The blockchain is going to destroy everything

As a PC gamer, I consider Nawk Tuah a far more solid investment.

abates said:

Crypto investor tortured man for weeks for bitcoin password, prosecutors say

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How did you manage to make a link that's not even clickable?

...Ah, you pasted the same thing for the URL and the text, is how.

Apologies, fixed!

I feel like this is one incident that's not going to get written off as "white collar crime" and let off with a slap on the wrist. But I dunno, maybe this sort of thing is normal for Wall Street suits and we're just not usually made aware of it.

So, something interesting happened since this story broke. I happened to catch another report on it on TV, and they described the victim as a "crypto investor", whereas the MSN article uses it to describe the perpetrator. Now, it's definitely true that the victim is a crypto investor; that's why he had crypto to steal. But it's such an interesting shift in wording that I went back to make sure I hadn't done that thing I always do where I manage to horribly misread something. The original article doesn't state how rich the perpetrator is, but it does say this: "The victim was held in a luxury six-story Prince Street townhouse known for loud partying, according to neighbors who spoke with NBC New York." Also how freaking rich are you that you decide to give your victim cocaine to smoke as a means of torture? At the same time, how rich must the victim be that this was worth doing?

The more I dig into this, the more fascinating it becomes. This is the sort of low-level thuggery I generally don't associate with people at this wealth level, unless they're involved in organized crime. It makes me wonder if we'd start seeing incidents like this a lot more if we ever actually did ban crypto outright, or if the banned substance has to be something with intrinsic value to be a thriving underground business.

Among those newly registered domains is crypto.gov and I'm pretty sure it's not in reference to cryptography.

Does Bitkern know something we don't?

Swiss-based Bitkern has partnered with Kartoon Studios to launch, ugh, a new animated series to "Introduce the next generation to Bitcoin" called...sigh..."Bitcoin Brigade". Characters are designed to "embody" elements of Bitcoin, the blockchain and cryptocurrency. And one of them looks like a reject Erin Essurance., while another looks like the most stereotypical emo-hacker caricature anyone could make.

This part kind of bothered me the most:

The animated series will also introduce The Satoshi Sparks Rewards System. Young viewers earn “sparks” by watching episodes, completing quizzes, and solving cryptography challenges in companion apps.

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This feels like propaganda for Bitcoin, and I just KNOW the companion stuff will skeezy as frick

It really is amazing that they keep pushing these kinds of transparent propaganda films like it's the 1950s. No other industry does this sort of thing anymore; no other industry has done this sort of thing in my lifetime. How can they possibly sell the idea that they're the way of the future when they're stealing a playbook from my grandparents' generation?

EDIT: Just dawned on me that the reason nobody does it anymore is that FCC regulations were passed in the early '90s banning it, and it's taken this long for the effectively-unregulated internet to supplant TV as the dominant platform for advertising.

Now you're on the trolley!