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Welcome to your weekly Dark Markets frauds n’ spoofs roundup, with apologies for slight lateness this week.
Since just before Thanksgiving, I’ve been going through one of the more harrowing experiences of my adult life. Luckily this was just a business situation and everything is fine, though I can’t discuss any specifics. What I can say is that I’ve gained a very personal new perspective on the central topic of this newsletter.
Someday it will be a story that can be told.
But for now, the Weird Finance News.
This Week: A Zizian Update; How Cardano Grifted Ethiopia; Joe Rogan Dreams of the God AI; Craig “Faketoshi” Wright and the Wirecard fraud.
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Rolling Stone has published a new article on the Zizian situation, including new insights from the various murder trials of members of the Rationalist splinter group. It’s billed as a feature, but unfortunately it’s somewhere between a comprehensive overview and an incremental update.
Maybe most importantly, it provides an actually good and fairly comprehensible rundown of “Timeless Decision Theory,” which supposedly motivated the Zizians’ murders. In essence, the idea is that if you act crazy enough, you can send signals back in time that your opponents should all fear you.
This sort of contorted rationalist absurdism is a major theme of my new book Stealing the Future. I would still really appreciate an Amazon review
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Jul 13
In the wake of my recent reminiscence about the weirdness of Cardano Founder Charles Hoskinson, I got a wave of tipoffs, some of them quite explosive. The big ones are pending more confirmation and digging. But it felt worth highlighting this claim by a former Ethiopian procurement official that Cardano was contracted to develop a digital ID system for Ethiopia - via a bid process that sounds questionable - and then failed to deliver for roughly five years.
It’s a clear example of how puffery and hype can lead to real harms, not just for investors, but for regular people who want their government resources well-spent.
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Nov 26
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“Code is Law” is a new documentary about a series of major cryptocurrency hacks, and a team of “white hat” hackers who fight them. The doc looks back as far as the 2016 DAO hack, and includes the 2021 Indexed Finance hack.
Both of those cases, the white hats trying to stop hackers were people who are now friends and colleagues of mine - most notably Laurence Day, whose harrowing experience at Indexed still echoes through our friendship.
It’s a pretty bare-bones documentary, with a perhaps inevitable critical mass of people typing and looking at phones. But for those with an interest in blockchains, it’s an absolutely essential bit of context and history you won’t get anywhere else.
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Joe Rogan is now a Singularitarian.
In a clip making the rounds, the guy who makes weed seem uncool muses that “AI could absolutely return as Jesus.”
This may sound like something Joe Rogan just made up on the fly as part of his very long, aimless, drug-addled broadcasting regimen. But in fact, it’s not much less coherent than Ray Kurzweil’s anti-scientific musings that computers will some day be able to store human minds and transcend to God-like intelligence.
When Joe Rogan finds your ideas fascinating, you might be in trouble.
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June 9, 2024
It’s hard to believe it’s been more than 5 years since Wirecard collapsed. The German payments giant blew up thanks in part to $1.9 billion in reserves that turned out to be fake, but more but fundamentally because it was a money laundering operation whose leaders included a reported Russian spy named Jan Marselek. Marselek supposedly ran Russian operations across Europe on behalf of the GRU. Marselek’s role at a large, international payments company almost certainly helped in his work as a spymaster, which throughout history has hinged on sending secret payments to operatives.
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December 19, 2023
Now, it seems that Calvin Ayre, the man who also gave us nuisance lawsuit machine Craig Wright, was happily in bed with this Russian intelligence asset. The relationship was mutually beneficial, with Wirecard helping Ayre move money around through fake third party intermediaries - who Wirecard then representated to auditors as a variety of separate customers.
According to new reporting from German outlet Das Erste, “around €135 million alone flowed to Antigua via accounts allegedly held by third-party partners at Wirecard Bank. The recipients are nine companies, most of which are based in the so-called ‘Fitzgerald House’ at 44 Church Street in St. Johns.”
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March 20, 2024
Antigua, of course, has long been Ayre’s offshore home-base, and his “best friend” is the tiny island nation’s former finance minister - who incorporated some of the entities recieving Wirecard funds. According to former Ayre insider Christen Ager-Hanssen, these accounts belonged to Ayre.
Ager-Hanssen was the former CEO of NChain, the Potemkin blockchain company stood up with Ayre’s money to make Craig Wright look more credible. It would be all too poetic if his crypto con was the thread that linked Wright to collaborations with Russian spies.
(Ager-Hanssen’s own bid to be seen as an “advocate for whistleblowers,” though, is just a bit too convenient - in reality, Hanssen is a spymaster with his own supposed connections to MI6 and the CIA.)
Bodog and Ayre’s entanglement with Wirecard is fundamentally unsurprising. In 2012, Ayre and other Bodog executives were charged with illegal gambling and money laundering, and the indictment outlines the circuitous movements of Bodog funds around the world to pay off customers while evading gambling bans.
It’s notable that the 2012 charges against Bodog involved the seizure of more than $66 million in criminal proceeds, finalized in 2017 - not long before Ayre got serious about turning Craig Wright into Faketoshi.
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