February 2023 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

The Same Day Sam Bankman-Fried Is Hit with a New Count of Bank Fraud, Three Regulators Warn About Crypto Bank Runs
by Gunnar Larson 27 Feb '23

27 Feb '23

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/02/the-same-day-sam-bankman-fried-is-hi… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 27, 2023 ~ Damian Williams (Photo Source US Attorney's Office, SDNY, via AP) Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for SDNY, Is Leading the Prosecution of Sam Bankman-Fried On December 13, the U.S. Department of Justice released an 8-count criminal indictment against the former crypto kingpin, Sam Bankman-Fried. He was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to defraud the Federal Election Commission and commit campaign finance violations. Last Thursday, the Department of Justice added four additional criminal counts against Sam Bankman-Fried in a superseding indictment. These include: bank fraud; conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business; and two counts involving the purchase and sale of derivatives. Bankman-Fried’s jury trial is scheduled to start in October. The charge of bank fraud is something that jury members can get their minds around – particularly when the alleged bank fraud is shown to have taken place at federally-insured banks which are backstopped by U.S. taxpayers. And while the new indictment does not name any specific banks, it is well known that Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange and his hedge fund, Alameda Research, were involved with a number of federally-insured banks. (See, for example, Federally-Insured, Crypto-Focused Silvergate Bank Loses 43 Percent of Its Market Value Yesterday as Depositors Flee. Silvergate was a $160 stock in late April of last year. It closed on Friday at $14.33 following a massive bank run on deposits in the last quarter of 2022 as its ties to FTX became publicized.) Here’s a sampling of what’s in the new indictment regarding Sam Bankman-Fried’s alleged diabolical plan to engage in bank fraud: “SAMUEL BANKMAN-FRIED, a/k/a ‘SBF,’ the defendant, perpetrated this multi-billion-dollar fraud through a series, of systems and schemes that allowed BANKMAN-FRIED, through Alameda, to access and steal FTX customer deposits without detection. For instance, in 2021, FTX began to accept customer fiat deposits into an Alameda-affiliated bank account that itself was established through a fraudulent scheme that BANKMAN-FRIED directed… “In part to obscure the relationship between FTX and Alameda, and in order to overcome Bank-1 ‘s refusal to open a bank account for FTX without extensive due diligence and licensing, in or about August 2020, SAMUEL BANKMAN-FRIED, a/k/a ‘SBF,’ the defendant, directed the incorporation of a new U.S.-based entity, North Dimension. BANKMAN-FRIED was listed as sole owner, CEO, and president of North Dimension, which had no employees or business operations outside of its bank account. BANKMAN-FRIED and others chose the name ‘North Dimension’ in part to conceal that there was a relationship between North Dimension and Alameda from FTX customers and from banks approving transactions with the North Dimension bank account. BANKMAN-FRIED also directed the creation of a website for North Dimension and used a credit card in his name to fund the hosting services for the website… “Once the North Dimension bank account was opened, FTX directed customer dollar deposits to the North Dimension account. Thereafter, when FTX customers deposited or withdrew fiat currency, Alameda personnel, who maintained control over the North Dimension account and acted under the direction and supervision of SAMUEL BANKMAN-FRIED, a/k/a ‘SBF,’ the defendant, and his co-conspirators, manually credited or subtracted the customer’s FTX account with the corresponding amount of fiat currency on an internal ledger system…” Investigative reporter, Gretchen Morgenson, reported for NBC News in December that North Dimension went to the trouble of creating a fake company website that marketed itself like this: “Our vision is to become most popular website for purchasing mobile phones and electronics by offering complete product information and a transparent purchasing procedure.” It is more than a little noteworthy that the same day that the Justice Department released details on how easily Bankman-Fried was allegedly able to commit bank fraud, three federal bank regulators released new warnings to U.S. banks about getting involved in crypto. The federal regulators are the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Federal Reserve), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). One paragraph of the various warnings sounds like it is describing the negative impact to all crypto-related banks when a relationship like that between Silvergate and FTX/Alameda makes headlines. It reads: “Deposits placed by a crypto-asset-related entity that are for the benefit of the crypto-asset-related entity’s customers (end customers). The stability of such deposits may be driven by the behavior of the end customer or crypto-asset sector dynamics, and not solely by the crypto-asset-related entity itself, which is the banking organization’s direct counterparty. The stability of the deposits may be influenced by, for example, periods of stress, market volatility, and related vulnerabilities in the crypto-asset sector, which may or may not be specific to the crypto-asset-related entity. Such deposits can be susceptible to large and rapid inflows as well as outflows, when end customers react to crypto-asset-sector-related market events, media reports, and uncertainty. This uncertainty and resulting deposit volatility can be exacerbated by end customer confusion related to inaccurate or misleading representations of deposit insurance by a crypto-asset-related entity.” There is no such thing as federal deposit insurance for crypto assets.

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Listing of Parts of Life
by Karl 27 Feb '23

27 Feb '23

-> Keep something similar to how it has been (body, environment, culture, home ...) -> Hold different approaches together and their merits (ways, cultures, genes, personalities, memes) Feel free to rewrite.

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Cryptocurrency: El Salvador's Bukele Clears The Streets To Build The First Cryptopia
by professor rat 27 Feb '23

27 Feb '23

Crypto-fascist police state more like it. It didn't take long for the inverse-Marxist ' Libertarian' crowd to embrace the ' omelette " thesis of Joseph Stalin. And that's actually good cos now we know exactly where rotten turds like Adam Back are coming from. And they can be driven out of all things cypherpunk with heavy blows. " Know your enemy " and " Cut off the head of the snake ". Yesterday.

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Cryptocurrency: Lunarpunks, Privacy, and the New Encryption Guerillas... CryptoAnarchy, Agorism, Black Markets, DarkFi
by professor rat 27 Feb '23

27 Feb '23

Keep polishing those Rachel-Rose O'Leary, Coindesk turds, G And AMIR - if you're listening - be sure to go fuck yourself.

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Cryptocurrency: El Salvador's Bukele Clears The Streets To Build The First Cryptopia
by grarpamp 27 Feb '23

27 Feb '23

As forums say... making all drugs legal, then rounding up the remaining street thugs, worldwide, eventually. El Salvador Sends Thousands Of Tattooed Gang Members To Mega-Prison Government authorities in El Salvador are circulating some surreal images in order to prove to the nation and the world that they are cleaning up crime in a country that's currently under a state of emergency due to rampant murders and violent crime. President Nayib Bukele has recently declared a "war on crime" and his message to gangs came in the form of publicizing 'shocking' video footage showing some 2,000 suspected gang members being huddled into a newly opened large prison using military tactics. Tens of thousands more suspected criminals have reportedly been rounded up. Watch below: https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1629513999833497600 Video from the president of El Salvador. Seems like “lock up all the guys with gang tattoos all over their bodies and throw away the key” was pretty low-hanging fruit? It’s interesting how many countries can’t even manage that. The criminals make it easy pic.twitter.com/xUk2Cj1l3U — Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) February 25, 2023 The footage has been met with some controversy, given there are allegations that innocent men may have been caught in the broad anti-gang dragnet. Additionally, the police appear to be utilizing military prison tactics not seen since post 9/11 Gitmo images. According to international reports: President Bukele tweeted that the first 2,000 people were transferred "at dawn, in a single operation" to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, which he says is the largest jail in the Americas. "This will be their new house, where they will live for decades, all mixed, unable to do any further harm to the population." Via Reuters Once widely dubbed the "homicide capital of the world" - authorities in recent years thought they had it under control, but murders spiked over the past year. Via Reuters This caused President Nayib Bukele to declared a state of emergency eight months ago, and police went 'gloves off' in attempting to clear the streets of gangs.

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Cryptocurrency: Lunarpunks, Privacy, and the New Encryption Guerillas... CryptoAnarchy, Agorism, Black Markets, DarkFi
by grarpamp 27 Feb '23

27 Feb '23

Lunarpunks, Privacy, and the New Encryption Guerillas https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/06/08/lunarpunks-privacy-and-the-new-e… By Rachel-Rose O'Leary, Coindesk This article is part of Road to Consensus. Rachel-Rose O'Leary will speak at Layer 2's "Big Ideas" stage at Consensus. We Have Entered the Age of Anonymous Crypto https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/01/25/we-have-entered-the-age-of-anon… Lunarpunk, Black Markets, and Agorism in the 21st Century https://theblockchainsocialist.com/lunarpunk-black-markets-and-agorism-in-t… Welcome to Bitcoin Country, Silk Road, and the Lost Threads Of Agorism https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2017/09/23/welcome-to-bitcoin-country-silk… Crypto Anarchists Are Building Tools to Resist the State in Eastern Europe https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/12/01/crypto-anarchists-are-building-… https://www.agorist.xyz/ By Rachel-Rose O'Leary, Coindesk, Jun 8, 2022 https://twitter.com/zkarmor https://twitter.com/polarpunklabs A growing group of cryptography experts are using tools to carve "dark" spaces out of the surveilled web. This article is a preview of Rachel-Rose O'Leary's talk on the 'Big Ideas' stage at Consensus. In 1916, a few hundred revolutionaries declared Ireland to be an autonomous nation and occupied strategic locations around Dublin. In the days that followed, the British Army encircled the uprising and suffocated it. One by one, the leaders of the uprising were lined up and shot. A young fighter named Michael Collins evaded death by chance. He vowed never to enter into direct clashes with the British Empire again, and began a war that would change the shape of resistance forever. Units were split into small groups that operated in secrecy. Fighters lacked weapons, but the people and rugged landscape protected them. The new warfare favored hit-and-run tactics and disrupting enemy intelligence. It was the dawn of modern guerrilla tactics – and it won Ireland its independence. These guerilla tactics are no longer feasible today. Modern surveillance technologies and automated weaponry have turned the world that we inhabit into a desert with no protective cover. Resistance fighters are easy targets. Since the 1990s, a movement of privacy advocates and coders called cypherpunks have been fighting back the encroachment of surveillance. In some sense, they draw inspiration from the guerilla fighters before them. Guerilla warfare is fundamentally asymmetric: It is the tactic of a smaller, disadvantaged people against a vastly superior enemy. They fight high-tech with low-tech, complexity with simplicity, fire with water. Coders and guerillas alike define the front lines and change them constantly. For cyphers, it's with ever-advancing encryption and for fighters like the Irish, it's the ability to melt back into the community before the enemy can even give chase. As governments build all-encompassing surveillance machines, cypherpunks use simple encryption tools to render them futile. Cypherpunks argue that without privacy, personal liberty is impossible. Cryptography is a defensive tool to live free from coercion and force. The new guerillas Lunarpunk is descended from cypherpunk but takes its logic a step further. It’s a guerrilla movement committed to establishing a digital forest in cypherspace using tools like encryption that its fighters can recede into. The current internet is a desert rather than a forest due to surveillance. Lunarpunks defend and define new territories – dark, fertile zones that have been claimed back using private, anonymous decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) and peer-to-peer (P2P) organizational tooling. Another word for this would be an agora, or non-state system. In an interesting twist of history, a science-fiction subculture called solarpunk was one of the principal inspirations for Ether Both lunarpunk and solarpunk are utopian. Unlike solarpunk, lunarpunk is armed. It runs on DarkFi. Currently in the devnet phase, DarkFi (the word is a combination of "dark" and "DeFi") is a layer 1 blockchain that supports these private and anonymous applications. Lunarpunks, so far a small movement of hackers, are already creating tools using DarkFi that allow communities to coordinate in the dark. The DarkFi community has been working on an initial design for a private and anonymous DAO. Right now, DarkFi coders are testing a P2P Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client and task manager to ensure DAOs on DarkFi do not become dependent on centralized and proprietary software. Although crypto aims for decentralization, so much of the industry’s activity happens over for-profit tools like the messaging app Discord and digital notebook Notion. Until now, blockchain applications have been built on a desert landscape. Killer apps like automated market makers (AMM) compute the price of assets in token pools and require the app to know everything that happens in real time. The dominant engineering paradigm requires total surveillance. To engineer anonymous applications, we must generate new concepts. It is necessary to evolve what the DarkFi community calls "anonymous engineering" – a new kind of engineering based on hidden information. For example, zero-knowledge cryptography unlocks a new set of techniques – you can make encrypted commitments to data and trustlessly prove whether or not something has happened. You can compose hidden data structures that can hold references to one another. You can combine these techniques with other primitives, such as homomorphic encryption and multiparty computation, to design fully anonymous and featured applications. Inverting power Lunarpunks perceive lightness as terror, and are fighting against surveillance capitalism. In DarkFi, darkness is structured as an inversion of contemporary power dynamics and a way to empower communities. Darkness is the legacy of surveillance turned upside down. The inversion of hierarchies has been central to many crypto-anarchist movements. Think of the parallel, inverted world that crypto-anarchists call the Parallel Polis, or the tactic of counter-economics, a black market economy that exists parallel to, but distinct from, the statist economy. You can trace this political symbol to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote about what he called active and reactive forces. Forces are energies that drive human behavior. For him, active forces were positive – and are seen when people affirm and assert their power. Further, active forces lead to differentiation – a multiplicity of cults, factions and communities expressing power in different ways. Reactive forces suppress power and deny difference. In the lunarpunk's language, forests are active and deserts are reactive. Resistance is active; oppression is reactive. According to Nietzsche, active forces should dominate reactive forces. He called this “hierarchy.” But he argues that in reality, perhaps contrary to what you might expect, hierarchies are often inverted. Reactive forces, though lethargic and without any original ideas, are often the most powerful. State power persists by repressing resistance. The desert dominates. Lunarpunk does not negate the current order: It inverts the false hierarchy that places reactive forces on high and suppresses active forces. Lunarpunk proclaims the victory of affirmation against negation, the victory of the active against the reactive, and the victory of the forests against the desert. Like flowers bursting from concrete, a new design space is emerging from dead-end surveillance optimization. It is effortless and spontaneous, like a miracle of healing breaking out across a scarred and broken landscape. Encryption is asymmetric: It favors the smaller player over the monopoly. Cypherpunk hero Julian Assange said that "the universe smiles on encryption" because it is easier to encrypt information than to decrypt it. Lunarpunks are wielding this mystical quality of the universe in open conflict with surveillance. Thanks to Armor and Paul-Dylan Ennis.

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Cryptocurrency: The Four Great Fatal Flaws And Frauds Of Bitcoin, Africa Discovers
by grarpamp 26 Feb '23

26 Feb '23

The Four Great Fatal Flaws And Frauds Of Bitcoin - Pathetically Unservicable Transaction Rate - Massive Growth Of Storage Required To Store TX - Absolute Total Lack Of Privacy - Lightning Network Bitcoin best resolve the first three, and soon, lest it be abandoned by all but the elites who can afford to transact upon it after the next cycle peak. Even they will eventually leave it for lack of privacy. Africa will soon discover these truths... that BTC shills have defrauded them out of the possibility of a True Crypto Future... https://twitter.com/saylor/status/1624175117612814337 Any "fixes" that Bitcoiners apply to Bitcoin to solve these three things can no longer legitimately be called "Bitcoin" under their caretaking... the hypocrisy of their refusal to even attempt fix them earlier exposes that fact.

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Browsers: LibreWolf Project Sanitizing FireFox, Seeks Devs
by grarpamp 26 Feb '23

26 Feb '23

https://librewolf.net/ https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community https://www.reddit.com/r/LibreWolf/ https://lemmy.ml/c/librewolf https://gitter.im/librewolf-community https://matrix.to/#/#librewolf:matrix.org What is LibreWolf? This project is a custom and independent version of Firefox, with the primary goals of privacy, security and user freedom. LibreWolf is designed to increase protection against tracking and fingerprinting techniques, while also including a few security improvements. This is achieved through our privacy and security oriented settings and patches. LibreWolf also aims to remove all the telemetry, data collection and annoyances, as well as disabling anti-freedom features like DRM. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox/protect-your-privacy https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fingerprinting https://arkenfox.github.io/TZP/index.html https://privacytests.org/ https://browserleaks.com/ https://www.deviceinfo.me/ https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/viewMyClient.html https://chromium.github.io/octane/ LibreWolf includes... Privacy Delete cookies and website data on close. Include only privacy respecting search engines like DuckDuckGo and Searx. Include uBlockOrigin with custom default filter lists, and Tracking Protection in strict mode, to block trackers and ads. Strip tracking elements from URLs, both natively and through uBO. Enable dFPI, also known as Total Cookie Protection. Enable RFP which is part of the Tor Uplift project. RFP is considered the best in class anti-fingerprinting solution, and its goal is to make users look the same and cover as many metrics as possible, in an effort to block fingerprinting techniques. Always display user language as en-US to websites, in order to protect the language used in the browser and in the OS. Disable WebGL, as it is a strong fingerprinting vector. Prevent access to the location services of the OS, and use Mozilla's location API instead of Google's API. Limit ICE candidates generation to a single interface when sharing video or audio during a videoconference. Force DNS and WebRTC inside the proxy, when one is being used. Trim cross-origin referrers, so that they don't include the full URI. Disable search and form history. Disable form autofill. Disable link prefetching and speculative connections. Disable disk cache and clear temporary files on close. Use CRL as the default certificate revocation mechanism, as it is faster and privacy oriented. For security and usability reasons, the browser might fall back to OCSP in some instances: when that happens, OCSP will be stapled to preserve privacy. Security Stay up to date with upstream Firefox releases, in order to timely apply security patches. Enable HTTPS-only mode. Enable stricter negotiation rules for TLS/SSL. Always force user interaction when deciding the download location of a file. Disable scripting in the built in pdf reader. Protect against IDN homograph attack. Implement optional extension firewall, which can be enabled manually. Revert user-triggered TLS downgrades at the end of each session. Set OCSP to hard-fail in case a certain CA cannot be reached. Annoyances Prevent window resizing from scripts. Disable autoplay of media. Disable search suggestions and ads in the urlbar. Remove all the distracting and sponsored content from the home page. Remove the Pocket extension at compile time. Remove Mozilla VPN ads. Disable Firefox Sync, unless explicitly enabled by the user. Disable extension recommendations. Others Completely open source and community driven. Easy and Docker-based build process, so that everyone can build from source in few steps and without local dependencies. LibreWolf specific UI that exposes the most important privacy and security settings, to allow you to easily control them. Completely disable telemetry, including crash report, normandy, studies and personalized recommendations. No data collection of any kind. In fact, as stated in our privacy policy, we wouldn't even have the infrastructure to do that, making it impossible from a technical standpoint. Disable Google Safe Browsing, over censorship concerns, and in an effort to prevent Google from controlling another aspect of the internet. This would also make a developer key a requirement to build from source, which is something we are not comfortable with. Disable DRM, as it is a limitation to user freedom. Avoid making unnecessary changes that increase the fingerprint without giving any privacy gain. Only allow outgoing connections that are not privacy invading. Disable built-in password manager and suggest more robust options.

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From Big Dog to Big House - the oxmoronic nature of national-anarchy
by professor rat 26 Feb '23

26 Feb '23

The confronting pictures that capture El Salvador's crackdown on gangsters 11 hours ago The Guardian More El Salvador moves suspected gang members to 40,000-capacity ‘megaprison’ Yesterday Reuters More The 'mega prison' in El Salvador's gang crackdown

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“We are looking to kill Trump."
by professor rat 26 Feb '23

26 Feb '23

Take a number and get in line Amirali Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guards Aerospace Force, during a TV interview, said that Iran has plans to kill former United States President Donald Trump https://www.news18.com/news/world/irans-cruise-missile-may-raise-us-concern… APster style deadpool on the perp https://stiffs.com/celebrity/donaldtrump Cypherpunk revolution into KILLING US PRESIDENTS SINCE 1999

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