News & Quotes

Forbes report: Despite FTX Collapse Bitcoin Futures Surge.

This is worse news upon bad news because it only highlights the problem in crypto. 

In any economy, there are always producers and traders, and they can be healthily symbiotic. But a collapse becomes a certainty when traders are trading on values that are solely created by trading itself (i.e., speculative value arising from speculative trading activities alone), instead of value producers who are independent economic actors.

I already wrote about FTX and crypto exchanges in general (see, Crypto exchanges are an obstacle to blockchain and DLT). Mainly due to disgust, I try not to make more comments on FTX, but couldn't help because the story is being spun in directions that are away from the core truth.

This post on LinkedIn is an example: Sex, drugs, and leverage - Critics are wrong. Why the FTX story has nothing to do with crypto.

The biggest structural and elemental difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that the former uses Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) while the latter uses an account-based model. UTXO is like cash, In that every bill or coin is independent from each other. As long as a dollar bill itself is authentic, the validity of a transfer...

“University of Illinois researchers have discovered a vulnerability in Bitcoin’s most popular second layer scaling protocol, the Lightning Network. Cosimo Sguanci and Anastasios Sidiropoulos published an academic paper describing a hypothetical attack based on a collusion of node operators. At the time of publication, they estimated that a coalition of 30 nodes could steal 750...

The defamation case of Wright v. McCormack is telling in multiple ways, not only in the result itself, but also in how the BTC world and cryptoverse have reacted to it.

In Wright v. McCormack, Australian/UK scientist Dr. Craig S. Wright sued podcaster Peter McCormack for libel (defamation in writing). McCormack in a series of posts on social media called Wright a fraud for claiming himself to be Satoshi.  Wright sued McCormack in a UK court for libel.

The outcome in the lower court: Wright won a judgment against McCormack on all libel accounts. But the judge awarded Wright only a symbolic £1 for the damages.

A recent post by Dan Thomas on LinkedIn brought up the issue of the usefulness of blockchain, web3, NFTs, etc., and touched on the question of decentralization and blockchain trilemma.

Any sign of sobriety during this intoxicating crypto frenzy is a good thing.

I partially agree with the original post, especially the point that many of the incumbent businesses shouldn't be excited about DLT and Web3 because, as the author points out, a lot of things they want to do can be done more efficiently and more economically using conventional database technologies.