like more of the same to me! Twitter accounts and even YouTube accounts get hijacked all the time to shill Crypto it's true, but the details of this particular one suggest it was very personally targeted.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Crypto trader kills himself on X live to create a meme coin

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

You guys:

Me:

 

[Casey Pelous]

Crypto trader kills himself on X live to create a meme coin

• Within minutes of his death, traders launched memecoins using his name, leading to backlash over whether it’s ethical to profit off suicide.

So now we know what it takes to get this crowd to raise some (fleeting) ethical concerns. I note, too, it's "whether it's ethical" -- like it is some philosophical fine point that wise scholars might debate at length.

 

[Free]

Shedding bitcoin tears.

Bitcoin plunges as crypto fans didn’t get everything they wanted from Trump

Bitcoin hit record $109,000 on Inauguration Day but has dropped 23 percent since.

arstechnica.com

The price of bitcoin hit a record high of $109,114.88 during intraday trading on January 20, the day of President Trump's inauguration, but has plummeted since and went as low as $83,741.94 during today's trading.

That's a 23.3 percent drop from the intraday record to today's low, though it was back over $84,000 as of this writing. Bitcoin had been above $100,000 as recently as February 7, and was over $96,000 on Monday this week.

Bitcoin's drop is part of a wider rout in which over $800 billion of nominal value "has been wiped off global cryptocurrency markets in recent weeks, as the enthusiasm that swept the crypto industry after Donald Trump's election victory last year ebbs away," the Financial Times wrote today.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Shedding bitcoin tears.

Bitcoin plunges as crypto fans didn’t get everything they wanted from Trump

Bitcoin hit record $109,000 on Inauguration Day but has dropped 23 percent since.

arstechnica.com

Bitcoin goes all over the place. A year or two ago it was down to $17,000.

 

[Free]

Bitcoin goes all over the place. A year or two ago it was down to $17,000.

His point is that "deregulation" - more like opening things up to a free for all for scammers and grifters - is not helpful in attracting normal investors.

 

[Free]

We may have reached the country-destroying stage for the world's bitcoin myopism. A look at El Salvador's current crypto-nationalization efforts by "the world's coolest dictator"...

An Entire Country Switched Over to Bitcoin and It's Turned Into a Disaster

Four years into a frenzied experiment in Bitcoin, El Salvador is still waiting for the promised crypto dream to come true.

futurism.com

 

[Free]

Jack Dorsey's Flailing Crypto Business Is Laying Off More Than 900 Employees

Jack Dorsey is making sweeping layoffs at Block, affecting 931 employees, or about 8 percent of the company's total staff.

futurism.com

Despite some fintech tycoons' promises that crypto will enable "infinite growth," companies are brushing up against the limits of blockchain hype faster than they anticipated.

The latest among them is Block, the financial service conglomerate owned by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey. Block encompasses massive fintech platforms like Cash App and Square, as well as more boutique crypto outfits like Bitkey, a digital crypto wallet started in 2023.

Now the company is seeing brutal cuts. In an email titled "smaller block," according to TechCrunch, the company's billionaire CEO announced the layoffs of 931 Block employees, or about 8 percent of the company's total staff.

"hi all," the hip all-lowercase message opens, dripping in authenticity the way only a CEO's email can. "today we’ll be making some org changes, including eliminating roles and beginning the consultation process in countries where required."

Dorsey proceeds to announce immediate layoffs and an overhaul to Block's managerial strategies, including 80 manager layoffs and 193 demotions from manager to "individual contributor roles." It also includes the immediate closure of some 748 open jobs that Block had been hiring for.

"thank you to all those leaving us," the CEO concludes. "we will continue to honor [your work] by increasing our value to our customers, and therefore to all of our shareholders, including you."

I'm sure that will help them all sleep at night.

Apparently, Jack Dorsey can't run a successful "financial services" business. Pass it on.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Apparently, Jack Dorsey can't run a successful "financial services" business. Pass it on.

This article on Medium from October 2022 well foretold the future. It also worries me about Bluesky, more than a little. The whole article is so important, I hope people read this, but here are some quotes.

No, Elon and Jack are not “competitors.” They’re collaborating.

Wherein I attempt to clarify a number of ridiculous and false narratives currently taking hold about Musk and Dorsey’s “rivalry.”

davetroy.medium.com

Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter has been met with surprise, derision, and gnashing of teeth — and an overwhelming amount of well-intentioned but poorly-informed commentary and analysis.

As someone who has followed the company closely since its inception and has had a chance to talk in depth about technical topics with Jack Dorsey and the company’s other founders over the years, I have a different view.

Q: Jack Dorsey is launching “Bluesky,” a new social network to compete with Twitter. I’ll just join that instead!

A: Sorry to disappoint, but Dorsey played a key role in Musk’s deal to take Twitter private. The two are good friends. And Bluesky is an initiative launched by Twitter. In April, Dorsey wrote, “In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.”

Q: What does Dorsey mean, “I trust [Musk’s] mission to extend the light of consciousness?”

A: This is a reference to “longtermism,” the heavily marketed philosophy being promoted by Musk and his friend William MacAskill that asserts the only thing that matters is humanity’s future in space, and that the only goal of the living is to maximize the number of future humans alive, as well as the number of artificial intelligence instances that could possibly exist in the future. This mandate is most often used to brush aside calls for improving conditions and alleviating suffering among the living here on Earth now. Because, the theory goes, giving a poor person a blanket isn’t likely to be as useful for the future of humanity as building a rocket to Mars.

 

[Free]

The biggest grifter has the greatest reach, and it'll all pay off for him.

Trump’s newest grift: Building a cryptocurrency empire while destroying its regulators

Inside the Trump family’s sprawling crypto empire — from memecoins to mining — and how Trump is using presidential power to dismantle the regulators who could stop it

www.citationneeded.news

In an unprecedented abuse of presidential power, Donald Trump is dismantling federal cryptocurrency oversight while building a sprawling family crypto empire worth billions. Through World Liberty Financial, a planned decentralized finance platform that also recently announced its own stablecoin, the Trump family is positioning to profit from facilitating cryptocurrency lending and trading. Through Truth.Fi, they seek direct exposure to bitcoin and profits from hawking investment products to Trump’s most loyal base. Through a new bitcoin mining venture, they’re gaining control over crypto infrastructure and expanding exposure to assets that Trump himself can influence from the White House. And through a series of memecoins, NFTs, and even a planned crypto game, the Trumps are converting political support directly into cash. This empire is set to profit precisely because Trump is gutting the regulations that would normally constrain it — brazen self-dealing that dwarfs even the unchecked emoluments violations of his first term. This is only one of the many widespread abuses characterizing the most flagrant exploitation of presidential authority in American history.

 

[Free]

Bitcoin Mining Is No Longer Worth it

The cost of electricity outweighs the coin's price.

gizmodo.com

After a dip that coincided with when the stock market crashed (remember when Bitcoin was supposed to be a hedge against market volatility?), the cryptocurrency is pushing back up toward its all-time high. Despite that, it seems that mining for the cryptocurrency is no longer worth it, even for some larger mining operations. According to data recently published by CoinShares, the cost of electricity and computational power needed to mine for Bitcoin now often exceeds the actual value of the coin.

 

[Free]

Part of the NFT price tag obviously didn't include long-term storage.

Reality Hits for "Art" Collectors as Million-Dollar Nike NFTs Vanish From Internet

Folks who shelled out millions of dollars for NFTs got a taste in digital ephemera when tens of thousands went dark earlier this month.

futurism.com

Remember when the guys who spent millions of dollars on non-fungible tokens (NFTs) would get mad at detractors for saying they shelled out for glorified JPGs? Turns out those critics may have been onto something.

As 404 Media reports, tens of thousands of NFTs from a collection known as CloneX RTFKT — a collaboration between Nike's "digital sneakers" venture and Japanese visual artist Takashi Murakami — started to disappear because the team behind the effort didn't shell out to keep the expensive digital images hosted.

 

[Free]

It's been a while since we've talked about crypto. So, how's it going?

Trump Bankrupted Tons of Crypto Bros and Caused Its Biggest Wipeout Ever With One TruthSocial Post

Since 2007, Jezebel has been the Internet's most treasured source for everything celebrities, sex, and politics...with teeth.

www.splinter.com

Crypto had its largest liquidation event in history by several orders of magnitude on Friday, with an estimated $19 billion in leverage wiped out, all off of one Trump post that erased about $560 billion off the total crypto market cap.

Oh. Well, at least it looks like the crypto fans have learned the lesson that when you make friends with Donald J. Trump, you and your money are soon departed.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Oh it gets better. It's been discovered that a handful of accounts, including a couple of brand new ones that were only opened a day or so before the announcement, all grabbed massive short positions literally in the minutes leading up to Trump's post. Someone close to Trump who knew or had control over the timing of the post was able to make sure all of his friends made a fortune off of the crash that they knew was about to happen. One of the insiders made $88m from it.

 

[Noodles]

In less exciting news, Reddit is getting rid of the NFT crap it forced on everyone.