Cryptonite March 2023
Paging Dr. Bitcoin!
It’s time for Cryptonite - our monthly roundup of all things crypto - with Dr. Tejaswi Nadahalli.
You can follow Tejaswi on twitter @nadahalli and he blogs at tejaswin.com
Show Notes & Links
The much-awaited Shapella update on Ethereum has gone live, paving the way for new features like the unstaking of Ether. (cointelegraph)
And validators are exiting. (blockworks)
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NYT did a hit piece on the energy consumption of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work (nytimes). Energy is a social good and is regulated as such. A free market in energy doesn’t exist - proof-of-work miners are bad-faith actors in some sense.
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A PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018. And the self-proclaimed “creator of Bitcoin” Craig Wright today hinted that Apple was violating copyright laws. (decrypt, decrypt)
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If you have committed crypto crimes, best catch a flight to Dubai soon after.
Federal authorities are making arrests and seizing funds with the help of new tools to identify criminals through cryptocurrency transactions. (WSJ)
After a global manhunt, Do Kwon, the founder of Terra Labs behind the $60 billion UST wipeout, was finally arrested in Montenegro… while trying to board a flight to Dubai using falsified travel documents. (cnbctv18)
The SEC is suing Justin Sun and three of his wholly-owned companies, Tron Foundation Limited, BitTorrent Foundation Ltd., and Rainberry Inc. (formerly BitTorrent), for the unregistered offer and sale of crypto asset securities Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT). (sec)
CFTC is after Binance and its founder, Changpeng Zhao. (cftc, cnn, theguardian, wsj)
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If you don’t want to run away to Dubai, then maybe take some tips from Shaq.
How can a man who is over 7 feet tall — and regularly appears on television — be so hard to find?
Lawyers trying to sue basketball star Shaquille O’Neal for promoting the now-bankrupt FTX crypto exchange have tried to serve him at least 20 times. The NBA champion-turned-DJ has eluded every attempt. (theblock)
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The sex-work industry’s biggest pain-point has always been payment processing. Even there, crypto couldn’t plug the gap.
The adult-themed SpankPay payment service announced that it would shut down after its upstream payment processor, Wyre Payments, terminated its agreement with the company. (decrypt)
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LCH, the clearinghouse arm of the London Stock Exchange Group, will offer clearing services for cash-settled bitcoin (BTC) index futures and options. (coindesk)
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Why pivot to AI when you can scam in both crypto and AI?
Zero-knowledge (ZK) layer 2 blockchain CryptoGPT has cashed in on the recent surge in interest around artificial intelligence (AI) to raise $10 million in funding.
Speaking of VCs…
a16z's invested in what appears to be some sort of rent-an-egirl service. (twitter)
U.S. Venture capital hasn't been able to outperform European VC for the past 20 years. The Thiel Andreessen generation of VC took one of the greatest engines of economic growth and American ingenuity, and turned it into an old world rent extraction scheme. (twitter)
Markets this Week
TCS & INFY results were disappointing and HDFC BANK’s was unexciting. Going to be a tough earnings season.
More here: country ETFs, fixed income, currencies and commodities.
Meme of the Week
