aakilfernandes

IANAL but I believe the legal theory is they stole proprietary information from Coinbase (information about an upcoming listing) and used it for personal profit. The "victims" in this view are NOT users of the exchange (or the broader cryptocurrency market) but rather shareholders of Coinbase.

Almost all crypto lending (at least the defi/smart-contract variety) is collateralized lending. There's still a sort of "counterparty" risk, in that the management has to operate price feeds/risk algos to make sure the collateral stays safely about the loan value.

Analyses like this just take the energy cost of each block of transactions and divide it by the amount of transactions in the block. If the number of transactions in a block doubles, the average energy cost per transaction is halved.

Another way of stating it is "the marginal energy usage of a bitcoin transaction is essentially 0".

Played around with bitmessage for a bit and worked on an alternative for a bit. Here's some thoughts:

1. Like most gossip networks, it uses tcp. Since most consumer devices won't allow for incoming tcp connections, the end result is that most traffic gets routed through the small fraction of nodes on cloud servers. While this is true for most gossip networks, it is particularly problematic when you're using it bandwidth intensive applications (a twitter/parler alternative).

2. Using PoW for spam prevention is better than nothing, but the PoW algorithm is a simple sha256 hash. Sha256 ASICs will keep spam cost effective. Not sure if there's any solution. I think using some kind of crypto based incentive would be better economics, though of course have an increased user burden of acquiring crypto.

3. Bitmessage IMHO tries to be too many things with a message storage/rebroadcast protocol on top of a gossip network. All of these suffer from less than great documentation.

I'm aware, I'm just hesitant due to the counter party/smart contract security risk. In a few years when some of these platforms have more of a track record, I'll probably start using them. Seems like polymarket has done pretty well this cycle.

Spent a lot of time/money this election cycle betting on the spread between Predictit and 538. I did act more conservatively by only making a bet when it made sense given all 3 versions of 538s' model.

ROI around 12% (not including 5% withdrawl fee). Expect it to go a few points higher given that called elections are still trading at 90c, but PredictIt won't close due to ongoing litigation.

Why? There's no need to use some game-theoretic machine for getting data when you can just get it direct from the source.

You're comparing two scenarios, one in which you know all the facts, and one in which you don't.

In the dice toss scenario, we know everything relevant. In the election scenario, we don't.

A model like this is attempting to say "these are the rules we think exist. Based on the rules, and assuming the data is off by some random distribution, here's what we think could happen".

What different forecasters disagree about is what the rules are. For example, the relevance of certain demographic characteristics and the potential variance between polling (conducted prior to the election) and actual election results.

There's a huge amount of assumptions, and forecasters disagree on those assumptions. We have very little historical data (polling is very recent) and even with complete historical data, future elections do not always conform to past elections.

Could this just be a result of low sampling by the author? If you reduce a sample to only include some tiny edge case, the resulting data points are going to be weird in random ways.

Not really possible cause we don't know how much carbon PoW generates. You could naively just assume they generates the average amount (which is what some analysts have done), but I doubt that would be accurate.

The S&P500 is not an index of the entire economy. It's heavily weighted towards the tech sector.

The hardest hit businesses (retail, restaurants, service) were small parts of the S&P500 because they usually don't have the economies of scale that tech has, and therefore don't produce the mega-caps that dominate the S&P500.

Sorry, who is "we"? And got a writeup anywhere?

Whats missing is proof of delivery, and thats the most important thing. I'm not just paying AWS to store my files, I'm paying them to deliver my files.

Maybe this could work as an alternative to glacier. But even then, I doubt it. I'd take Amazon with an SLA any day of the week.

You wrote that tokens in the safe harbor will need less registration and disclosure, but no comment on what that registration or disclosure will entail, or why it is less than sufficient.

This article doesn't even bother to explain the proposal

In politics, there's a huge incentive for insiders to appear to be a kingmaker. Names like Shadow and ACRONYM play into that stereotype of a behind the scenes puppet master, that politicians will pay big dollars to get them / keep them in power.

At a larger level, it makes understanding whats happening really difficult. Its hard to tell who is actually corrupt and who is "peacocking" corruption.

dApp is kind of a flexible word, but the typical unifying feature is that the user has custody of a private key they use for signing transactions on a distributed ledger.

Most dApps (at least the ones you access through a dApp browser) have UIs built using regular web technology, and served over http.

As for why Google/Apple are doing this, I can only imagine that it threatens their walled garden by giving web users more access to payments that they'd rather monetize.

For an order book you have two options:

1. An on chain order book. But saving state on chain is expensive

2. An off chain order book. With an off chain order book, you have to hash and verify signatures for every order, which is expensive.

For those unaware, Uniswap is a decentralized exchange without an order book. Rather than matching orders to buy and sell, it has a liquidity pool. As users buy/sell from the pool, the price to buy/sell automatically adjust to maintain a certain ratio.

The lack of an order book makes it extremely simple (and transaction cost efficient).

The down side is that to "bootstrap" a market, you need a liquidity provider willing to put up twice the value of the asset. There's also slippage costs and front running concerns.

My guess is the keyword "logo" in their brand name was a big part of their SEO ranking

I'm not sure why a blockchain is needed for this. Can't they just have an API where certain posts are "flagged" and hidden in the official UI? If you want to opt-out, you simply use a UI that doesn't hide flagged.

> they don't care and will look at how your token actually works and whether this is an investment contract under the Howey test.

This is 100% correct, but you're making the wrong conclusion. You're concluding the SEC considers the legal framework bogus, when the SEC is arguing they have not met the legal framework.

In a SAFT you sell securities for future non-securities. What Telegram did was sell securities for future securities. There's a couple of facts they use in this assertion:

1. Telegram said they would leverage their existing user base to promote the token (i.e. the success of Grams is based on Telegram's efforts as a promoter) 2. TON is PoS, and that its not possible to deliver a PoS network when the original stakers are all qualified investors

The author of this article is turning inches into miles. SAFTs aren't dead. The SEC is alleging Telegram has failed to deliver the promises it has made, so the SEC is pre-emptively stating they need to halt delivery. Presumably, once they complete their promises they'll be able to deliver Grams.

From the SEC Complaint:

The Whitepaper spoke of potential future products and services that investors could use in connection with Grams, but also made clear that these products were not available at the time the Offering began and would not be available by the time Defendants delivered Grams to Initial Purchasers.

Telegram, however, does seem to be in a pickle regarding the PoS consensus model. The SEC seems to be alleging that in order for the network to be sufficiently decentralized, having only qualified investors staking is not enough.

Also from the SEC complaint:

Defendants knew, however, that to actually implement the TON Blockchain in the real world, the project would require “numerosity”: a widespread distribution and use of Grams across the globe. Indeed, by definition, the TON Blockchain can only become truly decentralized (as contemplated and promoted in the Offering Documents) if Grams holders other than the original Grams purchasers actually stake Grams and, thereby, act as “validators” of transactions on the TON Blockchain. Stated differently, if the original Grams purchasers alone all immediately staked their holdings, the TON Blockchain would be centralized rather than decentralized and, therefore, subject to misuse and majority attacks. This fundamental need for additional Grams holders demonstrates that the TON Blockchain was designed from inception to require the Initial Purchasers to immediately distribute their holdings to the public.

Might even be profitable!

https://money.cnn.com/2010/03/02/pf/taxes/rat_out_tax_cheat/

Yea, IANAL but my understanding is if BNB is a security, then by allowing trading of BNB, Binance.us is an unlicensed security exchange

Their inclusion of BNB seems incredibly risky from a legal PoV

Verification: https://twitter.com/binance/status/1174301770907996161