Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other crimes against humanity.
#Bookmarks #Cryptography
Bitcoin is notorious for consuming as much electricity as the Netherlands, but there are around 10,000 other cryptocurrencies, most using similar infrastructure and thus also in aggregate consuming unsustainable amounts of electricity. Bitcoin alone generates as much e-waste as the Netherlands, cryptocurrencies suffer an epidemic of pump-and-dump schemes and wash trading, they enable a $5.2B/year ransomware industry, they have disrupted supply chains for GPUs, hard disks, SSDs and other chips, they have made it impossible for web services to offer free tiers, and they are responsible for a massive crime wave including fraud, theft, tax evasion, funding of rogue states such as North Korea, drug smuggling, and even as documented by Jameson Lopp’s list of physical attacks, armed robbery, kidnapping, torture and murder. – EE380 Talk, by Daniel Rosenthal
EE380 Talk, by Daniel Rosenthal
Traceability:
Bitcoin tracing would, over the next few years, solve the mystery of the theft of a half-billion dollar stash of bitcoins from the world’s first crypto exchange, help enable the biggest dark-web drug market takedown in history, lead to the arrest of hundreds of pedophiles around the world in the bust of the dark web’s largest child sexual abuse video site, and result in the first-, second-, and third-biggest law enforcement monetary seizures in the history of the US Justice Department. – How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity
How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity
NFTs, Blockchain, available in other languages:
This text is intended for a general audience. … Any artist who heard that NFTs are the future or art and any gamer who heard the same about video games. For anyone who got some lecture about how the future of the web would be built on this new tech that feels hard to grasp. For anyone who’s being bombarded with investment opportunities in NFTs that sound way too good to be true. – The Third Web, 2021, by @tante@tldr.nettime.org