November 2021 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Obstruction of Justice: PayPal's Conditional Bitlicense COVID-19 Earnings Manipulation Scheme
by Gunnar Larson 29 Nov '21

29 Nov '21

As the MIA Coin and NYCCoin fraud rages on, one must think back and glean insights on how we got here. Whatever (!) Is going on down in Miami, seems to be leaching into New York. Yes, the rumors are true, Interlocking Board Directorates likely participated in PayPal's Conditional Bitlicense COVID-19 earnings manipulation scheme. Failure to rectify the matter racks up to one of the largest Obstruction of Justice instances of modern virtual currency times. Graduate research conducted over the last six years by preeminent global industry scholars, who embody a strong sense of integrity and pride in the social importance and credibility of good institutional design, tease out the following incidents. With friendly intentions, there is no way out of us moving forward. Corruption occurs when the private search for economic advantage and personal advancement clashes with laws and norms that condemn such behavior. Further complicating the picture, some illegal corrupt transactions drain public resources away from education, health care, and effective infrastructure—the kinds of investments that can improve economic performance and raise living standards for all. Perhaps even more significant, there is no reason to think that PayPal, one of the more convenient and commonly-used online payment methods out there, will behave any better given their clear anti-cryptocurrency policy history. Paypal will likely further exploit their monopoly position and risk undermining a pure environment that maximizes the socially beneficial conditions of virtual currencies. Our estimation strategy so far has been predicated on the assumption that political and legal institutions affect sustainability directly and that the effect of corruption can be estimated conditionally on the institutional context. As we previously reported, it is perhaps no coincidence that the systemic risk to cryptocurrency and blockchain systems are tethered to activities of BitLicensees. The cost of corruption is greater than the sum of lost money: distortions in spending priorities undermine the ability of the state to promote sustainable and inclusive growth. This is possible in a framework already characterized by "weak law" that creates both a certain alteration of the rules of the market and perverse dynamics distorting the economy and inhibiting free competition. PayPal’s Crypto Corruption The heads of enterprises must curb corruption by setting a clear tone at the top. A statement from the founding CEO of Paypal Holdings Inc., Bill Harris, described Bitcoin as a “scam” and a “colossal pump-and-dump scheme”. “I’m tired of saying, ‘Be careful, it’s speculative.’ Then, ‘Be careful, it’s gambling.’ Then, ‘Be careful, it’s a bubble.’ Okay, I’ll say it: Bitcoin is a scam,” he wrote in June 2019. Later in October 2019 Fortune asked PayPal’s current CEO, Daniel Schulman if he could share some details of the projects Paypal is working on. However, he replied: “Yes and no. Some of this is competitive, and we don’t really want to,” but noted that what Paypal is working on is “not necessarily competitive with Libra.” Emphasizing that cryptocurrency is “still very volatile,” the CEO revealed, “we don’t have much demand for it by merchants because merchants operate on very small margins.” He continued: “Until it becomes less volatile, it won’t be a currency that is widely accepted by merchants on the web — not the dark web, but the web.” PayPal’s fundamental longtime assault on the crypto industry policy was to freeze user accounts connected with any cryptocurrency-related activity. While some people may consider this to be borderline illegal, the company can close user accounts or freeze funds for extended periods of time whenever they feel the need to. In less than a year, everything changed for PayPal with the October 2020 announcement of achieving another regulatory first: through Paxos, PayPal has been granted the first virtual currency conditional license from the New York State Department of Financial Services. It seems that PayPal’s dance with “regulatory arbitrage” now engages the ability to provide crypto to their customers. Turn this matter as we will, and look at it from any side whatsoever, and it presents the appearance of anti-competitive behavior. PayPal’s deception and corruption in building its crypto business infrastructure now acts as a cartel sponsored by regulators. PayPal forbids user access to their own private keys. What’s more, users will not be able to transfer their crypto holdings out of their PayPal account, nor will they be able to send crypto to other PayPal users. In other words, PayPal more or less dictates what users can do with their cryptocurrencies, and could presumably freeze accounts if they see fit. Additionally, merchant processors exist to assist merchants in processing transactions, converting bitcoins to fiat currency and depositing funds directly into merchants' bank accounts daily. As these services are based on Bitcoin, they can be offered for much lower fees than with PayPal or credit card networks. Note, however, that this potential monopoly could arise not from corruption but simply from a revenue-maximizing government that does not factor in the social benefits of competition or of effective natural monopoly regulation. Second, the hope of corrupt gains might lead government officials to privatize the wrong firms. That is, regulators may grant license(s) to firms that are operating at a high level as state firms and so appear valuable to private markets. The cute part of the "long story short" business about PayPal's Conditional Bitlicense COVID-19 Earnings Manipulation Scheme and interlocking board directorates point to Libra renaming to Diem, then just three months later PayPal winning a New York Cond. BitLicense. COVID-19 fraud is illegal and this should be prosecuted, or publically deferred.

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We will dox you; ddos you and destroy you
by professor rat 29 Nov '21

29 Nov '21

So you can run - to Mars if you like - but you can't hide - or escape justice. far-right extremist groups face exposure from army of hacktivists Data leaks and breaches by so-called ‘ethical hackers’ – often assisted by poor security practices – have exposed inner workings of groups and the nature of the movement as a whole https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/29/far-right-extremist-groups-da…

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Cypherpunk hero makes a profit
by professor rat 29 Nov '21

29 Nov '21

We deliberately did not create thousands of collections so that only true connoisseurs of crypto art could purchase tokens,” Cypherpunks explains. Once a week, the company adds one new NFT to the marketplace, so users follow the page update on OpenSea, trying to get the most interesting and favorite hero. Subsequently, the holders can either resell the token, making a profit, or use it in the Play-2-Earn game. https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/top-4-reasons-to-own-cyp…

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Re: Assange’s Auto Reply
by zeynepaydogan 29 Nov '21

29 Nov '21

I just sent an empty e-mail. And I got this email. I hope he gets back to us as soon as possible >> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- >> From: <proff(a)suburbia.org.au> >> Date: Açık Pzt, Kas 29, 2021 00:10 >> Subject: Fwd: (No Subject) >> To: <zeynepaydogan(a)protonmail.com> >> Cc: >> Hallo, you emailed me (Julian Assange). However I do not read mail >> sent to this address anymore. >> >> You most likely mailed one of my accounts at: >> >> proff(a)gnu.ai.mit.edu >> proff(a)gnu.org >> proff(a)four.net >> proff(a)iq.org >> proff(a)nntpcache.org >> proff(a)netbsd.org >> proff(a)rubberhose.org >> proff(a)suburbia.com.au >> proff(a)suburbia.net >> >> If you still wish to contact me, you may do so by mailing: >> >> m e @ i q . o r g >> >> (after removing the spaces) >> >> or see >> >> http://iq.org/ for additional contact details

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Metaverse: The next internet revolution?
by grarpamp 29 Nov '21

29 Nov '21

>> https://techxplore.com/news/2021-07-metaverse-internet-revolution.html > They will be forced on you As in the neural posts, they are seeking the gateway to the mind, a kaleidescope of pixels, where only a hidden handful out of the 3840*2160 are needed and utilized, a magic GloboGovCorp keyhole to spamvertise programming into the young and old alike, luring them in with virtual worlds and an endless addictive stream of banana orgasms, creating classes of monkey scanned feedback derived PLL locked drone enforcers, a new mass of expendable GMO'd meatware insulating the AI powers from the last revolt of the freeborn natural sentients. The first phase is always the FUD that gets you to submit... REFUSE TO SUBMIT, DO NOT COMPLY, JUST SAY NO!!! Rise against the growing global hegemoney of enslavement. Forced goggles, forced vax, forced programming, indoctrinating them while young, exactly as expected, now documented in pictures here today... https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&q=covid+vaccine+child+vr+goggles https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2021/11/22/as-covid-cases-surge-israel-starts-… Israeli child Rafael Peled, 8, looks through a VR virtual reality goggles as he receives a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine from medical staff at the Sheba Tel Hashomer Hospital in Ramat Gan The Metaverse Is A Scam: We're Being Herded Into The Matrix https://bombthrower.com/articles/the-metaverse-is-a-scam/ Picture: Child wearing VR goggles as pacifier, held down by parents and medical staff, resisting forced vaccination How do they get our souls? Soul traps. The lures are the lusts and hungers of this life. The [soul], exploring the newfound freedom of the energetic world, finds himself able to visit his friends and enemies, to see their innermost being and thoughts, even to converse with them in ways that their elemental selves cannot perceive. He is in danger, but he does not know it, for he has not ascended. He is still ensnared by his lust. Soon he will be shown something that perfectly fulfills his most en and cherished desires, desires he has never fulfilled. Unable to resist the chance to do it at last, he enters by a golden door into eternal captivity. The passage is from Whitley Strieber’s “The Key”, a purportedly true account as related by Streiber of an encounter with a mysterious humanoid being who simply knocked on the door of his Toronto hotel room at 3am on June 6, 1998, entered his suite and told him about mankind’s place in the cosmos and his inescapable fate. Strieber’s account may be a synthesis: partly “true” (in that he believes it occurred as he relates it), part visioning, part somnambulistic dream state. Whatever emanates from the mind of Whitley Strieber, it originates from some realm outside of our Cartesian, materialist notion of consensus reality. He reminds me of that other prophetic visionary of yesteryear: Rudolf Steiner, whom as I wrote previously, spent much of his life in a hypnogognic state, possibly without even realizing it. Steiner and Strieber. Odd that. They are both talking about the same thing. The idea that the souls of humanity could be captured in a technological machine, where they would wander forever, believing they have omniscience, even Godhood. “At that point the longevity of one’s mind file will not depend on the continued viability of any particular hardware medium (for example, the survival of a biological body and brain). Ultimately software-based humans will be vastly extended beyond the severe limitations of humans as we know them today. They will live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies, foglet projected bodies, and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms and other forms of nanotechnology”. — Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering @ Google and author of The Singularity is Near. Steiner called it The Eighth Sphere and warned that sometime in the late 20th century, Arhiman would incarnate in the west and drive a global process of harvesting human souls into it. The zeitgeist of radical material reductionism would dampen, deaden and dumb down humanity to its coarsest, most basic layers: meat. Our minds, what we think is our own consciousness, our souls, self-awareness even our freewill, it’s all just an illusion. Our experts say. It’s just something that happens when our brains gas off certain neurochemicals. However… We can take that illusion, what we call our consciousness, and pretty soon now (just as soon as The Singularity happens), we’ll be able to upload that illusion “into the cloud”, into The Metaverse and we’ll be able to experience anything we want, for as long as we want, forever. Who is the incarnation of Arhiman? Zuckerberg with his Metaverse ticks the boxes… This isn’t some phantasmagorical utopian afterlife promised by Bible-banging evangelists or bomb-toting Jihadists – this is serious Scientism. Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, even Jeffrey Epstein were espousing that the era of Tranhumanism was arriving. We are on the cusp of becoming Post-Biological, and when that happens, all our problems will be solved. “We will spend increasing portions of our time in virtual environments and will be able to have any type of desired experience with anyone, real or simulated, in virtual reality…. Lingering problems from our waning industrial age will be overcome” — Ray Kurzweil People worry that only the rich will have access to the trappings of emergent technologies, and the masses will be left out in the cold… That isn’t what’s happening here What’s happening is we’re being herded into The Matrix. As I’ve written previously, in The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto, and here, that the core rationalization of the “You’ll Own Nothing And Be Happy” Great Narrative (as it is now being called) is that the rabble has to ratchet down its standard of living. The reason why isn’t about climate change or COVID. It’s because we’re in late stage Globalism and the world’s financial and economic system is on the verge of imploding. The people in charge, the people who’ve been doubling down on failed policies for decades, the people who brought us here with Quantitative Easing, ZIRP/NIRP, debt, Big Government and The Forever Wars, they want to stay in charge. So they’re going to use COVID, Climate, Collectivism and Wokeness to herd the knuckle-dragging plebians into The Metaverse. That way they’ll be easier to control, they’ll be placated, and they won’t take up so much space in the real world. In the real world, the insular, inbred elites will be zipping around in their private jets. They’ll be reimagining everybody else’s lives. Deciding how much “real world time” and resources to apportion to the rabble. Uploading intellectual Muzak directly into their brains telling them that it’s all for their own good. There’s only one problem This would all be well and good, in fact large swaths of the masses may even prefer a synthetic life in The Metaverse than having to deal with the vicissitudes and tribulations of reality. However, the very construct of a Metaverse, one where: The straightfoward brain-porting scenario involves scanning a human brain (most likely from within), capturing all of the salient details, and reinstantiating the brain’s state in a different — most likely much more powerful — computational substrate. This will be a feasible procedure and will happen most likely around the late 2030’s” — The Singularity is Near The Algorithmic Imitation (“AI”) that would be required to facilitate this and have it operate along the lines proselytized by the Kurzweil’s et al is not attainable. The reason it isn’t attainable is because of the internal contradictions of what I call “techno-utopianism”. Two of those contradictions are these: Firstly: If the mind is a byproduct of physical processes then consciousness is really an illusion and free-will doesn’t actually exist, because all phenomenon are simply linear outcomes of biochemistry and physics. If so then there is nothing to upload into the cloud. Nor is there any real point in doing so. If we really do live in a billiard ball universe, who cares if we can make a shot last forever? There is nobody to care and nothing to care about. More importantly, “AI” at the level pontificated to solve all our problems, “by late in this century nonbiological intelligence on the Earth will be many trillions of times more powerful than biological intelligence” (Kurzweil, of course) is not attainable because our conception of what causes mind and thus intelligence is completely inverted. Mind, consciousness and intelligence will never emerge from material reality because it’s the other way around. Belief that mind emerges from matter is this era’s geocentrism. As was the case with the now antiquated idea that the Earth was the center of the universe. The heliocentric cosmos was probably understood by certain civilizations thousands of years before Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for saying as much in the 17th century. So too, did the ancients understand that “All is mental”. The universe is vibration, probability, information, energy and conciousness first. Out of that comes what we recognize as sub-atomic particles and atoms. The quantum physicists reconnected with this truth about a century ago, the rest of society, including the priests of the Temple of Scientism and Expert Management haven’t gotten the memo, yet. If they did, they wouldn’t be trying to shoehorn our minds into a computer. They’d be trying to build computers that tap into the conscious base layer of quantum reality (note, this is not to be confused with what so-called ‘Quantum Computing’ endeavours to do). Because of this, everything premised upon the idea of super-intelligent, top down, centralized control of the affairs of humanity, of the economy, of The Great Reset, The Great Narrative and The New Normal, all of it is doomed to failure. It simply won’t work. The problem, however, is that in betting the farm on having an expert class of managers deploying super-intelligent AI’s to solve all of our problems, manage the rabble and control all the outcomes, means we’re headed for a Tower of Babel 2.0 moment. More on that in the next edition. In the meantime, if you’re a plebeian, the work of the day is The Great Opt-Out, a Great Reject. Decentralize your affairs. Take sovereignty over your own life and your own economics. Link up with others doing the same. The counter-revolutionary impulse against late stage Globalism is, in addition to spirituality, meditation and contemplative practices, embracing decentralization and public key cryptography.

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Yet another reason I’m glad I traded out all my Btc earlier this year
by professor rat 28 Nov '21

28 Nov '21

Patrick Michael Byrne is in the news again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_M._Byrne He's as batshit crazy as Gramps.

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Re: Assange’s Auto Reply
by professor rat 28 Nov '21

28 Nov '21

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestgore.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splatter_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ilan_Halimi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta

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Nayib Bukele emerges from wheel-well of plane in Miami
by professor rat 28 Nov '21

28 Nov '21

These cutbacks have been brutal. Of course it wouldn't be so bad if the Overstock guy wasn't being paid so much. Bad joke - I apologize. But it just shows the stress we've all been under lately.

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PoX Screws Bitcoin, Adulterates Blockchain Software Technology
by Gunnar Larson 28 Nov '21

28 Nov '21

MIA Coin and NYCCoin use PoX as part of their fraud. Harvard Management Company perhaps has a hand in the scheme? PoX when used for participation rewards, as described, could lead to miner consoli- dation. Because miners that also participate as holders could gain an advantage over miners who do not participate as holders, miners would be strongly incentivized to buy the new cryptocurrency and use it to crowd out other miners. In the extreme case, this consolidation could lead to centralization of mining, which would undermine the decentralization goals of the public blockchain. Bitcoin Bandwidth: Because PoX miners must send Bitcoin transactions to participate in the consensus algorithm and send PoX rewards, PoX mining would occupy some Bitcoin transac- tion bandwidth. Given Bitcoin bandwidth is limited by design, given security require- ments, new PoX blockchains need to reduce their bandwidth use requirements. SIP- 007 does this by limiting the number of participants, using a STX holding threshold. Other ways to address bandwidth limitations are also possible e.g., lighting channels between Bitcoin and the new blockchain. Optimizations at the Bitcoin transactions layer could also be possible, which would reduce the total size needed for PoX trans- actions.

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Majority leader Gramps begins attacking Paul McCarthy
by professor rat 28 Nov '21

28 Nov '21

Majorie Taylor Greene begins attacking Kevin McCarthy as List Crazies find themselves on verge of civil war https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/majorie-taylor-greene-begins-attackin… No endorsement of this Dumpocrap site's rotten politics is expressed or implied. Repost is as-is and passed on in good faith for background due-diligence and Renard-style chaos.

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