December 2022 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Cryptocurrency: Altruism Is NOT Government
by grarpamp 16 Dec '22

16 Dec '22

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPM6rf0-e6M SBF "Charity" Charity is NOT to the US Govt Political Party, Government does not save lives, it destroys them, Government has never been shown "good", it's "bad" by definition, so stop doing that. Charity gives to the have-nots, not to the Politicians whose only definition and existance is to take-more. Personal Responsibility is Self-Education Due Diligence and Caretaking, not trusting some closed source secretive central exchange, random shitcoin scams, and Govt. Sam will be given second chance tests, to create opensource P2P DEX, to do transparent Good for the World, but never if by giving $Billions to prop up Government Fraud Theft Violence War Murder and Political Force Over Others, only if to peoples and their non-Govt projects in Voluntary Human Freedom and Advancement. Altruism is teaching doing giving the good yourself, not relegating offloading that responsibility to Govt which always turns it into evil force. Effective Altruism's evidence and reason would conclude to forever eschew Government, not to continue to prop it up. That is the chance that everyone has been given, and not least now also via Crypto Freedom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism

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Erin Plante needs killing ( My 2k sats )
by professor rat 16 Dec '22

16 Dec '22

Here is a much more acute threat than, say . . .Liz Rabbit Warren https://twitter.com/eeplante Erin Plante @eeplante · Sep 3 This week I had the fun experience of filming a VICE documentary with an Emmy award winning director, at the super cool Chainalysis Inc. headquarters in NYC <<< Kill one pentagon employee - scare one thousand

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How to surrender to cryptoanarchist terrorists
by professor rat 16 Dec '22

16 Dec '22

Surrender early - surrender often - surrender groveling & begging for mercy - especially if you're a POTUS https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/ethics-101-crypto-projects-negotiate-hac… Reposts not humiliating collapse conditions for the USG

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Elon Musk’s Twitter Is a Shakespearean Psychodrama Set in Silicon Valley
by professor rat 16 Dec '22

16 Dec '22

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy painfully they first make barking mad Elon Musk’s Twitter Is also an exercise in gross hypocrisy. ariehkovler 3h Replying to @DavidSacks Oh come on. To go from "everything legal is welcome here except incitement to violence" to "oh now we care about harm reduction but only for billionaires' jets" is not a remotely credible position. You just spent months arguing that harm reduction is woke censorship. << Mollusk go fuck your ugly mother up that shithole you fell out of.

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Elon Musk’s Twitter Is a Shakespearean Psychodrama Set in Silicon Valley
by Gunnar Larson 16 Dec '22

16 Dec '22

Elon Musk’s Twitter Is a Shakespearean Psychodrama Set in Silicon Valley https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-12-14/elon-musk-twitter-owners… Shortselling Telsa to the Moon?

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Major World-Wide Talent Expansion at Woodsford
by Gunnar Larson 16 Dec '22

16 Dec '22

https://litigationfinancejournal.com/major-world-wide-talent-expansion-at-w… Check out my new article: ESG financier and litigation investor Woodsford is proud to announce a new class of team members joining the firm’s global enterprise. Amar Singh Mann, David Haighan and Jordan Howells will join Woodsford’s London, United Kingdom office. Cody Nguyen is slated to enter Woodsford’s Brisbane, Australia office. Additionally, Woodsford announced that former Australian Federal Magistrate, the Honorable Neil McKerracher KC will join the firm’s global investment advisory panel. Woodsford says that Australia continues to be an emerging market for litigation finance innovation. Woodsford’s appointment of Howells as Senior Investment Manager is rooted in his wealth of experience, including 14 years of public and private organizational investigation, litigation and negotiation for ESG malfeasance. Woodsford plans to engage Howells’ prosecutorial acumen that includes liaising with the United States Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission and Serious Fraud Office. Steven Friel, Woodsford’s Chief Executive Officer, says that the firm’s new international appointments are indicative of cross border litigation investment innovation. Friel goes on to say that Woodsford’s international footprint in ESG justice is expected to represent some of the highest standards in the world.

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Senate Banking Hearing on FTX Collapse Pits a Courageous Law Professor Against Paid Shill Kevin O’Leary
by Gunnar Larson 16 Dec '22

16 Dec '22

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/12/senate-banking-hearing-on-ftx-collap… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 15, 2022 ~ Kevin O'Leary Testifying at Senate Banking Committee Hearing, December 14, 2022 Kevin O’Leary Testifying at Senate Banking Committee Hearing, December 14, 2022 If you are an average American without insider knowledge of how Congress works these days, you might have felt that you had stepped onto the set of Alice in Wonderland while watching the Senate Banking Committee hearing yesterday. The hearing was convened to examine the sudden collapse of the crypto exchange, FTX; its tentacles that reach into the federally-insured banking sector; and legislation that may be required to rein in the mushrooming risks that crypto poses to U.S. financial stability. Given that more than one million customers of FTX cannot get access to the money or crypto “investments” in their potentially worthless accounts; that the kingpin of this operation, Sam Bankman-Fried, was indicted on Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Justice on eight criminal counts; and that a federally-insured bank, Silvergate Bank, that held FTX customer deposits, has seen its publicly traded parent (Silvergate Capital Corp., ticker SI) lose 87 percent of its market value year-to-date, one might have expected that serious consideration would have gone into the selection of the four witnesses that appeared at yesterday’s hearing. Instead, the Republican crypto shills on the Senate Banking Committee made the public suffer through the alternative-reality ruminations of Kevin O’Leary, a cast member of the TV program, “Shark Tank,” who admits to receiving $15 million from FTX to be its “ambassador.” O’Leary is a named defendant, along with other celebrities who took money to promote FTX, in multiple class action lawsuits. He thus has an incentive to spin the narrative away from fraudulent conduct. In his opening remarks at the hearing, O’Leary also admitted to being “a shareholder in multiple companies involved in crypto.” Along with multiple Republican Senators on the Senate Banking Committee, O’Leary attempted to push the narrative that the collapse of FTX has nothing to do with crypto itself; that crypto continues to offer great promise. O’Leary told the Committee that if legislation were passed to ban banks from engaging in crypto activities, he would “short every American bank stock.” (To “short” means to bet on a decline in price.) O’Leary also insisted that once crypto is regulated, it “is going to be profound in terms of how it changes the cost, the efficiency, the audit ability, the productivity of the banking sector.” There is, in fact, zero evidence to suggest that crypto offers any productive use for the financial sector, as more than 1,600 scientists and software engineers have already explained in a detailed letter to the Senate Banking Committee and as was detailed by a serious witness at yesterday’s hearing — Hilary J. Allen, Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law. Hilary J. Allen, Professor of Law, American University Washington College of Law Hilary J. Allen, Professor of Law, American University Washington College of Law Professor Allen’s research focus is in the area of financial stability regulation. She is the author of Driverless Finance: Fintech’s Impact on Financial Stability, released by Oxford University Press in January. Professor Allen also worked in 2010 with the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to study the causes of the financial crisis of 2007-2008. She made the following key points at yesterday’s hearing, either in her verbal or written testimony: “The problems at FTX were not a one-off, but part of a cascade of interconnected failures in the highly leveraged crypto financial system.” “Another key flaw in the ‘this wasn’t about crypto’ narrative is that many of the problems at FTX arose because of a feature that is unique to the crypto industry: cryptoassets (like the FTT token) can be created out of nothing by anyone with computer programming abilities. I have previously explained that this unlimited supply of cryptoassets allows for significant leverage, making the crypto ecosystem very fragile. The unlimited supply of cryptoassets also ensures that frauds are particularly easy to perpetuate: when an entire industry is built on an asset type that can be manufactured at zero cost, has no fundamentals, and trades entirely on sentiment, traditional checks on fraud (like valuation methodologies and financial accounting) will inevitably break down.” Crypto tokens “are minted out of thin air.” “What the public actually needs is protection – individual investors need protection from crypto frauds, and our broader financial system also needs protection from crypto’s booms and busts.” “A ban on crypto would be the most straight-forward way of protecting both investors and the financial system: it would end the uncontrolled creation of cryptoassets and also ensure that cryptoassets never require a bail-out. If policymakers don’t wish to proceed with a ban, then they will need to be careful to ensure that any laws they do adopt don’t inadvertently encourage the proliferation of cryptoassets or bring those cryptoassets closer to the core of our financial system.” “Crypto should also not have the CFTC [Commodity Futures Trading Commission] as its primary regulator. The CFTC has no statutory investor protection mandate, has limited experience regulating retail-dominated markets, and the application of the CFTC’s self-certification regime to crypto would allow an unlimited supply of cryptoassets to proliferate.” Professor Allen’s slap down of the idea of allowing the CFTC to regulate crypto seemed to age Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) by about 20 years. When Lummis took her turn at questioning the witnesses later in the hearing, her face showed serious signs of stress. That might be because the legislation she has co-introduced with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) to allow the CFTC to oversee crypto, was just exposed in the hearing as a sell-out to crypto interests. (See our earlier report: After Crypto Money Piled into Campaign Coffers of Senators Lummis and Gillibrand, They Introduced a Sweetheart Legislative Bill for Crypto.) Another witness at yesterday’s hearing was Ben McKenzie, the actor and crypto researcher who has a book coming out next year with journalist Jacob Silverman, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. McKenzie demonstrated an acute understanding of the fraudulent aspects of crypto, stating: “ ‘Cryptocurrencies’ are not currencies by any reasonable economic definition, as they are unable to fulfill any of the three functions of money. They are a poor medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. Bitcoin cannot work as a medium of exchange because it cannot scale. The Bitcoin network can only process 5 to 7 transactions a second. By comparison, Visa can handle tens of thousands. To facilitate that relatively trivial amount of transactions, Bitcoin uses an enormous amount of energy. In 2021, Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total, comparable to the electrical energy consumed by the country of Argentina. Bitcoin simply cannot ever work at scale as a medium of exchange.” The fourth witness, Jennifer J. Schulp, was another crypto-friendly narrator from a suspect nonprofit – the Cato Institute, which was previously secretly owned by the fossil fuel billionaires, the Koch brothers, and a handful of other men. You can watch the full hearing at this link.

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Only Sons of Anarchy can handle crypto
by professor rat 15 Dec '22

15 Dec '22

Only 1% of people can handle crypto self-custody right now: Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao’s comments come as billions of dollars of stablecoins continue to flow out of the Binance exchange. https://cointelegraph.com/news/only-1-of-people-can-handle-crypto-self-cust… Reposts not wingnut Nuremberg rallies

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Maker Hacks: Fusion Energy - Dreaming Of Uncorked Genies
by grarpamp 15 Dec '22

15 Dec '22

https://www.theepochtimes.com/nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-touted-by-white-h… https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-makes-history-achie… Nuclear Fusion ‘Breakthrough’ Touted by White House, Drawing Praise and Some Skepticism Officials offer different views on pace of commercialization By Nathan Worcester December 13, 2022 Updated: December 14, 2022 It was 1:03 a.m. on Dec. 5 that experimental physicist Alex Zylstra first spotted it: for the first time, a target yielded more energy from a fusion reaction than a laser put into it—though that’s not counting the much greater input energy that was needed to power the laser in the first place. “One of the first things I did was call one of the diagnostic experts to double-check the data,” he said during a Dec. 13 press conference with his colleagues from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Zylstra was running a test with the world’s most energetic laser—Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility (NIF). By blasting a capsule of hydrogen atoms with that laser until the atoms heat into plasma and combine, he and his colleagues were hoping to achieve nuclear fusion through an approach known as inertial confinement. The other main approach to fusion, magnetic confinement fusion, uses devices such as tokamaks to contain plasmas using powerful magnetic fields. NIF physicist Tammy Ma said that “tears were running down [her] face” when she learned about the result. “I want to emphasize that each experiment we do is building on 60 years of work in this field, and more than a decade on NIF itself,” Zylstra said. His team’s latest work comes as the latest in a recent series of fusion-related achievements from that facility, where fusion research is pursued under the National Nuclear Security Administration’s “Stockpile Stewardship” program, as an alternative to the underground nuclear testing that ended during the early 1990s. The most important of those achievements may have occurred in August 2021, when NIF researchers first briefly achieved ignition according to one set of criteria—namely, when the forces cooling plasma down aren’t strong enough to swamp the forces heating it up. (The Dec. 5 result has also been called “ignition,” as it marks scientific energy breakeven.) “The NIF result in August 2021 changed everything, but this result changes nothing,” said Daniel Jassby, a former research physicist with Princeton University’s plasma laboratory, in a Dec. 13 interview with The Epoch Times. At the Dec. 13 press conference, Lawerence Livermore director Kim Budil said that about 300 megajoules of energy drove the experiment as a whole. The target produced about 3.15 megajoules of energy from 2.05 megajoules of energy, according to a press release. The latest result and press conference coincides with Congress negotiating a last-minute spending bill. Republican senators have called for their colleagues to wait until after their party takes the House of Representatives in January to finalize the package. Jassby did not rule out the possibility that the latest announcement’s timing has something to do with the ongoing spending debate. “That could be—that’s standard political activity,” he said. The reported breakthrough also coincides with increasing tension between the United States and its nuclear-armed geopolitical rival, Russia, in the midst of the Ukraine war. Lawrence Livermore’s Mark Hermann noted how NIF’s fusion research aided the United States’ nuclear deterrent capabilities. The scientists, bureaucrats, and administration officials who spoke on Dec. 13 said the results vindicate decades of earlier researchers who have sought energy breakeven. “They never lost sight of this goal,” said White House office of science and technology policy director Arati Prabhakar. Yet, an apparent discrepancy emerged as to a plausible timeline for commercial fusion power. Budil, of Lawrence Livermore, stated that commercialization could be achieved in “probably decades,” though perhaps not 50 or 60 years. “With concerted effort and investment, a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant,” she said. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, by contrast, appealed to President Joe Biden’s “decadal vision to get to a commercial fusion reactor within 10 years.” She said the latest result “shows that it can be done.” When Granholm was asked about that gap by a reporter, Budil jumped in to say that magnetic fusion was more advanced than inertial confinement fusion. However, she did not state that either approach could be realistically commercialized within a decade. “With real investment and real focus, that timescale can move closer,” she said. Praise and Skepticism Some fusion insiders have stressed what they see as the significance of NIF’s contribution. A spokesperson for a major international magnetic fusion collaboration called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) said the results were “a shot of adrenaline for the global fusion R&D enterprise.” Tokamaks—the technology at the center of ITER’s work—are still “the closest to commercial deployment,” added ITER spokesperson Laban Coblentz. Andrew Holland, the CEO of the Washington-based Fusion Industry Association, said that the announcement on the finding “shows the world that fusion is not science fiction: it will soon be a viable source of energy.” He also called for regulation of the emerging fusion sector, adding that the NIF experiment “will give governments around the world further incentive to support the development of commercial fusion energy.” Yet other experts who spoke with The Epoch Times sounded more skeptical, particularly with regard to the idea of fusion energy reaching commercialization within a decade. “It will take half a century to develop the presently non-existent technologies required for a power reactor based on [inertial confinement fusion], including a practical laser or ion beam,” Jassby said in an email to The Epoch Times. In his view, tokamaks remain “highly speculative.” “Anyone who predicts commercial fusion before 2050 has a far greater imagination than I do,” said Rod Adams, a Navy nuclear veteran who is a partner with the Nucleation Capital venture fund, in a Dec. 13 email to The Epoch Times. Like Jassby, he mentioned what he sees as the odd timing of the latest result, which aligned with a spending debate in Congress. “A final source of skepticism is the skillful orchestration of the announcement. Why did the news ‘leak out’ in time for multiple sources to produce articles even before the widely promoted press conference?” he asked. Steven Krivit, a journalist and noted fusion critic, told The Epoch Times in a Dec. 13 email that the latest NIF data is “irrelevant” from a practical perspective, though not necessarily to scientists. He questioned the definitions used to claim the reaction exceeded breakeven, noting that the lasers used to carry out the experiments require hundreds of megajoules of energy. In a follow-up message to The Epoch Times, Adams said the experimental net energy production amounted to “sound and fury producing dozens of articles about a breakthrough.”

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Re: Cryptocurrency: WarOnCash Proves To Billions That Privacy Crypto Must Be Adopted, Kill CBDC's
by grarpamp 15 Dec '22

15 Dec '22

Government and its Global Monopoly on Violence and Money *is* the ONLY Terrorist, not Free Human Beings. CBDC's must be fought against. We Are About To Witness A Major Move Toward A Cashless Society by Michael Snyder http://endoftheamericandream.com/we-are-about-to-witness-a-major-move-towar… https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022/12/07/anti-mon… https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/digital_euro/html/index.en.html The war on cash has just gone to an entirely new level. When I heard that the European Union was planning to completely ban all cash transactions above 10,000 euros, I had a hard time believing it. There are so many wild rumors flying around on the Internet these days, and so I wasn’t going to write about this unless I could confirm it. Unfortunately, this particular rumor is quite real. Under the pretext of fighting “money laundering and terrorist financing”, the European Union will be entirely outlawing all cash payments greater than 10,000 euros. The following comes from the official website of the Council of the European Union… By limiting large cash payments, the EU will make it harder for criminals to launder dirty money. An EU-wide maximum limit of €10.000 is set for cash payments. Member states will have the flexibility to impose a lower maximum limit if they wish. So this means that in some countries the upper limit could potentially be a lot lower than 10,000 euros. But instead of framing it as a major move toward a cashless society, the EU is trying to claim that this is all about fighting terrorists. The following is what Zbyněk Stanjura, the Minister for Finance in the Czech Republic, has said about this upcoming change… Terrorists and those who finance them are not welcome in Europe. In order to launder dirty money, criminal individuals and organisations had to look for loopholes in our existing rules which are already quite strict. But our intention is to close these loopholes further, and to apply even stricter rules in all EU member states. Large cash payments beyond €10.000 will become impossible. Trying to stay anonymous when buying or selling crypto-assets will become much more difficult. Hiding behind multiple layers of ownership of companies won’t work any more. It will even become difficult to launder dirty money via jewellers or goldsmiths. Meanwhile, the European Central Bank has been actively considering the possibility of introducing a “digital euro”. The following comes from the official website of the European Central Bank… We are working with the national central banks of the euro area to investigate whether to introduce a digital euro. It would be a central bank digital currency, an electronic equivalent to cash. And it would complement banknotes and coins, giving people an additional choice about how to pay. Well isn’t that convenient? As they take cash away from the general population, it turns out that they have already been working on the replacement. Incredibly, the ECB even has the gall to claim that this new digital currency will be “like cash”… A digital euro would offer an electronic means of payment that anyone could use in the euro area. It would be secure and user-friendly, like cash is today. As central bank money issued by the ECB, it would be different from “private money”, but you could also use a card or a phone app to pay with digital euro. Yes, you will be able to spend it just like you can spend cash. But unlike cash, a digital euro will allow authorities to track whatever you buy and sell with it. Won’t that be wonderful? By the way, the Federal Reserve is currently working on a digital currency as well. And this is all happening as the private cryptocurrency industry is imploding all around us. Many had believed that decentralized cryptocurrencies would be the future of commerce, but global central banks were never going to allow that to happen. Instead, it appears that they intend to force all of us on to a cashless grid in which everyone uses digital currencies that are issued by them. Needless to say, a lot of people out there are quite wary of any moves toward a cashless society because they believe that it is part of the “end times” scenario described in the Bible. According to one recent survey, approximately 39 percent of all Americans are convinced that we are living in the “end times” right now… Nearly two in five Americans, including half of self-identified Christians and a quarter of the religiously unaffiliated, agree “we are living in the End Times,” a new study has found. That’s about 39% of Americans who believe we are living in the End Times, according to Pew Research, highlighted by Lifeway Research. Other surveys have come up with similar results. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us, because global events have definitely started to spin out of control in recent years. At this point, even secular websites are publishing articles about the surging popularity of “apocalyptic scenarios”… There’s no denying that the apocalypse is currently having a moment, culturally and politically. It could be driven partly by the pandemic and fears of climate change. Those are actual, frightening apocalyptic scourges. Russia’s war has also set off alarm bells for certain evangelicals, as there was a Cold War tradition of identifying the country, variably, with Gog or Magog. Seeing Slate discuss such things made me chuckle. But this is where we are. Just about every day, more crazy things take place that have literally never happened before. For example, I came across the following story earlier today… For past 12 months, scientists have been studying a 50-second burst of energy from over a billion light-years away that could change how we understand how stars live and die. In December 2021, a massive blast of energy hit the Earth’s atmosphere. Its source was a gamma-ray burst – one of the most powerful explosions in the universe – but not just any gamma ray burst. One scientist said at the time that the event – named GRB 211211A – “looks unlike anything else we have seen before”. As time rolls along, things are only going to get even more weird. If you have been waiting for life to “return to normal”, you can stop right now. It simply is not going to happen, and I believe that global events will accelerate even more during the early stages of 2023. It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

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