Welcome to the world of tomorrow, where artificial intelligence can create East Asian landscape paintings that rival 11th century masters’ — with ownership that can be verified on the blockchain. Such is the vision of South Korean generative artist CSLIM, whose upcoming NFT collection will feature 5,000 artworks that the engineer and developer attests were created by AI that has studied the data of 80,000 classical East Asian landscape paintings from the sixth through 13th centuries via machine learning. Exquisitely combining cultural tradition and cutting-edge technology, “The World” will drop on Feb. 21 — only at Crypto.com/NFT. Read More
Tag Archives: BlockChain
Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme
Cryptocurrency is a scam.
All of it, full stop — not just the latest pump-and-dump “shitcoin” schemes, in which fraudsters hype a little-known cryptocurrency before dumping it in unison, or “rug pulls,” in which a new cryptocurrency’s developers abandon the project and run off with investor funds. All cryptocurrency and the industry as a whole are built atop market manipulation without which they could not exist at scale.
This should surprise no one who understands how cryptocurrency works. Blockchains are, at their core, simply append-only spreadsheets maintained across decentralized “peer-to-peer” networks, not unlike those used for torrenting pirated files. Just as torrents allow users to share files directly, cryptocurrency blockchains allow users to maintain a shared ledger of financial transactions without the need of a central server or managing authority. Users are thus able to make direct online transactions with one another as if they were trading cash.
This, we are told, is revolutionary. But making unmediated online transactions securely in a trustless environment in this way is not without costs. Cryptocurrency blockchains generally don’t allow previously verified transactions to be deleted or altered. The data is immutable. Updates are added by chaining a new “block” of transaction data to the chain of existing blocks.
But to ensure the integrity of the blockchain, the network needs a way to trust that new blocks are accurate. Popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin all employ a “proof of work” consensus method for verifying updates to the blockchain. Without getting overly technical, this mechanism allows blockchain users — known as “miners” in this context — to compete for the right to verify and add the next block by being the first to solve an incredibly complex math puzzle. Read More
Cryptographers are not happy with how you’re using the word ‘crypto’
The stadium that is home to the Los Angeles Lakers is getting a new name: the Crypto.com Arena. The name reflects the arena’s new sponsorship agreement with a Singapore-based cryptocurrency trading platform. That may be good news for cryptocurrency fanatics – but perhaps not so much for another faction within the digital landscape: cryptographers.
Look up the word “crypto” in Webster’s dictionary, and you’ll see it refers to cryptography, which in turn is defined as “the computerized encoding and decoding of information”. Search “crypto” on Google, however, and you’ll see a host of top results pointing to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum.
This lexical shift has weighed heavily on cryptographers, who, over the past few years, have repeated the rallying cry “Crypto means cryptography” on social media. T-shirts and hoodies trumpet the phrase and variations on it; there’s a website dedicated solely to clarifying the issue. Read More
Tracking stolen crypto is a booming business: How blockchain sleuths recover digital loot
Crypto heists are becoming increasingly common, but forensic investigators are getting savvier at figuring out who is behind specific accounts
Paolo Ardoino was on the front lines of one of the largest cryptocurrency heists of all time.
He was flooded with calls and messages in August alerting him to a breach at Poly Network, a platform where users swap tokens among popular cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Binance and Dogecoin. Hackers had made off with $610 million in crypto, belonging to tens of thousands of people. Roughly $33 million of the funds were swiftly converted into Tether, a “stable coin” with a value that mirrors the U.S. dollar.
Ardoino, Tether’s chief technology officer, took note. Typically, when savvy cybercriminals make off with cryptocurrency, they transfer the assets among online wallets through difficult-to-trace transactions. And poof — the money is lost.
Ardoino sprang into action and, minutes later, froze the assets. Read More
Zion Wants to Free Social Media from Big Tech Through the Lightning Network
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Social network Zion onboards users to the Lightning Network to free them from big tech censorship, revenue restrictions and data collection.
Announced earlier today, Bitcoin-based social network Zion has launched with the mission of eliminating reliance on large tech companies for content creation and sharing, providing an alternative that does not collect user data, censor speech or withhold portions of payments meant for content creators.
“With Zion, technology companies are completely eliminated and users interact in a secure, censorship-resistant, private utility that facilitates free and open flow of content and payments between users and their audiences,” according to a press release from the platform. “There is no way to manipulate how users experience the network and absolutely no data is collected, ever.” Read More
Disrupting Ransomware by Disrupting Bitcoin
Ransomware isn’t new; the idea dates back to 1986 with the “Brain” computer virus. Now, it’s become the criminal business model of the internet for two reasons. The first is the realization that no one values data more than its original owner, and it makes more sense to ransom it back to them — sometimes with the added extortion of threatening to make it public — than it does to sell it to anyone else. The second is a safe way of collecting ransoms: bitcoin.
This is where the suggestion to ban cryptocurrencies as a way to “solve” ransomware comes from. Lee Reiners, executive director of the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke Law, proposed this in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. Journalist Jacob Silverman made the same proposal in a New Republic essay. Without this payment channel, they write, the major ransomware epidemic is likely to vanish, since the only payment alternatives are suitcases full of cash or the banking system, both of which have severe limitations for criminal enterprises. Read More
NFTs Explained in Two Pictures: The Good, The Bad … and The Ugly
- Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are taking the art world by storm.
- A large number of serious problems outweigh any positives.
- Two infographics to explain the process and issues.
Thousands of Tor exit nodes attacked cryptocurrency users over the past year
For more than 16 months, a threat actor has been seen adding malicious servers to the Tor network in order to intercept traffic and perform SSL stripping attacks on users accessing cryptocurrency-related sites.
The attacks, which began in January 2020, consisted of adding servers to the Tor network and marking them as “exit relays,” which are the servers through which traffic leaves the Tor network to re-enter the public internet after being anonymized. Read More
Crypto, an Oral Essay
This is a special episode of the a16z podcast — it’s an audio history, told through the voices of the a16z crypto team, about what crypto is, how it really works, and why it matters. This “innovation overview” is meant as a resource, and it features hallway-style conversations with the a16z team as well as outside experts. Read More
Illegal Content and the Blockchain
Security researchers have recently discovered a botnet with a novel defense against takedowns. Normally, authorities can disable a botnet by taking over its command-and-control server. With nowhere to go for instructions, the botnet is rendered useless. But over the years, botnet designers have come up with ways to make this counterattack harder. Now the content-delivery network Akamai has reported on a new method: a botnet that uses the Bitcoin blockchain ledger. Since the blockchain is globally accessible and hard to take down, the botnet’s operators appear to be safe. Read More
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