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May 9
Private, permissionless AI
This one is old but I wanted to include it anyways....
Absolute chad Erik Voorhees (remember when he destroyed SBF in a debate over crypto regulation right before it came out the SBF was a piece of shit?) launched a decentralized AI, available at Venice.AI, because he was concerned with censorship and privacy concerns on other LLMs like OpenAI's ChatGPT. I mean if we get to a point where everyone is using an LLM as their own personal assistant, that AI is going to have massive amounts of data on people. I don't really want OpenAI to know about that thing growing on my dick so I'm going to use Venice.AI. I mean I could go to like a doctor I guess, but he's just going to put pictures of my dick in my medical providers internet portal thing, which gets hacked like every other Tuesday, so the result is the same. Check out Erik's blog post introducing the service and explaining why it is needed so badly.
May 14
BREAKING: Tornado Cash developer, 31 year old Alexey Pertsev, is found guilty of money laundering $1.2B through his app by a Dutch court and sentenced to 5 years in prison. 
Open source developer Alexey Pertsev was found guilty of laundering 1.2 billion dollars worth of crypto through his app, Tornado Cash. For this "crime", he was sentenced to five years in a cage. This was in the Netherlands, so I'm hoping Roman Storm, another Tornado Cash developer, will fare better since he is being tried in the United States where it has already been established in law that code is speech. This is an absolute travesty of justice. You cannot punish someone for developing a legitimate privacy tool just because a few people used it for crime. The majority of Tornado Cash volume was not illicit, and the logic of the Dutch prosecutors makes no sense whatsoever. By their logic we should arrest gun store owners if any of the guns they sell get used in a crime. What if you sell hammers and someone uses one of your hammers to bash someone's brains in? Straight to jail for everyone I guess. Absolutely moronic.
May 15th
Two brothers were arrested after allegedly exploiting the Ethereum network for 25 million.
Why is it the Government's job to go after someone who exploits Ethereum? If there was actual theft, just make them pay the money back to whoever got fucked over plus some for any opportunity cost, and it should be over and done with at that point. We don't need to throw some highly skilled technical people in prison for twenty fucking years when they can just make it right. Save prison for rapists and murderers and thieves who don't pay their victims back in a timely manner. The real front running is done by Congress and their friends and family anyways.
(Hey congressman who is also my uncle, what legislation is getting introduced this session? Oh tariffs on XYZ? Thanks unc, I'm goin' to short the fuck out of some futures,....yeah yeah I'll bring your cut by later, you want that in hundreds right?)
Andrew Tate says he's fed up with fiat and is going to put 100 million into bitcoin. Well he may be a bit of an ass but he didn't get that rich by being stupid, I just hope that he has the best security set up ever, like 100 different cold cards with 1 million each on them and seeds protected by 24 layers of insanity.
Ibex pay is a Bitcoin payments company that uses the lightning network, add it to the increasingly long list of crypto and Bitcoin companies that will no longer serve US customers. It's surreal how the US is for once the country getting locked out of the global financial system when we usually are on the other end of that. We are in good company at least with other restricted countries representing the finest of free democracies, such as North Korea, Syria, and Iran.
May 22
A new privacy feature for Bitcoin, silent payments, has been integrated into both Blue Wallet and Cake Wallet. You can read all about how it works here. Basically it's a way to share a single static address, on social media or wherever, that doesn't reveal anything about your on chain activity.
May 23
After careful consideration, we have decided to implement a stricter policy on allowed countries for our services. As part of this change, our lending platform, Lend at Hodl Hodl, will be blocked for...
Hodl Hodl has also joined the "fuck US users, we ain't trying to go to prison" club and is blocking access to it's platform for people in the US. Just more fallout from the Samourai arrests.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved today (May 23, 2024) the sale of spot Ether Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) in the United States.
The SEC decided to approve the Ethereum ETFs, which was a surprise to many. The Polymarket odds for this happening were around 10% not long ago. You would have to be a moron to actually buy an Ethereum ETF though, regardless of whether you think the Ethereum network will succeed or not, because you can't earn any staking returns on your ETF ETH because the SEC forced the issuers to take staking out to be approved. Not to mention the whole value proposition of holding ETH is that you can use it for all kinds of cool degen shit, not just let it sit around doing absolutely nothing. However this is supposed to be good for the health of the network because having more unstaked ETH is supposed to be a good thing beause if too much ETH is staked it can have some negative consequences such as too much centralization. The ETF approval couldn't of come at a better time for ETH holders, considering they have been getting completely fucked holding ETH versus BTC with the amount of BTC that you can buy with one ETH recently reaching a 3 year low.
May 24
A farewell party for the popular dog will be held on Sunday in a Narita city park.
Kabosu, the dog that inspired the first memecoin, Dogecoin, has died. She was over 17 years old, which is like a thousand in human years or something. Rest in peace. This single dog has led to a million meme coins being launched and several 16 year olds becoming richer than their parents. I spend hours researching protocols, only to have my portfolio consistently outperformed by teenagers aping into random memecoins, and it's all this dog's fault.
May 25
At the Libertarian National Convention, Trump pledges to pardon Ross Ulbricht, and also says he will protect self custody of Bitcoin
I don't really like an authoritarian like Trump being given a platform at the LP national convention, but if it actually leads to Ross being pardoned....than fuck it. Plus the libertarians need the press honestly, I'm pretty sure my Mom still doesn't know what a Libertarian even is despite me being one off and on since the 8th grade, and a lot of people are like that. I know Ross's mama has been fighting tooth and nail for her boy to come home like the straight ride or die G that she is, and goddamn it they deserve this.
Besides the promise to free Ross, Trump also mentioned protecting Bitcoin self custody, which gives a whole lot of people a strong economic incentive to vote for him. I mean if you are in the crypto industry in the US or holding a significant amount of crypto, voting for Biden is literally like shooting yourself in the foot at this point. Its fucking sad when even a tyrant like Trump is defending the right to CUSTODY YOUR OWN ASSETS. So if you are American you have to vote for Trump to just be able to keep your own shit? In what is supposed to be the most free country on Earth? Maybe the powers that be really do want you to own absolutely nothing, I don't know anymore.
May 26
Good Morning Liberty did a very good episode on the events at the Convention and Nate's thoughts on Chase Oliver. The Libertarian National Convention, circus that it was, did managed to nominate a Presidential candidate, barely. It took 7 rounds of voting and because of several delegates voting for non of the above, they almost didn't have a candidate with enough votes. Not having a candidate would of cost the Libertarian party ballot access in many states. Eventually they choose Chase Oliver, who is the first major party presidential candidate to be openly gay in the United States. There is some misinformation about him going around, I mean if you believe Twitter you would think they just nominated some communist antifa member or something instead of a gun toting left leaning Libertarian. Some people are saying he is pro vaccine mandates, when in fact he just supported individual business owner's right to decide if they want to only allow customers who have been vaccinated. As long as it's an individual deciding what is allowed on their private property, and not a Government decree, I don't see how that is not Libertarian? I haven't done much research on the man yet but I do know that Chase Oliver has already gotten more press coverage than a Libertarian presidential candidate has gotten in a very long time, or possibly ever, simply due to the circumstances surrounding his nomination and the fact Trump was present. This makes me think that inviting Trump was actually a genius marketing move for Libertarians, how many people might be converted because they saw some media coverage of the convention, and were like "What the fuck is a Libertarian?". Then they google it, and may find out they agree with a lot of what they read. It is especially important to lead people down the Libertarian rabbit hole now when dissatisfaction with the two major parties seems to be at a boiling point. Many people don't identify with either party any more and dread the prospect of having to once again choose between the lesser of two evils, octogenarian evils at that. That means this is a golden opportunity to recruit some new blood into the Liberty movement, if we can stop fighting among ourselves long enough to do so that is!
May 27
Nearly 107,000 bitcoin have been moved since early Asian hours on Tuesday, with bitcoin shedding 1.2% on expectations of selling pressure.
Mount Gox Bitcoin is on the move, a lot of it, in preparation for repayments. Now just because people are going to get their Bitcoin back that they have been forced into hodling for ten years, doesn't mean they are going to sell it all immediately, so don't panic. Whoever is in charge of moving these funds did a couple of small test transactions first before sending bigger transactions, the smallest of which was worth 1.2 billion dollars. Can you imagine clicking the button on that one? I'd be sweating bullets, shaking, and rechecking the address a minimum of 104 times before clicking send. One wrong character and you just lost more than a billion fucking dollars! That has got to be scary right? Let's also take a second to appreciate how cool it is to be able to easily send 1.2 billion dollars worth of value in a couple clicks of a mouse, without getting anyone's permission or filling out any forms. Nearly instantaneous permission less transfer of a ridiculous amount of immutable wealth. The power of Bitcoin is immense.
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thoughtcrimeboss
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