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2 Dec, 6 tweets, 2 min read
Another day, another $120M cryptocurrency theft. The mechanism here highlights a point I made before—given a set of decentralized, unusable tools, civilians will gravitate to centralized, easy to use tools like the website that just stole all their money. theblockcrypto.com/post/126072/de…
The list of assets stolen is great. From "wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) and convex finance (CVX) to more complicated tokens like "ibbtc/sbtcCRV-f." The idea is that you put your funny money on BadgerDAO, and it's loaned out and you make a preposterous rate of interest, risk-free!
How did thieves defeat the decentralized, mathematically proven distributed and trustless nature of this DeFi protocol? By stealing the Cloudflare key of the website everyone was using. In other words, the centralized intermediary that gated access to the centralized website.
When you build all this stuff out of nerd kudzu, people gravitate to whatever central entity is able to make it halfway usable. That then becomes the locus of all the nerdcrime until it's all regulated or all the money is stolen, whichever comes first.
We've had several proofs of concept of this with entities (like MtGOX) that are now smoking financial craters. But a better example may be Gmail—a distributed, decentralized protocol led to annoying spam, then one company fixed UX and now basically controls email infrastructure.
Looks like Cream Finance, cleaned out three times this year so far, is the industry leader in the exciting new frontier of decentralized lending/surprise giving. And their Twitter feed (@CreamdotFinance) is quite the journey.

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Pinboard Profile picture
4 Dec
Cryptocurrency in theory: transactions enforced by code, you don't need to trust anyone, money can instantly go anywhere, banks can't stop you

In practice: transactions enforced by bugs in code, you can't trust anyone, money can instantly go anywhere, banks can't help you
Traditional banking: your funds are secured by an intrusive apparatus of government surveillance and a set of hoary laws passed in the 1930s

Cryptocurrency: your funds are secured by a long, random integer in the wallet app your spouse just deleted to make room for Candy Crush
Fiat money: a social fiction sustained by the implicit threat of state violence that will lose all value when society collapses

Cryptocurrency: a borderless, anarchic store of value that will endure for as long as there is power, internet, and millions of servers running it 24/7
Read 5 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
2 Dec
Also could use an explanation of why the stops stayed in place this long.
Not to mention how many of the stops seem to remain in place. I flew through Dallas-Fort Worth not long ago, a major travel hub for a big airline. Why couldn't I get a rapid covid test there, or for that matter a vaccine? Why aren't there pop-up testing and vax clinics all over?
Seems to me like a vaccination requirement for domestic air travel, coupled with day-of-departure vaccination clinics at airports and measures to help those who are scared of needles, might be another stop Biden could pull out in the holiday travel season.
Read 8 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
1 Dec
I realize I'm being a broken record about this, but Congress took two weeks off knowing this was coming, and Biden had the Constitutional authority to call them back into session. This is a failure to lead.
Too much of the dysfunction in D.C. right now is either lack of urgency (failure to file paperwork on an FDA nomination, various vacancies) or a stop-and-go legislative process that tries to force progress through unrealistic, self-imposed deadlines intended to provoke a crisis.
As a chronic procrastinator who self-motivates by last-minute panic, I understand the approach, but I also don't think people like me should be running the country. At the very least, that leadership failure deserves to be called out by a press corps that currently enables it.
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
26 Nov
I can't understand why the US is imposing travel limits starting on Monday. Either impose them right away, or don't. For this entire pandemic our health system has behaved like covid takes weekends off (for example, by not updating infection statistics on Saturdays and Sundays)
Here's a Johannesburg flight 12 hours out from Newark. Is there a plan for testing passengers, quarantine, questionnaire, extra disinfecting towelette, anything? Or is the plan "our policy starts Monday"? It seems late in the pandemic for this clown car flightaware.com/live/flight/UA…
I'm also 100% down with "travel bans don't work", if that's the expert consensus. But what rustles my jimmies is that after two years of this shit we appear to be doing the useless things again rather than the effective things, driven by bureaucratic inertia.
Read 8 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
25 Nov
Hopefully we'll get an early Christmas present with the launch of the James Webb space telescope, which if it unfolds right will make Hubble look like a dirty coke bottle. Building Webb cost $9B, or about half the price of the relaxed-fit remake of the Apollo capsule called Orion
The challenge with the Webb is keeping the sensors really cold despite being in full sunlight. I love the solution NASA chose, because it is extremely carefully designed but looks like something you'd throw together in a panic the night before the middle school science fair
Two exciting things about the Webb are:

1. The mirror is YUGE
2. Unlike Hubble it sees in infrared, which means we can look at really distant stuff that is redshifted, or at nearby things in wavelengths that the Earth's atmosphere absorbs. Plus the design will attract space bees
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
24 Nov
I think my favorite thing about web3 tooling is how "what is one useful thing you can do with it today?" is treated as a gotcha question, beneath contempt, even though for binary search, asymmetric cryptography, Bloom filters or any other technology it was dirt simple to answer
This is why I keep getting drawn to the analogy to string theory. The grand intellectual edifice of the whole ensemble is supposed to be so compelling that pointing to the absence of any contact with reality is treated as either bad faith or sign of insurmountable ignorance
The fact is if you get deep into the tech, cryptocurrency is *impressively* stupid, in the same way it would be difficult but stupid to make a working slot machine entirely out of raisins. And the fact that this slot machine pays out real money with every pull is unsettling.
Read 9 tweets

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