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Secure communication with deniability for Nostr
by ROOT＠HardenedVault 09 Jun '23

09 Jun '23

The current spec of NIP-04 messaging protocol are signed by the sender/publisher, the protocol itself is undeniable. In order to implement deniable instant messaging based on Nostr, users can generate a new ephemeral key pair as a "temporary identity" specifically for instant messaging, even each time. The key pair used for posting content is the "permanent identity". However, which permanent identity a temporary identity belongs to should only be known by the communicating parties, and it can be deniable if the other party is treacherous. This requires the communicating parties to authenticate the temporary identities they are about to use with each other's permanent identities, but they cannot provide proof to third parties. We proposed to a secure communication with deniability by extending NIP-04: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/591 One may ask why don't we just use the encryption scheme of Signal instead? Well, double ratcheting does not provide deniability, if its handshaking protocol does not. It does not even provide forward secrecy as it claims if the implementation save the context to the disk as how Signal app does. On the other hand, Vault1317 adopts the very same double ratcheting as signal protocol, and concentrates on developing new handshaking protocols providing stronger deniability. https://github.com/hardenedvault/vault1317 https://www.cypherpunks.ca/%7Eiang/pubs/dakez-popets18.pdf regards R@HardenedVault

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Blockchains proffer huge energy savings
by pro2rat＠yahoo.com.au 09 Jun '23

09 Jun '23

Blockchains proffer huge energy savings already - and now . . Quantum miners would yield ‘massive’ energy savings for blockchains! https://cointelegraph.com/news/quantum-miners-would-yield-massive-energy-sa… Reposts not list cluttering cacophony from conformist dipshits

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What Nassim Taleb said
by pro2rat＠yahoo.com.au 09 Jun '23

09 Jun '23

Btc is useless and dangerous he reportedly said recently. I suspect he meant it's useless in the Serbian kingdom and dangerous in El Slavador. Yr mileage etc

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[ot][spam][personal] nothing is impossible
by Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many 09 Jun '23

09 Jun '23

the set of what is possible and what is impossible is a little hard for me i generally hold the value that everything is possible[???? not sure why question here

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[ot][spam][crazy][personal] pursuing rationality
by Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many 09 Jun '23

09 Jun '23

- it’s helpful, pleasant, and grounding to relate with rational people and conversations - it’s quite hard, and there is a great urge to pressure them to be irrational - when irrational, this seems to worsen as the pressure continues - if there is something in one that reduces rationality, and it has reason, this seems analogous to dissociation or trauma. conflict with basic reason implies an unhandleable truth. one can then infer that there is likely a set of rational “bounds” that would most effectively help one increase rationality while minimally stimulating the fear of engaging whatever the unhandleable truth is. for example, if i feel least thretened when supporting an imaginary mcboss, maybe i could try to work financial paperwork for a corporation or something — not sure. i usually try to get skilled at something safe and then kind of branch out carefully once established.

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FOIL Request Confirmation from Open FOIL NY (TECHSPRINT ON DIGITAL REGULATORY REPORTING IN CRYPTOCURRENCY. Keynote Fireside Remarks by Superintendent Lacewell and PayPal CEO Dan Schulman)
by Gunnar Larson 08 Jun '23

08 Jun '23

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: <noreply(a)its.ny.gov> Date: Thu, Jun 8, 2023, 3:51 PM Subject: FOIL Request Confirmation from Open FOIL NY To: <G(a)xny.io> Thank you for submitting your FOIL request through Open FOIL NY. Here is your Open FOIL NY confirmation information for future reference: LARSON_DFS_20230608155132162 *INFORMATION SUBMITTED:* *Records Requested From* Department of Financial Services *Short Title* TECHSPRINT ON DIGITAL REGULATORY REPORTING IN CRYPTOCURRENCY. Keynote Fireside Remarks by Superintendent Lacewell and PayPal CEO Dan Schulman *Description* Dear Madam or Sir: xNY.io - Bank.org kindly submits today's FOIL request seeking access to the video recording featuring Linda Lacewell and PayPal CEO Dan Schulman mentioned below. Warm regards, Gunnar Larson xNY.io - Bank.org 917-580-8053 —- DFS ANNOUNCES WINNERS OF TECHSPRINT ON DIGITAL REGULATORY REPORTING IN CRYPTOCURRENCY Demo Day Featured Keynote Fireside Remarks by Superintendent Lacewell and PayPal CEO Dan Schulman Three Winning Teams Showcase Solutions to Advance Digital Regulatory Reporting The New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) today concluded its first-ever Techsprint with a public Demo Day featuring a keynote fireside chat between Superintendent of Financial Services Linda A. Lacewell and PayPal CEO Dan Schulman. Wrapping up a two-week exercise that attracted participation from nearly 100 professionals in cryptocurrency and financial regulation, a panel of judges selected winners in three categories: (1) Greatest Industry Impact; (2) Most Creative Implementation; and (3) Most Functional Prototype. “These fresh and innovative proposals will help the Department fulfill its vision of becoming the regulator of the future, to better serve consumers and uphold the safety and soundness of the firms we supervise,” said Superintendent Lacewell. “This Techsprint is a testament to what we can accomplish when government and industry come together to deliver actionable solutions that will lead to a stronger and more transparent marketplace. Congratulations and thank you to all participants, our partners at CSBS, AIR, and to our brilliant judges.” Before the winners were announced, Superintendent Lacewell and Mr. Schulman discussed the future of finance, the evolution of cryptocurrency and the importance of innovation in regulation during a fireside facilitated by Jo Ann Barefoot, CEO and Co-Founder of the Alliance for Innovative Regulation (AIR). https://www.dfs.ny.gov/reports_and_publications/press_releases/pr202103121 *Uploaded Files* *FOIL Response Format* Media: USB *If fees apply, please contact me if costs will be greater than* $10000 Your FOIL request has been forwarded to the organization(s) you selected, and the respective Records Access Officer will contact you directly for further processing of your request. Please allow up to five business days for such communication(s). For your convenience, here is additional contact information: Department of Financial Services One State Street 20th Floor New York, NY 10004

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Welcome to Dystopia: From Wildfires, to Flooding, to Serial Banking Crises and Crypto Frauds, It’s All Too Surreal
by Gunnar Larson 08 Jun '23

08 Jun '23

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 8, 2023 ~ Yesterday, news headlines blared that New York City had the worst air quality in the world, as an eerie brownish-orange haze enveloped the city and Long Island. Photographs that looked more like scenes from a sci-fi movie popped up all over Twitter. Daytime took on a nighttime quality as streetlights automatically flipped on. Outdoor activities of all kinds were cancelled: the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies cancelled their home games that had been scheduled for Wednesday; schools banned outdoor activities on playgrounds; millions of Americans living in the Northeast United States were cautioned to remain indoors. The Governor of New York State, Kathy Hochul, announced she was distributing one million N95 masks – a flashback to the hellish life of New Yorkers in 2020 and 2021 as the COVID-19 pandemic engulfed the city and the overflowing bodies of COVID victims had to be stored in refrigerator trucks. The deep, dangerous haze on Wednesday, which is still present this morning, is coming from wildfires in Canada. According to Governor Hochul, a normal Air Quality Index (AQI) is 50, but yesterday Brooklyn recorded an AQI of 413 while Queens recorded an AQI of 407 – more than twice the readings of some of the most polluted cities in the world. New Yorkers were not the only people to be impacted. By noon, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania recorded an AQI of 410. Health officials up and down the East Coast warned residents that there were fine particulates in the air that could cause serious respiratory problems for those venturing outdoors. New York State officials issued a notice, warning that fine particulates “can cause short-term health effects such as irritation to the eyes, nose, and throat, coughing, sneezing, runny nose, and shortness of breath.” The statement also cautioned that “Exposure to elevated levels of fine particulate matter can also worsen medical conditions such as asthma and heart disease….” The Associated Press published detailed advice on “How to stay healthy as smoke spreads from Canada wildfires.” The syndicated advice was carried by the Long Island newspaper, Newsday. It included this: “When inside, keep doors, windows and fireplaces shut so that smoke stays out. If you have a portable air purifier or HVAC system, run it to help keep the air clean, the Environmental Protection Agency recommends. Check that your filters are high quality and up to date. Make sure any filters or air conditioners are set to recirculate indoor air to avoid bringing in smoke from outside. If you have a window air conditioner, check that it’s sealed to the window as tightly as possible. And try to avoid activities that would add more particles to the air in your home — like smoking, burning candles or frying meat.” Another danger not mentioned by the media yesterday is that Americans are increasingly becoming desensitized to surreal weather events at the same time that fossil fuel money is pouring into Congressional races and putting more and more climate-change deniers on key Committees in Congress to bully regulators in hearings and obstruct the passage of legislation. (See our report: A Fossil Fuels Giant Has Been Raising the Election Chances of Extreme-Right Candidates — Using a Dangerous High-Tech Weapon.) Many of these Congressional proponents of a hands-off approach by government to the fossil fuel industry, share the same hands-off view for crypto currencies – raising our suspicions that the two may be linked. To get your head around that idea, just remember that crypto begins with so-called “mining” that drives up demand for fossil fuels. This is how Senator Elizabeth Warren described this crypto “mining” at a Senate hearing in June of 2021: “Finally, there are the environmental costs of crypto. Many cryptocurrencies are created through ‘proof-of-work’ mining. It involves using computers to solve useless mathematical puzzles in exchange for newly minted cryptocurrency tokens. Such mining has devastating consequences for the climate. Some crypto mining is set up near coal plants, spewing out filth in return for a chance to harvest a few crypto coins. Total energy consumption is staggering, driving up demand for energy. If, for example, Bitcoin — just one of the cryptocurrencies — were a country, it would already be the 33rd largest energy user in the world — using more energy yearly than all of the Netherlands. “And all those promised benefits – the currency that would be available at no cost to millions of unbanked families and that would provide a haven from the tricks and traps of big banks – well, those benefits haven’t materialized.” What has materialized, however, are massive crypto frauds which also have a surreal, dystopian quality. (See also: Former New York Fed Pres Bill Dudley Calls This the First Banking Crisis Since 2008; Charts Show It’s the Third.) Those members of Congress who have pushed this laissez faire attitude are getting a personal lesson in climate change this morning. The Washington Post reports the following conditions in Washington, D.C. and surrounding area: “Residents in the Washington and Baltimore regions are awakening to their worst air quality in years. EPA air quality monitors are reporting widespread Code Red and Code Purple conditions, signifying unhealthy conditions for most people and especially those with respiratory concerns. Toward Baltimore, some monitors are reading Code Maroon, signifying hazardous ‘emergency’ conditions, unhealthy for everyone.” https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/06/welcome-to-dystopia-from-wildfires-t…

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Silvergate Bank Lands in the Middle of Another Massive Alleged Crypto Fraud – This Time at Binance
by Gunnar Larson 08 Jun '23

08 Jun '23

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/06/silvergate-bank-lands-in-the-middle-… It’s only June 7, but the liquidating, federally-insured, crypto-loving Silvergate Bank is having one helluva month. On June 1, the Federal Reserve released an enforcement action (called a Cease and Desist Consent Order) that it and a California banking regulator had filed against Silvergate Bank and its parent, Silvergate Capital Corporation. (See our report: Disgraced Silvergate Bank Hints It May Not Be Able to Cover All of Its Deposits; Fed Slaps It with a Cease and Desist Consent Order.) The bank had announced on March 8 that it was going to voluntarily wind down and liquidate itself. The announcement followed a run on the bank when news articles began appearing linking Silvergate Bank to indicted crypto kingpin, Sam Bankman-Fried. The bank is facing a growing roster of lawsuits on charges that it moved customer funds deposited at Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, FTX, to his hedge fund, Alameda Research, where they then went missing to the tune of billions of dollars to fund Bankman-Fried’s and other FTX executives’ lavish lifestyles. Shareholders in Silvergate Bank’s parent, Silvergate Capital, which is publicly traded, have also lost their shirts. The stock traded at $105 last August. It closed yesterday at 97 cents. Having a federally-insured bank’s name linked to one massive international crypto fraud is bad enough, but on Monday Reuters dropped a new bombshell. It reported that it has documents showing that Silvergate Bank was also involved in moving customer funds for crypto exchange Binance.US, by people who should not have had access to those accounts. Also on Monday, without one mention of Silvergate Bank, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed 13 charges against Binance, its various affiliates, and its founder Changpeng Zhao, who is known as “CZ.” In a statement accompanying the SEC complaint, the SEC specifically mentions “commingling billions of dollars of investor assets and sending them to a third party, Merit Peak Limited, that is also owned by Zhao.” The SEC writes: “The SEC also alleges that Zhao and Binance exercise control of the platforms’ customers’ assets, permitting them to commingle customer assets or divert customer assets as they please, including to an entity Zhao owned and controlled called Sigma Chain. The SEC’s complaint further alleges that BAM Trading and BAM Management US Holdings, Inc. (BAM Management) misled investors about non-existent trading controls over the Binance.US platform, while Sigma Chain engaged in manipulative trading that artificially inflated the platform’s trading volume. Further, the Complaint alleges that the defendants concealed the fact that it was commingling billions of dollars of investor assets and sending them to a third party, Merit Peak Limited, that is also owned by Zhao.” One could be forgiven for thinking that there are striking similarities between what Sam Bankman-Fried was doing and what CZ was doing – and both, coincidentally (or not), being aided and abetted by federally-insured Silvergate Bank. The Federal Reserve Board was the primary regulator of Silvergate Bank. It had farmed out its bank examinations to the San Francisco Fed. Those same federal regulators and bank examiners were dosing when Silicon Valley Bank blew itself up on March 10. These latest revelations that not one, but two, alleged master crypto fraudsters were having their way with customer deposits in a federally-insured bank will further erode confidence in the U.S. banking system. It’s not that the Fed and other banking regulators did not have ample warnings that crypto was, itself, a giant fraud. One of the most respected investors in America, Warren Buffett, summed up Bitcoin like this in May 2018: Bitcoin is “probably rat poison squared.” In January of the same year, Buffett told CNBC in an interview that “In terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say with almost certainty that they will come to a bad ending.” Also in 2018, Bill Harris, the former CEO of Intuit and PayPal, wrote a detailed critique of Bitcoin for Vox, under the unabashed headline: “Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history.” Harris opines: “In my opinion, it’s a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen. In a pump-and-dump game, promoters ‘pump’ up the price of a security creating a speculative frenzy, then ‘dump’ some of their holdings at artificially high prices. And some cryptocurrencies are pure frauds. Ernst & Young estimates that 10 percent of the money raised for initial coin offerings has been stolen.” If Bitcoin is a pump and dump scheme, nothing has helped to perpetuate that scheme more than Bitcoin futures trading, which has very conveniently been accommodated by the CME Group and its equally accommodating federal regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Harris also knocked down the idea that there is intrinsic value to Bitcoin. He writes: “It helps to understand that a bitcoin has no value at all. “Promoters claim cryptocurrency is valuable as (1) a means of payment, (2) a store of value and/or (3) a thing in itself. None of these claims are true. “1. Means of Payment. Bitcoins are accepted almost nowhere, and some cryptocurrencies nowhere at all. Even where accepted, a currency whose value can swing 10 percent or more in a single day is useless as a means of payment. “2. Store of Value. Extreme price volatility also makes bitcoin undesirable as a store of value. And the storehouses — the cryptocurrency trading exchanges — are far less reliable and trustworthy than ordinary banks and brokers. “3. Thing in Itself. A bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It only has value if people think other people will buy it for a higher price — the Greater Fool theory.” In July 2019, NYU Professor and economist, Nouriel Roubini, launched a scathing analysis of Bitcoin. In a Bloomberg interview, Roubini said this: “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.” Adding significant substance to these off-the-cuff remarks, in July of last year Wall Street On Parade reported that Over 1,600 of the Brightest Scientific Minds in Technology Have Signed a Letter Calling Both Crypto and Blockchain a Sham. U.S. markets and the U.S. banking system were once the pride of this nation. Today, we mostly hang our head in shame.

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Another day - another feeble, flailing and failing attempt to mansplain the cryptoanarchist revolution as Austro-libertarian reaction
by professor rat 08 Jun '23

08 Jun '23

Anarchy and Bitcoin https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/anarchy-and-bitcoin/ar-AA1c78B1 How Any Rand, Hayek, Heinlein and Vinge helped David Friedman and Tim May create Btc 1998, Cypherpunk and computer engineer Wei Dai authored an essay explaining how a cryptographic money, which he called ‘b-money’, could work. In the very first sentence of the essay he wrote that he was “fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy” and that in this cryptographic cyber-utopia, government was “permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary” because “its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.” https://www.aier.org/article/cypherpunks-galts-gulch-and-bitcoin/ Great timing - Btc just handcuffed itself to a fascist police state near Chile and started sucking up to absolutist monarchists in Serbia. WAY to GO Austro-Libertarian MORONS! Cypherpunk revolutionists carry on preferring antistate anarchism to cheap plastic toy imitations and meritocracy to hereditary imbecility indistinguishable from North Korea's. Your mileage may vary.

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Another day - another feeble, failing and failing attempt to mansplain the cryptoanarchist revolution as Austro-libertarian reaction
by professor rat 08 Jun '23

08 Jun '23

Anarchy and Bitcoin https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/anarchy-and-bitcoin/ar-AA1c78B1 How Any Rand, Hayek, Heinlein and Vinge helped David Friedman and Tim May create Btc 1998, Cypherpunk and computer engineer Wei Dai authored an essay explaining how a cryptographic money, which he called ‘b-money’, could work. In the very first sentence of the essay he wrote that he was “fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy” and that in this cryptographic cyber-utopia, government was “permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary” because “its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.” https://www.aier.org/article/cypherpunks-galts-gulch-and-bitcoin/ Great timing - Btc just handcuffed itself to a fascist police state near Chile and started sucking up to absolutist monarchists in Serbia. WAY to GO Austro-Libertarian MORONS! Cypherpunk revolutionists carry on preferring antistate anarchism to cheap plastic toy imitations and meritocracy to hereditary imbecility indistinguishable from North Korea's. Your mileage may vary.

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