December 2022 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Passport to Dystopia
by professor rat 08 Dec '22

08 Dec '22

CBDC airdrop chance favors the prepared mind https://cointelegraph.com/news/fintech-company-zelf-launches-anonymous-visa… Reposts not Gramps garbage

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Senate Banking Chair Threatens a Subpoena If Sam Bankman-Fried Doesn’t Show for Next Wednesday’s Hearing; Says SBF “Orchestrated a Coverup”
by Gunnar Larson 08 Dec '22

08 Dec '22

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/12/senate-banking-chair-threatens-a-sub… Senate Banking Chair Threatens a Subpoena If Sam Bankman-Fried Doesn’t Show for Next Wednesday’s Hearing; Says SBF “Orchestrated a Coverup” By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 8, 2022 ~ Senator Sherrod Brown Senator Sherrod Brown The past 48 hours has brought major developments in the battle lines being drawn in the crypto wars. Let’s start with the unusual letter that Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) sent yesterday to Sam Bankman-Fried, the ousted CEO of the collapsed and scandalized crypto exchange, FTX, via his new lawyer, Mark S. Cohen. Typically, if you want a witness to testify at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, one doesn’t tell his attorney in writing that you know the witness is guilty of law-breaking activities. (But then, again, most people credibly alleged to have done what Sam Bankman-Fried has done would by now be warming a cot in a cold prison cell.) Brown advises in the letter that “There are still significant unanswered questions about how client funds were misappropriated, how clients were blocked from withdrawing their own money, and how you orchestrated a cover up.” Senator Sherrod Brown goes on in the letter to order Bankman-Fried to appear before the Senate Banking Committee next Wednesday, December 14, at 10 a.m. Brown wants a confirmation of that appearance by 5:00 p.m. today. If Brown doesn’t get that confirmation, he advises that he is “prepared, along with Ranking Member Pat Toomey, to issue a subpoena to compel your testimony.” The Senate Banking hearing is titled “Crypto Crash: Why the FTX Bubble Burst and the Harm to Consumers.” It presently has just two witnesses officially scheduled: actor Ben McKenzie, a long-term critic of crypto and the celebrities who push it on a gullible public; and Law Professor Hilary Allen of the American University Washington College of Law. McKenzie is co-writing a book with journalist Jacob Silverman, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, set for release in July of next year. Professor Allen is the author of The Superficial Allure of Crypto published in the September edition of the IMF’s Finance and Development. Bankman-Fried has also been invited to testify the previous day (December 13) before the House Financial Services Committee, which is chaired by Congresswoman Maxine Waters. There has been a bit of waffling as to whether Waters will issue a subpoena if Bankman-Fried fails to show. More crypto fireworks went off in another unusual letter sent on Tuesday to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) by Congressman Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from New York. Torres (from the same political party as SEC Chair Gary Gensler) asks the GAO to investigate the SEC’s failure to “uncover the largest crypto Ponzi scheme in US history” and blames Gensler for “being singularly responsible for the regulatory failures surrounding the collapse of FTX and its affiliate FTX US.” Torres, it should be noted, is a big crypto fan. Bankman-Fried’s well-funded Political Action Committee (PAC), Protect Our Future, endorsed Torres in his 2022 campaign for Congress. In May, CNBC’s Brian Schwartz reported that Torres had written an OpEd in the New York Daily News in March, calling on New Yorkers to get behind the cryptocurrency market, but failed to mention that Torres was getting fundraising support from crypto backers. Schwartz reported that “Crypto investors Ben Horowitz, Anthony Albanese and Chris Dixon — leaders at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — hosted the ‘Ritchie Torres Ethereum Fundraiser’ at the swanky private nightclub Zero Bond in New York City on April 13” and “Fred Wilson, a partner at venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, which is also heavily invested in cryptocurrencies, co-hosted another fundraising event for Torres in April, the lawmaker’s aide confirmed.” In the Daily News OpEd, Torres used the same old trope that was used to avoid regulating derivatives and which led to the largest financial collapse in 2008 since the Great Depression. Torres wrote: “The state’s regulatory regime [toward crypto] has the cost of inhibiting job creation and innovation without the actual benefit of protecting a single consumer or investor. It’s a classic case of bureaucracy trumping efficacy. “With a multi-billion dollar market capitalization, crypto is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere. New York City should and must embrace crypto if it is to remain the financial capital of the world. We no longer live in a world where our central place in finance can be taken for granted.” There are plenty of respected and highly knowledgeable individuals who believe crypto could topple the U.S. as the financial capital of the world. Investment icon Warren Buffet has called the largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, ‘rat poison squared’; global economist, Nouriel Roubini, told the Senate Banking Committee in 2018 that ‘Crypto is the Mother of All Scams and (Now Busted) Bubbles While Blockchain Is The Most Over-Hyped Technology Ever, No Better than a Spreadsheet/Database.’ More recently, Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, one of the most valuable tech companies in the world, stated that cryptocurrencies are ‘100% based on greater fool theory.’ And just this past June 1, more than 1,600 scientists and software engineers wrote to Committee chairs in Congress to warn that both crypto and blockchain are shams.” Should you believe those august voices or a guy taking money from the crypto industry?

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European Union: ESG—Climate Change And Related Litigation Take Center Stage In Europe
by Gunnar Larson 08 Dec '22

08 Dec '22

https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/climate-change/1257624/esgclimate-chang… Nearly every board of a publicly traded company in the European Union, United Kingdom, or United States will have considered and, for most, reported on ESG matters. And it is not just public companies. In what has been little more than a few years, ESG has become one of the dominant themes for both traded companies and their investors, and increasingly for many medium and large privately owned businesses. What began as a focus on climate and the environment now includes diversity, equity and inclusion, and local and global supply chains and human rights. No sector is untouched. Litigation is a growing part of the landscape. It has flourished in response to the actions taken and commitments made by governments and businesses. In this *White Paper* on ESG-related litigation, we explore the status and trends across Europe, with a focus on climate- and environmental-related litigation. Read the *White Paper* <https://www.jonesday.com/-/media/files/publications/2022/12/esg-climate-cha…> .

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US CBDC a Paper Tiger
by professor rat 08 Dec '22

08 Dec '22

Vested interests in the US are slowing and may stop the present push for a USG shitcoin https://cointelegraph.com/news/report-outlines-reasons-why-stakeholders-are… Hamfisted attempts to brute-force govt spycoins in shitholes like Nigeria, Pakistan and Indonesia will create more cryptoanarchism than totalitarianism since there is no earthly power - or combination of them - remotely capable of rolling out any overt globalized surveillance state - world-wide totalitarianism. The last time this was even remotely possible was just after 9-11 when the US went in for massive covert surveillance. The scare campaign about CBDC's is now moving from ' War on Cash! " status to " War on Xmas " grade garbage. Probably why Gramps floating scow is topping up on it.

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Telegrams "True Names " pay-to-play
by professor rat 08 Dec '22

08 Dec '22

' . . . To use the feature, users will need to purchase “blockchain-powered anonymous numbers” from Fragment, a decentralized auction platform founded by Telegram creator Pavel Durov. Fragment sells user names and anonymous numbers that are only compatible with Telegram. Purchases are made on the platform via Telegram’s affiliated token The Open Network (TON). <<< https://cointelegraph.com/news/telegram-to-allow-no-sim-accounts-via-anon-b… Reposts not tiresome attempts to cash-in from carpetbaggers

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When Tim Cook is called a terrorist
by professor rat 08 Dec '22

08 Dec '22

TIM COOK is obstructing the FBI - there he goes! GET HIM! https://twitter.com/dnvolz/status/1600642718509703168?cxt=HHwWgICxkc2E0LYsA… CBDC’s are hardly the crack of doom if they can be laundered on any i-phone; amirite? Fail again Backstabber - fail better.

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Backstabber giving mouth-to-arse resuscitation to Mongo's old ' Fork-in-the-Road ' thesis
by professor rat 08 Dec '22

08 Dec '22

This is false a Manichean binary as you will find outside organized religion and Marxist-Communism. >>> adam3us Humanity is at a tipping point. One path leads to dystopia, digital dark-ages, neo-feudalism of well-meaning, but economically and socially confused plutocrats. #bitcoin is the main ray of light, a way to opt out of this central pllanner, global surveillance state hell-scape. <<< The last remote chance the USG had for the OVERT Dossier Society was in the early noughties - they chose a covert version instead that failed by 2006. They were the only ones who could have done this but they lost their nerve and ever since then they have gotten weaker and cryptoanarchy has gotten stronger. Btw does Adam Back even know what cryptoanarchy is? Guys been around for near 30 years and still doesn't have the first clue. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-is-a-humanistic-alternative There is no Govcorp capable of creating a deliberate dystopia. Welcome to the globalized anarchist revolution.

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ABC-Belarus group argues why resistance to Putin is a revolutionary necessity
by professor rat 08 Dec '22

08 Dec '22

https://anarchistnews.org/content/existence-22022-anarchist-strategy BONUS CONTENT December 10th, 2022 Fofão Rock'n Bar (Estrada de Taipas 3827, Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil) https://anarcopunk.org/festival/ Reposts like sand through an hourglass

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[ot][spam][crazy][rude] ramblings and bemoanings
by Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many 08 Dec '22

08 Dec '22

1. Once upon a time .... 2. It's interesting to compulsively blither onto this mailing list where I don't really know anybody and have amnesia around most of the parts of the real content I actually knew. I would guess that one of the reasons my subconscious would have picked this list to spam was both that the people using it were probably pretty resilient to spam, but also that I don't really know many people here, and don't have a strong emotional attachment to the culture. That second point, it feels bad, and that bad feeling reflects on me: there are few things here that really strike my heart. I likely would have subconsciously worked very hard to keep myself away from communities I really strongly valued, perceiving myself as harming them. A counterargument could be that other communities could be targeted just as badly as this one, and maybe my additional targeting would be minimal. It's an interesting thought. Still, I like the tiny bit of safety of having [spam] tags and not having strong connection to the community. It's an interesting idea, that maybe I could find more communities by feeling like I am disrupting them, rather than trying to engage them. Of course things end up being a hybrid of both.

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Cryptoanarchist networking for dummies
by professor rat 08 Dec '22

08 Dec '22

Professor Rat at Sysad Org - about a minute ago ( pro2rat ) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CxHk59CmcnFdWad1GEfNJa822Mw0rNnu/view?usp=… Venn diagrams grim reading

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