Snippings

xxx

The key point of Escaping the Dark Forest, Samczsun’s account of their night’s work, is that, after the group spotted the vulnerability and built a transaction to rescue the funds, they could not put the rescue transaction in the public mempool because it would have been front-run by a bot. They had to find a miner who would put the transaction in a block without it appearing in the mempool. In other words, their transaction needed a dark pool. And they had to trust the cooperative miner not to front-run it.

From DSHR’s Blog: EE380 Talk.

xxx

xxx

Vitalik Buterin pointed out that lack of decentralization was a security risk in 2017, and this was amply borne out last year when Justin Sun conspired with three exchanges, staking their customers coins to take over the Steem Proof-of-Stake blockchain. Pushing back against the economic forces centralizing these systems is extremely difficult.

From DSHR’s Blog: EE380 Talk.

xxx

xxx

One recent study, which a team of researchers published in the leading science journal Nature, for example, found that “the top 10% of traders alone perform 85% of all transactions and trade at least once 97% of all assets.” All things considered, the top 10 percent of “buyer–seller pairs” are as active as everyone else combined. All in all, the research paints a picture of the NFT market almost completely captured by “whales,” or deep-pocketed players in crypto.

From Researchers: The NFT Economy Is Just as Unequal as the Real One.

xxx

xxx

LooksRare financially rewards users for their trading volume, which predictably led to people gaming the system. Just this week, it surpassed OpenSea in trade volume thanks to what crypto analytics firm CryptoSlam estimated to be $8.3 billion worth of wash trading―approximately 87 percent of its total trading volume since launching on Jan. 10, Decrypt reported.

From The NFT Ecosystem Is a Complete Disaster – VICE.

xxx

xxx

The platform which sold an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet for $2.9 million has halted most transactions because people were selling tokens of content that did not belong to them, its founder said, calling this a “fundamental problem” in the fast-growing digital assets market.

From NFT marketplace suspends most sales, citing ‘rampant’ fakes and plagiarism – CNN.

xxx

xxx

Consumers in Glasgow in Scotland can now take part in a pilot scheme that rewards participants with a micropayment made directly into a digital wallet on their smartphone every time they recycle a single-use plastic bottle.

To take part in Scotland’s Deposit Return Scheme pilot, consumers first download the Recycle Glasgow app that enables them to scan the barcode on single-use plastic bottles and receive a 20p (US$0.27) refund in the app’s wallet for every bottle they return to a smart recycling bin or a participating convenience store across the city.

From Scotland trials digital micropayments as rewards for recycling plastic • NFCW.

xxx

xxx

For the past 12 years Anthony Welch and his partner Theresa have been living a Robinson Crusoe life alone on a South Pacific island mostly untouched by humanity.
Welch, a retired British property investor, hopes the tranquility will soon be shattered by 21,000 cryptocurrency investors he is trying to convince to move to his island and form a regulation-free “crypto utopia”.
Under Welch’s plan, the 3 million sq metre (32 million sq ft) island, which is part of the Vanuatu archipelago between Australia and Fiji, would be transformed from 90% undisturbed rainforest into a “sustainable smart city”, filled with multistorey apartment blocks and offices for cryptocurrency investors from around the world.

From Bitcoin paradise? Briton creates ‘crypto utopia’ in South Pacific | Cryptocurrencies | The Guardian:

xxx

xxx

I was sitting a webinar the other day, having a cup of tea and listening to a discussion about the future of retail banking. That’s about as exciting as it get for me. But then someone on the panel said “data is the new oil” and sat back as if they had delivered a revelation. That was great, because it gave me the opportunity to say something at the last. That’s because only is not a revelation (since management consultants say it all the time), but it’s not true.

From Data Is Not The New Oil – by David G.W. Birch.

xxx

Jack Dorsey’s tbDEX is now turning this into a reality. The tbDEX protocol will manage trust by charging transaction fees based on the anonymity maintained by the transactors. The transaction costs are governed by the magnitude of risk involved. If users demand maximum anonymity, transaction fees are also much higher and vice versa.

xxx

But she had willingly handed over her seed phrase, and there was little anyone could do to actually get her art back.

From Crypto’s Town Square Has Become “a Scammer’s Paradise.” Why Isn’t Discord Doing More to Clean It Up? — The Information.

xxx

 

You see the same problem with authorised push payment (APP) fraud here in the UK.