I know plenty of people with a critical outlook on crypto who have a clue what they are talking about.

I shouldn’t feed the troll, but there is a teachable moment here.

Crypto transactions that are direct on a Blockchain, by design, are immutable. Once they are validated in a block, and future blocks are validated on top of that, it is impossible for any entity to change that history unless they control a majority of the validation power of that network. Yes, even the NSA can’t do it. It’s math.

Yes, if the government wants your crypto, it will get it. But the only way to do that is to obtain your private keys. It cannot reverse a transaction, nor reverse-engineer your private keys from a transaction. Yes, not even the NSA can do it. It’s math.

Governments do have other tools at their disposal. But those tools must center on obtaining the key. They cannot “hack” it any other way.

Well, nothing anyone says is going to convince you, because you’re obviously correct. How silly of me to question you!

No, but if the US government sends money into your bank account, they can just as easily take it back.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/02/12/trump-administration-takes-back-80-million-in-fema-money-from-nycs-bank-accounts-city-alleges-highway-robbery/

Crypto was designed to be a peer-to-peer method for immutable transactions. Crypto transactions are irreversible, even for governments.

I’ve used crypto for legitimate transactions in the past. It bailed me out once, big time, when I had to top up a foreign SIM card while abroad and their website wouldn’t take my US credit card. I found a site selling top-up codes that took crypto and sent some from my phone, and I was back in business. (The site was legit, but even if it turned out to be a scam I knew they could never take anything more than what I sent them because of the way crypto worked.) But this was back when people were still using it to transact.

The worst thing that ever happened to law-abiding people using crypto was when it’s price zoomed up. Because for all those early adopters, every individual transaction now has a considerble capital gain attached. That’s why people don’t spend crypto anymore, because it’s been turned by the market into a Store of Value. (And by developers, but that’s a different thread).

This seems to be all about a technicality involving how these sanctions are applied. Sanctions are meant to be applied to people and the companies they run, and a US court ruled that these sanctions couldn’t be applied to a smart contract because it’s just a bunch of code, and not the property of a sanctioned individual. This ruling was made back in November, they are just getting around now to removing the sanctions. From what I can tell, the sanctions against the people involved in running the service are still in effect.

These agencies are sometimes able to retrieve stolen funds. In the case of the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in 2021, the Department of Justice (DOJ) was eventually able to recover almost 85% of the bitcoin (BTC) ransom paid to Russian cybercriminal group Darkside. It’s unclear how investigators obtained the hacking group’s private keys.

Probably the old-fashioned way

I can believe areas of the White House have no cell service, on purpose. Remember when they found those fake cell towers around DC?

https://www.wired.com/story/dcs-stingray-dhs-surveillance/

I bet at some point they installed some cell phone jammers specifically to limit the amount of foreign spying that could be done by fake towers, and they simply “forgot” to tell the incoming Trump administration…

But this is exactly what AI is being marketed toward. All of Apple’s AI ads showcase dumb people who appear smart because the AI bails out their ineptitude.

Actually, this is good news, because they were able to fulfill all those redemptions. It means they were not doing shady things with all those deposits.

Do I understand this correctly, then, that this was some sort of MITM attack where valid requests to the multisig parties were replaced by malicious code while still appearing to be valid to the signers? That must be an inside job.

And this is the first time I have heard the word “musked” in this context…

Well, either it wasn’t as offline as they all thought, or someone pulled off an epic inside job.

Ah, I know a bit about Kodak, being a resident of Rochester, NY (and a former employee). Go back 100 years, and George Eastman was the Steve Jobs of his day. Kodak was just like Apple, bringing the obscure technology of photography to the masses.

But that tech was very much dependant on chemical processes, specifically the Silver Halides used in film. Although Steve Sasson invented the digital camera whike at Kodak, Management basically told him “Great job! Here’s a bonus. We’re not gonna sell it, though, this will ruin our film business”.

Ridge Road in Rochester is full of factories with large roll coating machines to make film which are now functionally obsolete. As far as I know many of those buildings are still there, but in truth its been a while since I’ve been up there. Kodak sold off bits and pieces of that factory space over the years, even before the bankruptcy. But they tore down much more factory space, entire buildings, because the property taxes were cheaper on vacant lots than on buildings. Yet they haven’t gotten around to divesting it all.

Kodak still technically exists after the bankruptcy, but is far less relevant to the local economy now. Back in the day, when Kodak Park ran 3 shifts making film, local car dealers timed their promotions around Kodak’s “Wage Dividend” bonus. But it turns out their technological advantage had an expiration date.

George Eastman’s influence is seen all over Rochester, though. His name is all over various buildings in town, as well as the University of Rochester and the Eastman School of Music. And when he decided his health was declining and his work was done, he shot himself to end it all in the most efficient matter possible. Even most Lemmings, who abhor the rich, might have a soft spot for an insanely rich person who not only gave back to his community, but also took it upon himself to end it without being a burden to anyone.

Kodak’s value is as a film company. Now that film is a niche product, their brand name has no value whatsoever, except for the fact that it’s still familiar. If you see Kodak branding on a consumer product, I doubt it was actually developed by Kodak, I would bet they just licensed the name.

The Internet was designed to be somewhat decentralized. Some administrative aspects are centralized, like public IP address allocation, Top Level Domains, and common TCP/UDP port assignments for essential services. But the operational aspects are very decentralized. When an organization wants to connect directly to the Internet, they “just” need to connect with sufficient bandwidth, and then start broadcasting the IP address ranges they are assigned, and the routing protocols figure it all out. If all you want is a private Internet, you can even dispense with the routing protocols and set up static routes yourself, although that won’t scale up.

No matter what happens in the world, there will always be an Internet, as long as the equipment exists and there are enough furries to run it.

It makes perfect sense when you realize that Silk Road was the killer app that launched Bitcoin and the entire Crypto universe that is currently funding Trump’s lifestyle.

Now Ross can dust off that old brain wallet and live large in his stash. When he was arrested, 1 BTC was worth $200ish, it’s now worth $100k. And he can make more dollars whenever he wants to by simply selling a shitty token.

Did the law give Trump the power to change the deadline through executive order?

Yes, it does, but only a one-time 90 day extension and only if the President says there is concrete progress toward a sale to a US entity. Of course, this President will say anything that benefits him personally, whether or not it is true. So he says the magic words, and all interested parties (Bytedance, Zuckerberg, Musk, etc.) continue to buy his shitty NFTs and tokens to influence his decisions.

Hey, Joey, don’t say that shit out loud. Once they realize that there is a way to access content that isn’t sufficiently monetized, they will block it. Keep it secret!

“Temu is designed to make this expansive access undetected, even by sophisticated users,” Griffin’s complaint said. “Once installed, Temu can recompile itself and change properties, including overriding the data privacy settings users believe they have in place.”

That’s just nuts

Good PMs are vital to the success of projects, and bad PMs are vital to their failure.