Cryptocurrency (and related fuckery)

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That’s a great video, I liked her treatment of the reddit commentary attempting to heckle Flick. Link to that paper,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666659622000312

And she made several references to the “Line Goes Up” video. I abhor lengthy videos, but this one is information-dense and gets my endorsement:

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New York State has banned a practice becoming more common in the crypto-mining industry – the rescuing and repurposing of mothballed fossil fuel plants to exclusively provide energy for mining digital currency.

Governor Kathy Hochul yesterday enacted a bill in the works since May 2021 that establishes a two-year moratorium on applications or permits for “an electricity generating facility that utilizes a carbon-based fuel and that provides, in whole or in part, behind-the-meter electric energy consumed or utilized by cryptocurrency mining operations that use proof-of-work authentication methods to validate blockchain transactions.” This includes applications to renew such permits.

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Too soon? Amazon commissions FTX mini-series

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Production house AGBO used its Instagram account to reveal that it has “teamed up with David Weil and Amazon Studios for an eight-episode limited series about the FTX crypto scandal, expected to be in production this spring.”_

[…]

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Do we really need eight episodes? Seems like it could be condensed into a pamphlet.

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It’s surely too soon to know what was going on.

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But never too soon to make stuff up! /s

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Reading FTX’s bankruptcy filing we will never really know what was going on, other than massive fraud.

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Certainly one of these, I’m sure:

image image image

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Citizens United and the FTX meltdown - The Keating Five were amateurs

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/23/incentives-matter/#blockchain-eight

Wow. Just… wow.

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What was going on here, to be clear, is that a lot of fake money was being made up and a lot of real money was being lost. “It’s like if you had supermarket loyalty points, and you’re counting them as money, and you’re only solvent if you’re counting your own loyalty points that you made up as your assets,” said David Gerard, a prominent crypto blogger and critic based in the UK. “Their liabilities were real, but their assets were imaginary.”

which, at present, has this disclaimer hanging round it like a millstone.

Disclosure: This August, Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox’s Future Perfect a grant for a 2023 reporting project. That project is now on pause

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I am not really bothered by the note - the Future Perfect projct is really not any different than public tv/radio underwriting and Vox properties have always been good about separating editorial and advertising (the vergecast has a long list they do regularly and constantly criticize our outright mock companies in their disclosures).

So long as I still see critical articles and they are open about sponsors I am fine and Vox has always been overall way against crypto

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The Ellison-linked account also demonstrated a substantial preoccupation with “hbd” or “human biodiversity,” an online euphemism for the discredited fields of race science and eugenics popularized by the alt-right.

Never heard that one before…

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Human Biodiversity? Like…Ringworld where the hominids took over all the various niches unoccupied by other species? No?

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Nasty space hobbitses.

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It turns out that there was only ever $5.25 in real money invested in crypto. It looked like a lot, but it was the same $5.25 coming and going a zillion times. Then a few weeks ago, someone pulled the $5 out, and it’s been trying to keep going on that one quarter, and it just can’t move fast enough. /s

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