April 2022 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Domain Names Fueling the Latest NFT Craze
by professor rat 29 Apr '22

29 Apr '22

Ethereum users have taken to speculating on the future value of three and four-digit ENS domain names. ENS names are domains that end in “.eth.” Each one is an NFT that is minted and sold just like your average NFT, which is a unique blockchain-based token that signifies ownership. ENS names are touted by their proponents as the future for decentralized, uncensorable websites and a potential universal login for all things Web3. . . . " - FROM https://decrypt.co/98984/ethereum-domain-names-eth-nft-craze

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NFT's not blowing your skirt up?
by professor rat 29 Apr '22

29 Apr '22

Hang on - help might be on the way - according to Flat-Earth-Forbes there's a growing interest in them to launder money. IF the IRS and foreign LEO's do have a genuine fear about this then its worthy of any genuine anarchists attention. BTW - sooner or later the " Third-Worldist " Left will cotton on that small countries from the global South are adopting crypto-anarchist tech. This could lead to increased 'noise ' levels that might even drown out Gramps / Semich/ Nazi-punk. I tremble for my anarchy.

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Edward Snowden Revealed As Secret Participant in the Ceremony That Launched a $2 Billion Private Cryptocurrency
by jim bell 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Edward Snowden Revealed As Secret Participant in the Ceremony That Launched a $2 Billion Private Cryptocurrency https://share.newsbreak.com/ytkbp4ms

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Fw: Mailman privacy alert
by revevilgod＠gmx.com 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Good try :-D Who did this? > Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2022 at 6:16 PM > From: cypherpunks-bounces(a)lists.cpunks.org > To: revevilgod(a)gmx.com > Subject: Mailman privacy alert > > An attempt was made to subscribe your address to the mailing list > cypherpunks(a)lists.cpunks.org. You are already subscribed to this mailing list. > > Note that the list membership is not public, so it is possible that a bad > person was trying to probe the list for its membership. This would be a > privacy violation if we let them do this, but we didn't. > > If you submitted the subscription request and forgot that you were already > subscribed to the list, then you can ignore this message. If you suspect that > an attempt is being made to covertly discover whether you are a member of this > list, and you are worried about your privacy, then feel free to send a message > to the list administrator at cypherpunks-owner(a)lists.cpunks.org.

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Cryptocurrency: The Law [re: crypto privacy coins zec, etc]
by grarpamp 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

re, from the twattersphere recently, still... > https://github.com/Enegnei/JacobAppelbaumLeavesTor/blob/master/JacobAppelba… Some say the law is code, some a tool, some corrupted and corruptible, some a registry and censorable repository of speech and actions in re, some a weapon or murder machine, others just another twitter and tabloid rag of sorts... https://archive.org/details/gov.uscourts.cand.340308 https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/14868600/1/todd-v-reichwein/ UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA OAKLAND DIVISION Case 4:19-cv-01751-DMR PETER TODD, an individual, Plaintiff, vs. SARAH MICHELLE REICHWEIN aka ISIS AGORA LOVECRUFT, an individual, Defendant.

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Fwd: Funding partnership with CLientEarth
by Gunnar Larson 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Gunnar Larson <g(a)xny.io> Date: Thu, Apr 28, 2022 at 8:28 AM Subject: Re: Funding partnership with CLientEarth To: Support Us <supportus(a)clientearth.org> Dear Kriss: Thank you for reaching out. Bank.org is working on a project similar to your Shell board dispute. We wanted to reach out and introduce ourselves. Would there be a good time to connect? Thank you, Gunnar -- *Gunnar Larson - xNY.io <http://www.xny.io/> | Bank.org <http://bank.org/>* MSc <https://www.unic.ac.cy/blockchain/msc-digital-currency/?utm_source=Google&u…> - Digital Currency MBA <https://www.unic.ac.cy/business-administration-entrepreneurship-and-innovat…> - Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ip) G(a)xNY.io +1-646-454-9107 New York, New York 10001 On Thu, Apr 28, 2022 at 5:35 AM Support Us <supportus(a)clientearth.org> wrote: > Dear Gunnar, > > Thank you so much for getting in touch, we are so grateful that you would > like to know more about partnering with ClientEarth. > > We really appreciate your request, if you can send us details of your > proposal we would love to review in line with our corporate partnership > policy. Once we have reviewed this opportunity we will contact you again > regarding your donation. > > Please do feel free to let us know of your latest environmental policy or > if your company currently holds any environmental ISO certificates, as this > would greatly expedite our review process. > > As you know, ClientEarth works to stop climate change and pollution, > protect and restore habitats, wildlife and natural resources, as well as > empowering people and promoting the rule of law. > > If you would like to find out more about our work, you can find the latest > news on our website <https://www.clientearth.org/> or you can sign up to > our email newsletter > <https://www.action.clientearth.org/sign-clientearths-newsletter/?_ga=2.2608…>. > > > Please contact me if you have any further questions or queries and I will > be happy to help. > > > > Best wishes. > > > > > > *Kriss Atkin* > > Development Administration Assistant > > [image: ClientEarth_lockup_black] > > t. +44(0)303 050 5991 > > ClientEarth, The Joinery, 34 Drayton Park, London, N5 1PB > > [image: cid:image004.png@01D65A06.292F2EF0] > > *Website* <https://www.clientearth.org/>* | **Facebook* > <https://www.facebook.com/ClientEarth>* | **Twitter* > <http://www.twitter.com/clientearth>* | **Instagram* > <https://www.instagram.com/clientearth_/?hl=en>* | **LinkedIn* > <https://www.linkedin.com/company/clientearth> > > > > > -- *Gunnar Larson - xNY.io <http://www.xNY.io> | Bank.org <http://Bank.org>* MSc <https://www.unic.ac.cy/blockchain/msc-digital-currency/?utm_source=Google&u…> - Digital Currency MBA <https://www.unic.ac.cy/business-administration-entrepreneurship-and-innovat…> - Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ip) G(a)xNY.io +1-646-454-9107 New York, New York 10001

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What Elon Musk Can Learn From Mastodon—and What He Can’t
by revevilgod＠gmx.com 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Twitter’s new owner has a vision that sounds a lot like a scrappy little social network that already exists, with one key difference. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-twitter-masatodon/ FREEDOM NEVER COMES for free. In Twitter’s case, the price was $44 billion, which Elon Musk will pay to liberate the platform from its responsibilities as a public company and transform it into a free speech Xanadu. Musk wants to open source the platform’s algorithms, exile spam bots, and allow people to tweet whatever they please “within the bounds of the law.” To him, the stakes are nothing short of existential. “My strong intuitive sense,” he said in an interview at TED last week, “is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.” Musk’s vision has fueled uncertainty about what the future of Twitter may look like. But many of those ideas are already at work on another social network, one that thousands of people have flocked to in recent days: Mastodon. Mastodon emerged in 2016 as a decentralized alternative to Twitter. It is not one website, but a collection of federated communities called “instances.” Its code is open source, which allows anyone to create an “instance” of their own. There is, for example, metalhead.club, for German metalheads, and koyu.space, a “nice community for chill people.” Each instance operates its own server and creates its own set of rules. There are no broad edicts about what people can and cannot say across the “fediverse,” or the “federated universe.” On Mastodon, communities police themselves. More than 28,000 new users joined a Mastodon server on Monday, according to the network’s creator, Eugen Rochko. Since March, when Musk first started making noise, the network has seen as many as 49,000 new accounts. For a service with 360,000 monthly active users, that’s a substantial influx. “On the Mastodon server that I manage, sign-ups have increased by 71 percent and monthly active users have increased by 36 percent,” Rochko said by email. “Many people have come back to their old accounts following the news.” Rochko once found himself in a position similar to Musk's: He was a Twitter power user with some gripes. The problem, as Rochko saw it, was centralization. A central authority meant the platform bent to the whims of its shareholders and rules could change without warning. It also meant that a platform could go defunct, something Rochko had experienced with MySpace, Friendfeed, and SchülerVZ, a German version of Facebook. A server owned and operated by the people who used it would allow greater control, including over their self-governance. Unlike Musk, Rochko did not have billions to burn. Instead, he was a 24-year-old college student, months away from graduating from a university in central Germany. So Rochko decided to build his own social network. He created the framework for Mastodon in his spare time, accepting donations from benefactors from Patreon, who were similarly interested in a Twitter alternative that returned power to the people. In 2016, shortly after graduation, he launched Mastodon to the masses. The initial wave of interest in Mastodon came from people who wanted to escape Twitter’s trolls, spam bots, and the sudden rise of @realDonaldTrump. Plus, Mastodon was fun. One early instance was based around a word-game community that excluded the letter “e.” Another instance, called Dolphin.Town, allowed people to communicate exclusively using the letter “e.” The federated nature of Mastodon allowed Rochko to skirt some of the common problems with social media moderation that have increasingly vexed companies like Twitter and Facebook. As platforms scale, it gets harder to make rules that fit every case, and it’s nearly impossible to enforce those rules across millions of users. But Mastodon’s user base was still small, and each instance was responsible for itself. If two instances had a beef, they could block each other outright, cutting off all contact between their communities. Individuals could also employ a number of blocking, muting, and reporting tools. “This gives the power to shape smaller, independent, yet integrated communities back to the people,” Rochko wrote in an early blog post. “As an end-user, you have the ability to choose an instance with the rules and policies that you agree with (or roll your own, if you are technically inclined).” By design, Mastodon’s moderation looks a lot like what Musk seems to want. Some instances are widely blocked, but no one has been “deplatformed.” While the approach has its advantages, it also has consequences. In Mastodon’s early days, people referred to it as a place to take refuge from the trolls of the internet—or, simply put, “Twitter, without Nazis.” But Nazis did eventually arrive. In 2019, when the alt-right social network Gab was shut down, a number of its users recreated their community on Mastodon. People protested, but Rochko told reporters that his hands were tied. “You have to understand it’s not actually possible to do anything platform-wide because it’s decentralized,” he said at the time. “I don’t have the control.” Still, Mastodon’s blocking tools at least make the Nazis easier to ignore. And instances can choose the rules that fit their needs, says Darius Kazemi, who runs a server called Friend Camp for about 50 of his friends and wrote a guide for others to do the same. That sounds similar to Musk’s idea that people on Twitter should be able to say what they wish, but Kazemi says in practice that ethos only works in small groups. “It’s much easier to come up with rules that 50 people agree with than moderation rules that a billion people agree with,” he says. “If I wanted to, I could probably get consensus that mentioning Elon Musk would be a bannable offense on our server. I don’t think you can do this sort of stuff at scale.” For similar reasons, Mastodon has never grown quite as big as social networks like Twitter or Reddit. Rochko says that’s because network effects are hard to replicate. People go where their friends are, and most people’s friends are still on Facebook and Twitter. Still, the fediverse has benefitted from the regular stumbles of those larger social media companies. When Tumblr announced in 2018 that it would ban “sensitive content,” like nude photography, thousands of its users migrated to Mastodon. The network also saw a surge of users after the #deletefacebook campaign the same year, and since then various complaints about Twitter have sent new users to Mastodon.

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Justice Department and SEC Portray Serially-Charged Banks on Wall Street as Hapless Victims of Archegos Fraud. Nobody’s Buying It.
by Gunnar Larson 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Justice Department and SEC Portray Serially-Charged Banks on Wall Street as Hapless Victims of Archegos Fraud. Nobody’s Buying It. <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/04/justice-department-and-sec-portray-s…> https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/04/justice-department-and-sec-portray-s… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens <https://wallstreetonparade.com/about-3/about/>: April 28, 2022 ~ [image: U.S. Attorney for the SDNY, Damian Williams, at Press Conference on Archegos Indictments] <https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/U.S.-Attorney-for…> U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, at Press Conference on Archegos Indictments, April 27, 2022 Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) brought charges against executives at Archegos Capital Management, the family office hedge fund that blew up in March of 2021. The Justice Department brought criminal charges <https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/U.S.-v-Sung-Kook-…> while the SEC and CFTC brought civil charges. Archegos founder and owner Sung Kook (Bill) Hwang and its former CFO, Patrick Halligan, were indicted on securities fraud and racketeering charges. William Tomita, the former Head Trader, and Scott Becker, the former Chief Risk Officer, have pleaded guilty for their roles in the fraud and are cooperating with the Justice Department. All three federal agencies adopted the narrative that the biggest trading houses on Wall Street were the hapless victims of the Archegos’ fraud. That narrative is going to be difficult for a jury to swallow for the following reasons: (1) the Wall Street firms invented the derivatives (total return swaps) that Archegos was using to hide its concentrated stock positions from the marketplace. The legality of those contracts has come into question <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/04/senate-banking-chair-sherrod-brown-s…>. Archegos had been in operation since 2013, but had never made a 13F filing with the SEC showing its stock holdings because the Wall Street banks lumped Archegos’ stock positions into the banks’ own 13F filings, making it appear to the public as if the banks actually owned these stock positions; (2) the same Wall Street firms provided Archegos with as much as 85 percent margin debt <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/04/archegos-wall-street-was-effectively…> on the stock trades tricked up as derivative trades, despite the federal regulation requiring a maximum of 50 percent initial margin debt on stock trades. The Justice Department said that at one point Archegos had $35 billion in capital and $160 billion in market value; (3) the same Wall Street firms were actually part of the manipulation of the stock prices in the Archegos portfolio because they were buying up the same shares to hedge their own exposure to their derivative gambles with Archegos; (4) the same Wall Street firms were incentivized to refill the punch bowl and keep the party going at Archegos because of the fat fees they were collecting; and (5) the Wall Street firms that the Justice Department alleges were defrauded by Archegos are some of the most sophisticated global trading firms on the planet and have been serially charged themselves with defrauding investors. The theory of the Archegos case by the U.S. Department of Justice was so lame that U.S. Attorney Damian Williams beat it out of his press conference yesterday after taking only a handful of questions from reporters. (You can watch the video of the press conference here <https://www.facebook.com/usaosdny>.) There was a lot of backslapping at the press conference on how fast and how great the work of the federal investigators had been to bring charges in just a little over a year since Archegos collapsed, resulting in at least $10 billion in losses to its bank counterparties. But one question from a reporter at the press conference revealed just how skimpy this investigation had been. The reporter asked if there could be “10 other individuals out there that we don’t know about,” meaning 10 other Archegos-style family office hedge funds doing business with Wall Street firms in a similar fashion. U.S. Attorney Williams responded: “It’s a fair question. I can’t speculate on what else may be out there.” If the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York concluded its investigation without knowing the full breadth and scope of what Wall Street is doing with these total return swaps for other family office hedge funds, can one really call this an investigation? In April of last year, *Wall Street On Parade* did some digging into that matter ourselves. This is part of what we reported <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/04/the-stock-market-is-just-one-hedge-f…> : We found that billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Willett Advisors family office hedge fund hasn’t filed a 13F since 2014 <https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001509379/000114036114040025/xslFo…> and that filing showed only $273,000 in assets. According to CaproAsia <https://www.caproasia.com/2020/11/16/2020-top-10-largest-family-office-in-t…>, Willet Advisors is the seventh largest family office in the world with $25 billion in assets. (Thus, when Bloomberg News’ editorial board tells you that Archegos was “No Big Deal” <https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l32SjfGdO4oJ:https://…> and that “there’s little regulators need to do,” you might want to take that with a grain of salt.) The public has also learned recently that the SEC doles out requests to file 13F forms on a confidential basis quite frequently. According to CaproAsia’s list of the top 10 family offices, billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions family office has $107 billion in assets. But the SEC has no 13F filing at all for the entity in its public records. Then there is billionaire James Simon, founder of Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s largest hedge funds. (See Did Archegos, Like Renaissance Hedge Fund, Avoid Billions in U.S. Tax Payments through a Scheme with the Banks? <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/04/did-archegos-like-renaissance-hedge-…>) Simon’s family office is called Euclidean Capital. Its 13F filing for the quarter ending December 31, 2020 shows $472 million in assets <https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001825034/000101297521000077/00010…>. But CaproAsia indicates that it manages $21 billion in assets. Are the rest of those assets hiding out on some bank’s balance sheet? Under the SEC’s current, billionaire-friendly, dodgy system of reporting, it’s all just one big guessing game as to whom owns what. Another example is billionaire Bill Gates’ family office, Cascade Investment LLC. According to CaproAsia it ranks number 3 among the world’s largest family offices with $51 billion in assets. Cascade Investment LLC hasn’t filed a 13F form with the SEC since the quarter ending September 30, 2008 (coincidentally, the same quarter that Wall Street blew itself up, taking the stock market along with it). At that point in time, Cascade Investment showed $4.32 billion in stock positions <https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1052192/000104746908009453/a2187455…>. Its only filings since that time simply show what stocks it’s acquired and sold, but not the 13F which would show the full positions in its portfolio and their value. We could go on and on, but you get the picture. *Wall Street On Parade* also reported in April of last year that since the Wall Street crash of 2008, equity derivative contracts similar to those held by Archegos have exploded from $737 billion to $4.197 *trillion* <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/04/archegos-unpacked-equity-derivative-…> . A 25-year former veteran staff attorney at the SEC, James Kidney, has gone on the record <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2019/01/former-sec-attorney-james-kidney-is-…> as to how not prosecuting higher ups on Wall Street at the SEC provides a shot at those seven-figure jobs on Wall Street. For how the Justice Department is similarly co-opted from prosecuting the big names on Wall Street, see here <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/10/the-justice-department-has-58-docume…> and here <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/01/one-day-after-frontline-airs-critica…> . Another big problem for the Justice Department’s case is the internal investigation conducted by the Big Law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison into Credit Suisse’s role in the Archegos implosion. (Last July, Credit Suisse released the 165-page report <https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Paul-Weiss-Invest…> by Paul Weiss on its version of what happened.) Other Wall Street banks doing trades with Archegos included Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Nomura, Deutsche Bank and others. This is how the Paul Weiss report portrayed the zombie risk managers at Credit Suisse: “The Archegos-related losses sustained by CS [Credit Suisse] are the result of a fundamental failure of management and controls in CS’s Investment Bank and, specifically, in its Prime Services business. The business was focused on maximizing short-term profits and failed to rein in and, indeed, enabled Archegos’s voracious risk-taking. There were numerous warning signals—including large, persistent limit breaches — indicating that Archegos’s concentrated, volatile, and severely under-margined swap positions posed potentially catastrophic risk to CS. Yet the business, from the in-business risk managers to the Global Head of Equities, as well as the risk function, failed to heed these signs, despite evidence that some individuals did raise concerns appropriately.” And this: “…a Prime Services business with a lackadaisical attitude towards risk and risk discipline; a lack of accountability for risk failures; risk systems that identified acute risks, which were systematically ignored by business and risk personnel; and a cultural unwillingness to engage in challenging discussions or to escalate matters posing grave economic and reputational risk. The Archegos matter directly calls into question the competence of the business and risk personnel who had all the information necessary to appreciate the magnitude and urgency of the Archegos risks, but failed at multiple junctures to take decisive and urgent action to address them.” The following Tweets appeared on the Twitter page for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York shortly after it announced its findings in the Archegos matter: [image: Tweets regarding the U.S. Attorney's Indicments Against Archegos Executives] <https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Tweets-regarding-…> Now would be a good time for the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to open its own investigation and actually get to the bottom of the full scope of this fraud. -- *Gunnar Larson - xNY.io <http://www.xNY.io> | Bank.org <http://Bank.org>* MSc <https://www.unic.ac.cy/blockchain/msc-digital-currency/?utm_source=Google&u…> - Digital Currency MBA <https://www.unic.ac.cy/business-administration-entrepreneurship-and-innovat…> - Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ip) G(a)xNY.io +1-646-454-9107 New York, New York 10001

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https://www.coinbase.com/price/usdp
by Gunnar Larson 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Wonder what happened? https://www.coinbase.com/price/usdp USDP Stablecoin price (USDP / USD) USDP Stablecoin is not supported by Coinbase.    $0.00000010 -100.00% -- *Gunnar Larson - xNY.io <http://www.xNY.io> | Bank.org <http://Bank.org>* MSc <https://www.unic.ac.cy/blockchain/msc-digital-currency/?utm_source=Google&u…> - Digital Currency MBA <https://www.unic.ac.cy/business-administration-entrepreneurship-and-innovat…> - Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ip) G(a)xNY.io +1-646-454-9107 New York, New York 10001

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Zooko Wilcox, posing as a cypherpunk, has earned killing ( My 20 sats )
by professor rat 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Zooko: The Financial Industry Is Demanding Privacy ... https://bitcoinmagazine.com › culture › zooko-the-fina... 20 Apr 2016 — During a recent cryptocurrency event at the Cato Institute, Zcash CEO and longtime cypherpunkZooko Wilcox-O'Hearn . . . " CATO - A "libertarian" quasi-academic think-tank which acts as a mouthpiece for the globalism, corporatism, and neoliberalism of its corporate and conservative funders. Cato is an astroturf organization: there is no significant participation by the tiny libertarian minority. They do not fund it or affect its goals. It is a creature of corporations and foundations. ( Mike Huben ) https://theworld.com/~mhuben/cato.html

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