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Celsius Floats Fix For Customers' 'Devastating' Ballot Blunder
by Gunnar Larson 01 Mar '24

01 Mar '24

Celsius Floats Fix For Customers' 'Devastating' Ballot Blunder <https://www.law360.com/capitalmarkets/articles/1808289?nl_pk=abe82add-2a33-…> By Alex Wittenberg Hundreds of Celsius Network customers who mistakenly elected to receive a reduced payout for their cryptocurrency claims would get a chance to correct their "devastating" error under a plan filed by the crypto company in New York bankruptcy court. 2 documents attached | Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/capitalmarkets/articles/1808289?nl_pk=abe82add-2a33-…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/capitalmarkets/articles/1808289?nl_pk=abe82add-2a33-…>

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Discover Deal Prompts Dems To Seek Bank Merger Revamp
by Gunnar Larson 01 Mar '24

01 Mar '24

Discover Deal Prompts Dems To Seek Bank Merger Revamp <https://www.law360.com/capitalmarkets/articles/1807899?nl_pk=abe82add-2a33-…> By Courtney Buble Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, and 15 other House Democrats are calling on federal bank regulators and the U.S. Department of Justice to quickly crack down on mergers in the wake of Capital One's recently announced $35.3 billion deal to acquire Discover Financial Services. Letter attached | Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/capitalmarkets/articles/1807899?nl_pk=abe82add-2a33-…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/capitalmarkets/articles/1807899?nl_pk=abe82add-2a33-…>

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The top two privacy blockchains
by pro2rat＠yahoo.com.au 01 Mar '24

01 Mar '24

And so as privacy coins rot down privacy networks lurch up. The top two privacy blockchains include Mina Protocol, with a 23.2% market share, and Oasis Network, with a 13.6% market share. CoinGecko noted that in January 2021, privacy coins had a 96.6% share of the crypto privacy market, amounting to a $4.62 billion market capitalization. Privacy-Security Conundrum In Blockchain While blockchain excels in security and transparency, it presents a unique challenge when it comes to privacy. The very transparency that makes blockchain so appealing can also be a double-edged sword. Balancing the need for privacy with the benefits of an open ledger is a critical issue in blockchain development. This challenge has led to the emergence of privacy-centric blockchains and cryptographic techniques aimed at reconciling these seemingly contradictory requirements. https://www.searchmyexpert.com/resources/blockchain-technology/privacy-secu…. Reposts not yet more Gunnar drivel from worlds biggest shithole country

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FBI probes Bronx home of Mayor Adams aide Winnie Greco
by Gunnar Larson 01 Mar '24

01 Mar '24

Oh my God! Gunnar --- https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/02/29/fbi-probes-bronx-home-of-top-adams-a… FBI agents on Thursday raided two Bronx homes owned by Winnie Greco, a top aide to Mayor Adams, multiple sources confirmed to the Daily News. Greco <https://tableofsuccess.hellgatenyc.com/winnie-greco/>, Adams’ director of Asian affairs <https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/311-22/transcript-mayor-eric-a…>, has for months been the subject of a city Department of Investigation <https://www.nyc.gov/site/doi/index.page> probe examining whether she attempted to milk perks out of her government job. It wasn’t immediately clear if Thursday’s FBI raids, which targeted two homes that Greco owns on Gillespie Avenue in Pelham Bay, are related to the DOI investigation. A law enforcement source described the Thursday action as “court-authorized law enforcement activity.” According to the news outlet The City <https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/02/29/winnie-greco-fbi-raid/>, FBI agents also Thursday raided offices of the New World Mall in Queens, where Greco helped host a series of fundraisers for Adams’ 2021 campaign that generated tens of thousands of dollars in contributions, some of which have raised straw donor concerns <https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/02/29/winnie-greco-fbi-raid/>. An Adams administration official confirmed after the raids that Greco has been placed on leave, but wouldn’t say whether she’s still drawing a salary while away from her post. The official said the mayor’s office hasn’t been contacted by either the FBI or federal prosecutors about the matter. Greco did not return phone calls or text messages. The raids on Gillespie Avenue were first reported <https://bronx.news12.com/fbi-investigates-pelham-bay-home-owned-by-key-mayo…> by News12 The Bronx. Video posted on X <https://twitter.com/ScooterCasterNY/status/1763294630399922438> by freelance journalist Oliya Scootercaster showed FBI agents exiting one of Greco’s homes carrying boxes and bags that they loaded into awaiting SUVs. A next-door neighbor told The News that the FBI agents first arrived at 6 a.m. Thursday. “They have been in and out of the house. The whole road crossing was blocked,” said the neighbor. [image: Mayor Eric Adams and Director of Asian Affairs Winnie Greco are pictured at the 21st Autumn Moon Festival and 12th China Day Festival on Sunday, October 1, 2023. (Violet Mendelsund / Mayoral Photography Office)]Mayor Eric Adams and Director of Asian Affairs Winnie Greco are pictured at the 21st Autumn Moon Festival and 12th China Day Festival on Sunday, October 1, 2023. (Violet Mendelsund / Mayoral Photography Office) Last year, The City <https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/11/30/investigation-inquiry-mayor-adams-aide-w…> first reported Greco was being probed by the city Department of Investigation based on a referral from the mayor’s office, but a DOI spokesperson would not divulge what that investigation’s focus was at the time. A spokesperson for DOI also declined comment Thursday. The DOI probe came on the heels of The City’s reporting that Greco, who has worked for Adams since he was Brooklyn borough president, asked a volunteer for the mayor’s 2021 campaign to renovate her Bronx home for free before getting a job in the Adams administration. That outlet also reported that after that campaign volunteer was hired by the city, Greco continued to demand he perform work on her home while on the city’s time. Additionally, the outlet reported Greco had sought a $10,000 contribution to a nonprofit she founded from a businessman in exchange for admission to a Chinese-themed government event at Gracie Mansion hosted by Adams. [image: FBI agents raded the Bronx home of Mayor Eric Adams' Director of Asian Affairs Winnie Greco on Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024. (Sheetal Banchariya for New York Daily News)]FBI agents carried out “court-authorized law enforcement activity” at the Bronx home of Mayor Eric Adams’ Director of Asian Affairs Winnie Greco on Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024. (Sheetal Banchariya for New York Daily News) When asked about the feds’ activity at Greco’s addresses, Adams spokesman Fabien Levy said that “our administration will always follow the law.” “We always expect all our employees to adhere to the strictest ethical guidelines. As we have repeatedly said, we don’t comment on matters that are under review, but will fully cooperate with any review underway,” Levy added. “The mayor has not been accused of any wrongdoing.” [image: New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Director of Asian Affairs Winnie Greco are pictured at a celebration recognizing the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival at Gracie Mansion on Friday, September 9, 2022. (Michael Appleton / Mayoral Photography Office)]New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Director of Asian Affairs Winnie Greco are pictured at a celebration recognizing the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival at Gracie Mansion on Friday, September 9, 2022. (Michael Appleton / Mayoral Photography Office) Property records show Greco bought one of the raided homes for $850,000 just this past Oct. 16. She holds a $680,000 mortgage on the property, records show. Greco earns $100,000 annually in her city job, according to payroll records. In paperwork for the $680,000 mortgage, Greco identified herself as residing at a second one-family home just across the street. That’s the second property that was targeted by the feds Thursday. Property records show Greco owns the second property with Nickolas Greco, her husband. It’s unclear which of the two buildings Greco permanently resides in. [image: Mayor Eric Adams' Director of Asian Affairs, Winnie Greco, is pictured at a Lunar New Year Celebration at Gracie Mansion on Tuesday, February 8, 2022. (Michael Appleton / Mayoral Photography Office)]Mayor Eric Adams’ Director of Asian Affairs, Winnie Greco, is pictured at a Lunar New Year Celebration at Gracie Mansion on Tuesday, February 8, 2022. (Michael Appleton / Mayoral Photography Office) The feds’ interest in Greco comes as the mayor himself faces a federal probe into his ties to Turkey. As part of that investigation, the FBI raided the homes of Brianna Suggs <https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/11/02/mayor-adams-abruptly-cancels-migrant…>, a top fundraiser for Adams, and City Hall staffer Rana Abbasova <https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/11/20/mayor-adams-aide-rana-abbasova-told-…>. The FBI also seized the mayor’s electronic devices <https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/11/10/fbi-agents-seize-mayor-adams-electro…> as part of their investigation. It’s unclear if the raid in the Bronx is tied to that probe into foreign involvement in local politics. Records show Greco likely has her own connections to a foreign government. It first emerged last year that Greco served as a consultant to multiple local Chinese interest groups <https://nypost.com/2023/09/08/top-eric-adams-aides-company-got-chinese-comm…> that receive funding from Beijing’s Communist government. And in a previously unknown wrinkle, Greco also identified herself in a 2014 letter reviewed by The News as the CEO of the New York Sino Agricultural Organization, a Chinese investment group. Under Greco’s leadership, the Sino organization was in talks in the mid-2010s with the upstate municipality of Warwick about purchasing the shuttered Mid-Orange Correctional Facility in hopes of turning it into an “agricultural education center,” according to a lawsuit filed in Orange County Supreme Court in 2021. In 2013, Warwick Town Supervisor Mike Sweeton told the Times Herald-Record <https://www.recordonline.com/story/entertainment/music/2013/07/01/warwick-c…> that the Chinese government was actually behind the bid to buy the old prison. Citing Sweeton, the local newspaper reported at the time that China’s government was hoping to turn the closed prison into “an agricultural university or a vocational school, where they can learn about American agricultural technology.” Sino’s bid to buy the old prison ultimately never came to fruition.

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TechCrunch: Silence Laboratories, a cryptographic security startup, secures funding
by jdb10987＠yahoo.com 01 Mar '24

01 Mar '24

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[media] Fwd: Israeli Zombie Film
by Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many 01 Mar '24

01 Mar '24

this isn’t my thing so i haven’t watched it but it sounds like it might be your kind of thing ---------- Forwarded message --------- This film is a genuine piece of work...IDF, Hezbollah, & the Zombie Apocalypse. Be sure to watch the credits all the way through: the fun continues.... Action, suspense, gore, politics, social commentary, & unleavened humour. Definitely a tip of that Hat to Romero's Dawn of the Dead (the original). I hope those of U in the u.s. can access this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE8LMXAhHhQ

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The Fed Pretends to Send a Warning to Wall Street’s Mega Banks on Derivatives and Counterparty Risk
by Gunnar Larson 29 Feb '24

29 Feb '24

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/02/the-fed-pretends-to-send-a-warning-t… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 29, 2024 ~ Taming the Megabanks, Book JacketOn Tuesday, the Vice Chair for Supervision at the Federal Reserve, Michael Barr, delivered a speech at a risk management conference in Manhattan. Barr’s objective was to convince conference attendees that the Fed has its eye on the ball when it comes to Wall Street mega banks and their counterparties who are sitting on the opposite sides of derivative trades totaling tens of trillions of dollars. (Yes, trillions.) The most illuminating and dangerous elements of Barr’s speech are what he didn’t say. To remind attendees of what could happen if counterparty risks were not managed properly, Barr cited Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) and Archegos Capital Management. LTCM was a hedge fund stocked with the so-called “smartest men in the room,” including two Nobel laureates, who fed mathematical formulas into computers that generated trades using astronomical levels of leverage. Of course, this resulted in the brainiacs blowing up the firm in the fall of 1998 during the Russian debt crisis, putting their counterparties – the big trading houses on Wall Street – at grave risk. The New York Fed had to corral the big boys on Wall Street into its conference room and hammer out a multi-bank bailout of the teetering hedge fund. What happened at Archegos can best be summed up with our headline of 2021: Archegos: Wall Street Was Effectively Giving 85 Percent Margin Loans on Concentrated Stock Positions – Thwarting the Fed’s Reg T and Its Own Margin Rules. LTCM occurred in 1998, before Sandy Weill, the Bill Clinton administration, Robert Rubin, the New York Times and the Federal Reserve had ushered in the most dangerous banking era in U.S. history by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act and allowing the trading casinos on Wall Street to merge with giant, federally-insured, deposit-taking banks. This explosive situation continues to this day, as do the never-ending Fed bailouts. The biggest explosions in U.S. banking history from derivatives and insolvent counterparties were, of course, neither LTCM or Archegos. They were Lehman Brothers and AIG – both of which owned federally-insured banks at the time of their demise in 2008, thanks to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. The U.S. government seized control of AIG the following day and “made over $182 billion available to assist AIG between September 2008 and April 2009” according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). $90 billion of the $182 billion went in the front door of AIG and out the back door to pay 100 cents on the dollar on credit derivative trades that had been made between a dodgy unit of AIG and the major trading houses on Wall Street. According to documents released by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), at the time of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy it had more than 900,000 derivative contracts outstanding and had used the largest banks on Wall Street as its counterparties to many of these trades. The FCIC data shows that Lehman had more than 53,000 derivative contracts with JPMorgan Chase; more than 40,000 with Morgan Stanley; over 24,000 with Citigroup’s Citibank; over 23,000 with Bank of America; and almost 19,000 with Goldman Sachs. Below is a share price chart of what derivatives contagion looked like on Wall Street in 2008. This Is What Wall Street's Systemic Contagion Looked Like in 2008 So why was Michael Barr not talking about 2008, Lehman Brothers, AIG or the insanely interconnected trading houses on Wall Street in his speech on Tuesday? It’s because, as we reported on February 13, Barr has allowed five Wall Street mega banks to hold $223 trillion in derivatives today, 83 percent of all derivatives at 4,600 banks in the U.S. For more than two decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington have shown a sycophantic subservience to tolerating the catastrophic level of derivatives at the Wall Street mega banks while simultaneously allowing them to own federally-insured, taxpayer-backstopped commercial banks. This sycophantic tolerance has existed despite repeated warnings from academics and federal researchers. As far back as 2016, researchers have been sounding the alarms on counterparty risk and the failure of the Fed’s stress tests to properly measure that risk. In a report issued in March 2016 by the Office of Financial Research (OFR), a federal agency created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the OFR brought the illusory nature of the Fed’s oversight of counterparty risk into focus. The OFR researchers who conducted the study, Jill Cetina, Mark Paddrik, and Sriram Rajan, found that the Fed’s stress tests are measuring counterparty risk for the trillions of dollars in derivatives held by the largest banks on a bank by bank basis. The real problem, according to the researchers, is the contagion that could spread rapidly if one big bank’s counterparty was also a key counterparty to other systemically important Wall Street banks. The researchers write: “A BHC [bank holding company] may be able to manage the failure of its largest counterparty when other BHCs do not concurrently realize losses from the same counterparty’s failure. However, when a shared counterparty fails, banks may experience additional stress. The financial system is much more concentrated to (and firms’ risk management is less prepared for) the failure of the system’s largest counterparty. Thus, the impact of a material counterparty’s failure could affect the core banking system in a manner that CCAR [one of the Fed’s stress tests] may not fully capture.” [Italic emphasis added.] In Barr’s speech on Tuesday, he stated that “…alongside this year’s stress test results, we will publish the aggregate results of several exploratory analyses, including analysis of the resilience of the globally systemically important banks to the simultaneous default of their five largest hedge fund counterparties.” But according to an OFR study released in July 2021, it’s not hedge funds where banks have the largest counterparty risk. It’s corporations. For just how long this insidious behavior between the Fed and the Wall Street mega banks has been going on, we suggest reading the seminal book on the subject, Arthur Wilmarth’s Taming the Megabanks: Why We Need a New Glass-Steagall Act.

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ERC 404, combines ERC-20 (fungible tokens) and ERC-721 (non-fungible tokens)
by pro2rat＠yahoo.com.au 29 Feb '24

29 Feb '24

ERC 404, an emerging token standard on the Ethereum blockchain, represents a significant innovation in the realm of digital assets. They are APsterlicious and nutritious. They uniquely combine the characteristics of ERC-20 (fungible tokens) and ERC-721 (non-fungible tokens) to create semi-fungible tokens that then take into account incentives such markets create to act differently outside the market. A "prediction market" is always also one that changes incentives outside that market: a prediction market automatically creates parallel incentives to bring about the predicted event. For example a prediction market on a certain person's death is also an assassination market. Which is why a pre-Gulf-War-II DARPA-sponsored experimental "prediction market" included a prop bet on Saddam Hussein's death, but excluded such trading on any other, more politically correct world leaders. A sufficiently large market predicting an individual's death is also, necessarily, an assassination market . . . https://zerocap.com/insights/snippets/erc-404-hybrid-nfts/

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The Story of Project Matthew
by pro2rat＠yahoo.com.au 29 Feb '24

29 Feb '24

The Story of Project Matthew: A Space building simulator Humans discover a not-so-distant planet called Matthew with the potential to house living beings. As pioneers of space living, players will have the opportunity to design and manage their very own industrial plants, mine for resources, build robots that can help to work in the plants as well as fight other intergalactical forces, and construct their very own space city from the ground up. In the game, players work not as astronauts, but as builders and engineers that make space livable for a new civilization. https://invezz.com/news/2024/02/29/binaryx-igo-to-list-project-matthew-buil… Own ERC-404 NFT tokens and exchange for in-game land Players have the opportunity to own fractionalized ERC-404 NFTs that can be converted to ownership of in-game land, weapons, and other materials. ERC-404 tokens provide users with ample liquidity while also opening up different possibilities for their future ownership, including shared ownership of land, buildings and resources.

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Google Says Innovation Led To Dominance In Closing Brief
by Gunnar Larson 29 Feb '24

29 Feb '24

Google Says Innovation Led To Dominance In Closing Brief <https://www.law360.com/competition/articles/1805946?nl_pk=6416fd97-1dc4-4e0…> By Jared Foretek Google is telling the D.C. federal judge overseeing the U.S. Department of Justice's monopoly case against the search giant that its innovation and relentlessness are the forces driving its dominance in search, not anticompetitive agreements as the Justice Department has alleged. 2 documents attached | Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/competition/articles/1805946?nl_pk=6416fd97-1dc4-4e0…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/competition/articles/1805946?nl_pk=6416fd97-1dc4-4e0…>

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