February 2023 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Lee Reiners needs killing ( My 2k sats worth )
by professor rat 15 Feb '23

15 Feb '23

LEE " After fourteen years and innumerable claims that crypto represents the future of money, finance, or something else, we have yet to see crypto’s killer use case.” REINERS I blame this rotten creep for obfuscating APster https://stiffs.com/celebrity/julianassange Any prediction market accepting crypto-currencies is also an assassination market.

1 0

Rat-Scientists ‘switch off’ autism symptoms using $3 epilepsy drug
by professor rat 15 Feb '23

15 Feb '23

Exit Semich! https://nypost.com/2023/02/14/scientists-switch-off-autism-using-3-epilepsy… Reposts not forced medication for serial pests

1 0

Cryptoanarchy or the USA - choose one
by professor rat 15 Feb '23

15 Feb '23

Lee Reiners, policy director of the Duke Financial Economics Center, said that the crypto world barely resembled anything Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned and “undermined” U.S. national security. https://decrypt.co/121293/lawmakers-continue-to-quarrel-over-crypto-nightma… Liz Warren tries to invoke the Narco-terrorist Fourth Horseman - truth is the USG doesn't care https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs Page 459, " Too big to fail" by Andy Sorkin "...Goldman had been on Wachovia's payroll as its adviser, and as such, knew every aspect of its internal numbers..." " Government Sachs " knew every aspect of this continuous flow of drug cartel cash. The USG didn't care then - it cares even less now. Protecting children is the only one of the four horsemen of the infopocalypse with any legs. But even that has severe limits - as witness Sandy Hook. TL/DR we young - they old - and that's life. The world chooses cryptoanarchy more every day - USA power declines in proportion. Victory is here - its just not evenly distributed

1 0

Crypto on Tap Today at Senate Banking Hearing: Two of Three Witnesses Will Push Nutty Ideas
by Gunnar Larson 14 Feb '23

14 Feb '23

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/02/crypto-on-tap-today-at-senate-bankin… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 14, 2023 ~ Senator Sherrod Brown Senator Sherrod Brown, Chair of Senate Banking Committee To understand the deteriorating condition of American democracy, one needs to be able to spot corrupt patterns. Let’s take the Senate Banking Committee, for example. We previously explained how the Senate Banking Committee has subpoena power to get at the truth but never uses it, relying on Senator Elizabeth Warren to send out an endless stream of letters demanding information – which typically never comes because the target of those letters knows that a failure to respond will not result in a subpoena. The failure of the Senate Banking Committee to issue subpoenas stems from the fact that, according to the Congressional Research Service, the Senate Banking Committee has adopted a rule that requires a majority vote to issue a subpoena for documents or witnesses. And since this Committee has too many right-wing Republican members who take campaign funds from powerful players who want to keep a lid on the truth, the American people keep getting pablum from Senate Banking hearings, instead of the cold, hard facts. The end results of these failures to issue subpoenas are that the American people have yet to see or hear any investigative findings about what really went down in the Fed’s historic trading scandal, despite the passage of more than 17 months; or what really occurred in the Archegos collapse, where mega banks were giving out 85 percent leverage on billions of dollars in concentrated stock positions via ginned up derivatives; or why the Fed needed to funnel trillions of dollars in repo loan bailouts to Wall Street mega banks in the fourth quarter of 2019, months before there was any COVID-19 pandemic anywhere in the world. (See There’s a News Blackout on the Fed’s Naming of the Banks that Got Its Emergency Repo Loans; Some Journalists Appear to Be Under Gag Orders.) The Chair of the Senate Banking Committee is Senator Sherrod Brown, a decent guy and a progressive from Ohio. But the makeup of the witnesses on tap for today’s hearing on the crypto crisis looks like something a right-winger put together. One witness, Linda Jeng, is the top lawyer for the Crypto Council for Innovation, a lobbying group for crypto interests. She will be shilling today for crypto interests in much the same way that celebrities shilled for FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried in the lead up to $8 billion of FTX customers’ funds going missing. On the website for the Crypto Council for Innovation, it lists its “Alliance” members. These include the following: Andreessen Horowitz – the venture capital firm that is a heavy investor in crypto and would severely suffer if crypto is banned; Coinbase – the publicly-traded crypto exchange that lost 86 percent of its market value last year; Gemini, a crypto exchange created by the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, whose customers have been locked out of their interest-bearing “Earn” accounts to the tune of $900 million since November 16 of last year; and others with a vested financial interest in pushing crypto in a positive light to Congress. According to Jeng’s written testimony, which has been posted on the Senate Banking Committee’s website, she plans to push the right-wing mantra that all those crypto frauds and crypto bankruptcies and billions of dollars in looted customer funds are “a failure of people, not technology.” The crypto gang has apparently hired a p.r. firm to script its message because the same refrains are popping out of the mouths of multiple right-wingers in Senate and House hearings on crypto. One of those repeated refrains is this: “…we didn’t eliminate or ban banking after the collapse of Lehman Brothers….” Jeng also included that scripted phrase in her written remarks for today’s hearing. Another nutty idea will be presented today by Yesha Yadav, a law professor at Vanderbilt Law School. Yadav, according to her written remarks, will recommend “self-regulation by cryptocurrency exchanges.” Given what the public knows thus far about what was going on at bankrupt FTX and bankrupt Celsius, that would be like giving Bernie Madoff’s co-conspirators self-regulatory powers after he was charged with the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has called Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto exchange, FTX, “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.” New York State’s Attorney General, Letitia James, has filed a lawsuit against the co-founder of Celsius, Alex Mashinsky. In announcing the lawsuit, the New York State Attorney General’s office wrote this: “Mashinsky repeatedly claimed that Celsius made safe, low-risk investments and only lent assets to credible and reputable entities. However, investors’ assets were routinely exposed to high-risk counterparties and strategies, many of which resulted in losses that Mashinsky concealed from investors. The collapse of Celsius has left many individuals in financial ruin. One New York resident mortgaged two properties to invest with Celsius. A disabled veteran lost his investment of $36,000, which had taken him nearly a decade to save up. Another disabled citizen, who depended upon government assistance to supplement his $8 per hour income, lost his entire investment.” Three of the bankrupt crypto lenders and exchanges were extensively interconnected to FTX: BlockFi, Celsius, and Voyager Digital. The crypto “industry” is a tightly-wound, layered ball of fraud. The only way to effectively regulate it is to ban it altogether, as veteran investor Charlie Munger recommended in a recent Wall Street Journal OpEd. The only refreshing voice at today’s hearing is Lee Reiners, the Policy Director at Duke University’s Financial Economics Center. Reiners will remind the members of the Senate Banking Committee that despite 14 years of hyped promises about the groundbreaking innovation that crypto was going to deliver, it has failed to materialize. Reiners’ written statement includes the following: “By technology standards, crypto is not new. For comparison, the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Anyone who held a smartphone in their hand for the first time immediately recognized its transformative potential; now, 85% of Americans own a smartphone…After fourteen years and innumerable claims that crypto represents the future of money, finance, or something else, we have yet to see crypto’s killer use case.” Reiners’ statement reminded us of what global economist Nouriel Roubini said about crypto in a Bloomberg TV interview in 2019: “Crypto currencies are not even currencies. They’re a joke…The price of Bitcoin has fallen in a week by how much – 30 percent. It goes up 20 percent one day, collapses the next. It is not a means of payment, nobody, not even this blockchain conference, accepts Bitcoin for paying for conference fees cause you can do only five transactions per second with Bitcoin. With the Visa system you can do 25,000 transactions per second…Crypto’s nonsense. It’s a failure. Nobody’s using it for any transactions. It’s trading one sh*tcoin for another sh*tcoin. That’s the entire trading or currency in the space where’s there’s price manipulation, spoofing, wash trading, pump and dumping, frontrunning. It’s just a big criminal scam and nothing else.” What else strikes us as untoward in what the Senate Banking Committee is doing is it calling academics and a lawyer for a crypto lobbyist to testify when there are more than 1,600 scientists and software engineers who have put their names to a letter sent to the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committee that explains in detail why both crypto and blockchain are failed experiments in financial innovation. Many of these experts work in the technology field at companies like Google, and Apple and Microsoft. Why not call actual technology people to testify? Why not call those defrauded of their life savings to testify about what they want to see in the way of reform? Why not call the Big Law firm that seems to be entangled with an uncanny number of these collapsed crypto firms – Sullivan & Cromwell — to testify about what they knew and when they knew it. It’s right now billing in the FTX bankruptcy at an annualized rate of $147 million after failing to detect a litany of waving red flags that the business model of FTX was fraud. In other words, the Senate Banking Committee members need to stop feeding pablum to the American people and actually do the job their constituents sent them to Congress to do.

1 0

LexShares' Fourth Quarter 2022 Highlights - Litigation Finance Journal
by Gunnar Larson 14 Feb '23

14 Feb '23

Check out my new article: https://litigationfinancejournal.com/lexshares-fourth-quarter-2022-highligh… As the global litigation investment marketplace continues to mature in meaningful ways, LexShares reflects on the firm’s Q4-2022 success. According to LexShares <https://lexshares.ghost.io/blog/industry-outlook-q4-2022/>, overall financial performance of the industry continues to advance and attract favorable attention from a variety of investors looking to profit from the increasing usage of litigation finance. LexShares forecasts that business owners will embrace creativity in searching for capital lines, and litigation investors are targeting qualified legal funding franchises as a result. As 2022 closed, all signs pointed to legal professionals’ increasing engagement with the services offered by the litigation finance industry. LexShares reflects on the 60 Minutes expose of the industry, which snagged over 11M viewers, many of whom may have discovered litigation finance for the first time. Overall, LexShares suggests that the global litigation investment marketplace is attracting traditional money managers who are seeking to invest in uncorrelated litigation finance instruments.

1 0

Solidarity and support for Andrew Mickel
by professor rat 13 Feb '23

13 Feb '23

FREE ANDY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Mickel OR ELSE . . .

1 0

Assassinating cops
by professor rat 13 Feb '23

13 Feb '23

LULZSEC’s La Chinga Migra stand briefly aligned them with 14 years ( an eternity in net years ) standard revolutionary c-punk praxis. A bit like " Raise the Fist " had done nine years previously. Cryptoanarchist assassins continue to hunt down all fascist-pig-cops, Bill Gates and the current POTUS. Welcome to the global revolution. Voluntaryist, agorist carpetbaggers GO FUCK YOURSELF.

1 0

These Are the $439, 000 Missiles the US Is Using to Shoot Down Mystery UFOs
by Gunnar Larson 13 Feb '23

13 Feb '23

Gunnar's Big Blimp Company 🎈 These Are the $439,000 Missiles the US Is Using to Shoot Down Mystery UFOs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-13/us-is-shooting-down-unid…

1 0

Cypherpunk 2027 is shaping up nicely - four years at full warp!
by professor rat 13 Feb '23

13 Feb '23

At least according to this most conventionally successful cypherpunk https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-could-hit-10m-in-9-years-but-more-si… Reposts not calls for selective Butlerians against conventional conformists

1 0

Sam Bankman-Fried, BlockFi and Sullivan & Cromwell: A Viper’s Nest of Conflicts and Intrigue
by Gunnar Larson 13 Feb '23

13 Feb '23

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/02/sam-bankman-fried-blockfi-and-sulliv… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 13, 2023 ~ Ryne Miller, Former Sullivan & Cromwell Partner; Now General Counsel of FTX.US Ryne Miller, Former Sullivan & Cromwell Partner, Became General Counsel of FTX US On December 21, Big Law firm Sullivan & Cromwell filed a conflict disclosure with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, where it was hoping to be officially appointed as lead counsel for the bankruptcy estate of Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto house of cards – FTX, Alameda Research and its more than 100 opaque affiliates. Judge John Dorsey signed the order making Sullivan & Cromwell lead counsel on January 20, despite a mind-numbing list of conflicts of interests, including extensive past legal work for the FTX group and personal legal work for its now indicted kingpin, Sam Bankman-Fried. The disclosure showed that in addition to FTX and Alameda Research, Sullivan & Cromwell had 10 other current crypto clients, including four major crypto competitors to FTX — BlockFi, Coinbase, Gemini, and Kraken. Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose office indicted Bankman-Fried on eight criminal counts for looting billions of dollars from customer accounts, called FTX “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.” Those four crypto competitors that Sullivan & Cromwell named as also being their clients, haven’t fared too well either. BlockFi is in bankruptcy proceedings in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey with over $1 billion exposure in loans and locked up assets at Bankman-Fried’s related companies. Coinbase is a publicly-traded crypto exchange in the U.S.; its shareholders lost 86 percent of their money if they owned the stock throughout last year. Gemini is a crypto exchange created by the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler. Its customers have been locked out of their interest-bearing “Earn” accounts to the tune of $900 million since November 16 of last year. Kraken is also a crypto exchange; last Thursday the Securities and Exchange Commission charged it with the “illegal unregistered offer and sale of securities involving the staking of crypto assets.” Kraken agreed to pay $30 million in penalties and disgorgement. While this litany of crypto disasters does not paint a pretty picture of what is happening in general with Sullivan & Cromwell’s crypto clients, BlockFi is in a league of its own in terms of a viper’s nest of conflicts inside Sullivan & Cromwell and internecine intrigue. Under Bankruptcy Code Section 327(a), attorneys hired by the bankruptcy estate cannot hold or represent an interest adverse to the estate and must be “disinterested persons.” The December 21 disclosure filed with the FTX bankruptcy court included a declaration from Sullivan & Cromwell partner, Andrew Dietderich, who told the court the following: “Based solely on the conflicts procedures described herein, (i) S&C is not aware of any conflict between its representation of the Debtors and its representations of its Current Clients or Former Clients that would cause S&C not to be a ‘disinterested person,’ (ii) S&C does not represent any person or entity having an interest adverse to the Debtors in connection with these chapter 11 cases….” On the date of that declaration, December 21, Sullivan & Cromwell was well aware that its client, BlockFi, had an extremely adversarial relationship with the FTX group. On the compensation request submitted by Sullivan & Cromwell to the bankruptcy court last Wednesday, for legal work it performed for the FTX group in the last 19 days of November, the name BlockFi appears 57 times. In 6 of those instances, the billable hours were described as involving the “BlockFi adversary proceeding” or “BlockFi adversary action.” For example, on November 30, Sullivan & Cromwell law partner, Brian Glueckstein, billed 3.2 hours for what he described as follows: “Analysis and strategy re: BlockFi claims (.80); call with S&C and Haynes Boone teams re: BlockFi claims issues (.50); follow-up correspondence to S&C team re: same (.20); meetings with A. Dietderich re: BlockFi claims (.40); correspondences to S&C team re: BlockFi adversary proceeding (.40); meeting with A. Dietderich and J. Bromley re: BlockFi strategy issues (.40); meeting with M. Porpora re: BlockFi adversary proceeding (.50).” >From November 12 through November 30 (which is the only compensation request that Sullivan & Cromwell has presented to the FTX bankruptcy court thus far) the law firm billed a total of 50.3 hours of work related just to BlockFi. At its indicated “blended hourly rate” of $1,452.41, that’s more than $73,000 involving an “adversary proceeding” when the law firm had told the court on December 21 that “S&C does not represent any person or entity having an interest adverse to the Debtors.” (Sullivan & Cromwell’s total compensation request came out to more than $7.6 million for the 19-day span.) What is this adversary proceeding all about? BlockFi is claiming ownership of more than half a billion dollars in publicly-traded shares of Robinhood, a trading app, which were 90 percent-owned by Sam Bankman-Fried through an offshore vehicle called Emergent Fidelity Technologies, Ltd. The shares were pledged as collateral for $680 million in loans that Alameda Research owed BlockFi. Judge Dorsey was put on notice of this adversary proceeding on January 5 of this year when Richard Anigian, a law partner at Haynes and Boone, LLP, filed a declaration in Dorsey’s court explaining the situation along with documentation that tallied up to 372 pages. Sullivan & Cromwell has conceded in a court filing that it represented Bankman-Fried in connection with this Robinshare share purchase. Making that transaction even more fraught for Sullivan & Cromwell is the fact that the Department of Justice believes that Sam Bankman-Fried may have been attempting to hide that half billion dollars he held in the publicly-traded common stock of Robinhood by setting up the offshore vehicle, Emergent Fidelity Technologies Ltd. in Antigua, to hold the shares. The registration for Emergent Fidelity Technologies, Ltd. was filed on April 22, 2022 in Antigua. Federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York wrote in a letter on January 30 of this year that “the original circumstances of the purchase of these shares, through a foreign special purpose vehicle with no public connection to FTX or Alameda, further indicate the steps the defendant has taken to obscure his criminal misuse of FTX customer property.” The documentation on how this transaction went down is a window into what was going on under the nose of Sullivan & Cromwell’s former partner, Ryne Miller, who became General Counsel to FTX US in August of 2021. Although Miller was General Counsel to FTX US, not Alameda Research or Emergent Fidelity Technologies Ltd., he listed himself as the contact person on the Securities and Exchange Commission filing for this Robinhood stock purchase. Presumably, Miller should have inquired into how Bankman-Fried came by this more than half a billion dollars to buy 56 million shares of Robinhood stock. That’s not a pretty picture either. Caroline Ellison, the woman who was reportedly at some point sleeping with Sam Bankman-Fried in his penthouse in the Bahamas, that was shared with other FTX executives, signed two loans from Alameda Research to Sam Bankman-Fried in April and May of 2022. The loans totaled $491.7 million. Ellison signed the promissory notes for these loans as Co-CEO of Alameda Research. Ellison also signed the pledge agreement to BlockFi as Co-CEO of Emergent Fidelity Technologies, Ltd. despite the fact that the Bylaws for Emergent list officer positions of President, Treasurer, Secretary, etc. but no such position as CEO or Co-CEO. Bankman-Fried is listed as the sole Director of Emergent. According to the complaint against Sam Bankman-Fried filed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), it is highly likely that the loans made to Bankman-Fried from Alameda Research came from looted customer funds. The CFTC writes: “…without disclosure to FTX customers, Alameda and FTX commingled assets and freely used FTX customer assets as if they were their own, including as capital to deploy in their own trading and investment activities. On information and belief, Bankman-Fried, his parents and other FTX and Alameda employees used FTX customer assets for a variety of personal expenditures, including luxury real estate purchases, private jets, documented and undocumented personal loans and personal political donations.” According to testimony provided to the House Financial Services Committee on December 13, $8 billion of customer funds are missing at the FTX group of companies. One of those customers, Warren Winter, filed a written objection with the bankruptcy court to Sullivan & Cromwell serving as lead counsel in the bankruptcy case. Winter wrote: “Sullivan & Cromwell was one of the FTX Group’s ‘primary external law firms’ before the FTX Group collapsed. To date, the FTX Group has paid the firm more than $20.5 million in fees and retainers. Now, in the most flagrant attempt by a fox to guard a henhouse in recent memory, Sullivan & Cromwell has applied to be appointed the FTX Group’s bankruptcy counsel with duties that would include ‘investigating all potential estate causes of action’….” Unfortunately for FTX customers, Judge Dorsey appears inclined to gloss over serious conflicts of interests involving Sullivan & Cromwell like he’s shooing away gnats on a summer’s day. (See 18 States Send a Message to FTX Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey: We’re Watching You and Numerous Big Law Firms Had Zero Ties to Sam Bankman-Fried; So Why Did John Ray Hire Two Deeply Conflicted Law Firms?)

1 0