It appears that these banks, especially Signature, were the victims of an opportunistic campaign to decapitate banks serving the crypto industry. Not only was the bank run opportunistically exploited by regulators to shut down Signature, but it may even trace its origins to Choke Point 2.0. Did the Biden Administration actually instigate the now-global bank run as part of a grievance campaign against the crypto space? If so, this represents a colossal scandal, and one that the Biden administration must be made to answer for. The preponderance of public evidence suggests that Silvergate and Signature didn’t commit suicide — they were executed. The Fed also made it abundantly clear that new crypto-focused bank charters like that of Custodia (a fully reserved model, immune to bank runs!) would be denied, which is exactly what happened at the end of January. Banking crypto firms wasn’t prohibited, just rendered extremely expensive and reputationally risky.

The US doesn't produce much manufacturing. It runs massive trade deficits and it has huge budget deficits. Why is it still powerful? It's the financial hub. Regardless of where people earn their money, they want to invest it back into the US. If the US were to implement capital controls that would disappear. It would be a late 1980s Soviet Union. A strong military and not much else. That limits what it can do to crypto.

Gov. DeSantis says: “What the central bank digital currency is all about is surveilling Americans and controlling behavior of Americans." The governor raises a legitimate concern. He is right that the rise of certain foreign CBDCs – particularly China’s e-CNY – create a benchmark for one kind of CBDC that will provide enormous financial surveillance and social control. You might call this form of CBDC a “surveillance coin.” DeSantis is also right that money in the United States must reflect the values of a free society, including individual privacy, free enterprise and economic freedom – a “freedom coin,” so to speak. The sad fact is that our current financial system – before we even turn to digital currency – is far more subject to government surveillance than it has become socially acceptable to admit. Right now, financial service providers build dossiers about their customers, share customer information with each other and report an enormous amount of conventional financial transactions to the government without being compelled by a subpoena.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/84785 > In a chilling irony, the VP ran searches for the term “surveillance state.” As an unaccountable state-partnered bureaucracy secretly searched it out, the idea that “vaccines are part of a surveillance state” won its own thoughtcrime bucket: “conspiracy.”

Our “algorithm” is overly complex & not fully understood internally. People will discover many silly things , but we’ll patch issues as soon as they’re found! We’re developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it’s still a work in progress. That’ll also be open source. Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality. Most importantly, we hope to earn your trust.

The CDC said it would be using the tracking data to “assess home-by-hour behaviors (i.e. curfew analysis) by exploring the percentage of mobile devices at home during specific period of time.” The data could also be integrated with other information “to provide a comprehensive picture of movement/travel of persons during the COVID-19 pandemic to better understand mandatory stay-at-home orders, business closure, school re-openings, and other non-pharmaceutical interventions in states and cities.”

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/84326 > “Nothing could be more dangerous than adhering to a manufactured sense of urgency like this and ultimately developing a CBDC that is not open, permissionless and private.”

Silicon Valley Bank, aka SIVB, the 18th largest bank in the US with $212 billion in assets of which $120 billion are securities (of which most or $57.7BN are Held to Maturity (HTM) Mortgage Backed Securities and another $10.5BN are CMO, while $26BN are Available for Sale, more on that later )...

Federal criminal law has metastasized to the point where the average person probably commits multiple federal crimes on the average day — which of us is prosecuted depends mostly on the priorities and caprice of law enforcement. If you want a vision of the future, imagine your phone ratting you out to the cops, forever.

Facebook has generated more than a hundred pages for U.S.-designated terrorist groups like Islamic State and Al Qaeda, giving greater visibility to organizations involved in real-world violence. TTP’s investigation adds to growing questions about how the major tech platforms facilitate terrorist organizing and recruitment. Under a key internet law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, tech companies are not legally responsible for what users post on their platforms. Because Facebook itself is creating these pages—and is not simply hosting them on its platform—the company may not be able to rely on Section 230 to shield it from lawsuits over the content. ISIS has long been known for its heavy reliance on social media to spread propaganda, recruit supporters, and expand its reach. As TTP’s new investigation shows, the group is getting a regular assist from Facebook, which has generated more than 100 pages for the terrorist organization and its regional offshoots. Despite repeated warnings over the years about this problem, Facebook hasn’t taken any discernible steps to stop generating terrorist pages, which violate its own content policies and raise legal liability questions for the company.

Although other self-custody swapping wallets have been approved, the final build of Uniswap’s mobile wallet was rejected by Apple just a few days before its planned December 2022 launch. Uniswap Labs shared that it responded to Apple’s concerns, answered all its questions, and reiterated that it was compliant with its guidelines. However, Apple has still not greenlit the launch, and Uniswap Labs remains in limbo.

Despite resembling Twitter so much, Bluesky is set to have some technical features designed to make it very different from Elon Musk’s social media giant. The platform aims to provide a decentralized social network protocol, which is expected to make its user data free from influence by any government or corporation. Bluesky is built on the AT protocol, a new federated social network that integrates ideas from the latest decentralized technologies. Originally known as the authenticated transfer protocol, or ADX, the AT protocol is Bluesky’s main effort to enable a new way for servers to communicate with each other, allowing individuals and businesses to self-host and have multiple websites instead of one.

Or if you say Ivermectin . . .

One of the biggest benefits for adoption is that it allows new users to onboard into the decentralized world of crypto without ever having to worry about complicated seed phrases or understand the technical process of setting up a wallet. They can simply open a smart account via a smartphone app using a fingerprint or face scanner. While there are plenty of crypto wallets currently available as smartphone apps, they come with numerous security risks and are unsuitable for holding larger amounts of cryptocurrency due to the risk of hacks. But because smart accounts enable the cryptographic keys to be stored on the phone’s hardware security module, phone wallets can now be almost as safe as a hardware wallet. If a user loses their phone, time-locked social recovery means a group of trusted friends or even a commercial service can help them recover it without putting the enclosed funds at risk. They gave a hypothetical example of someone who wants to go on holidays and have their bills paid automatically from their crypto wallet, after they get paid in two weeks’ time. You can already do this from bank accounts of course, or via a custodial wallet, but both require trusting a centralized service. The paper explains that the difficulty doing it on Ethereum is because it has two types of accounts: user accounts (also known as externally owned accounts, or EOAs) and smart contract accounts. “A user account, controlled by a private key, can send transactions,” explains Visa Crypto. “A smart contract has associated code that can be executed, however, a smart contract cannot initiate transactions on its own. Transactions must always originate from a user account and be signed by the user.”

I like where people can beat big money > Organically growing is now a key ingredient for achieving sustainability in crypto projects. VC-based projects will not be able to compete in the long term with organic versions where distribution is broader, so community interaction and socialization are critical to reaching the end goal.

Cross that car off my list