I asked an AI app to render an image based on the input ”bitcoin 2022” to give me some hints of what’s in store for the next year. It gave me this.
What does it look like?
Dogecoin? A bear? A honeybadger that don’t care?
This is ”Ethereum 2022”
I see the Ethereum logo hovering over a skyscraper… or a money lego DeFi city. But I also see a big rift in it. Does this mean there will be a chainsplit upon the Merge after all (the PoW => PoS hardfork)?
This is ”Solana 2022”
I see something very impressive. A breathtaking monument of the future. But it also looks inherently unstable, as if it could crack at any moment under the sheer load the structure puts on itself. It doesn’t look to have a very reliable baselayer.
”AVAX 2022”
I see a boat—a stranded yacht as the tide went out?
The architecture looks quite bold and advanced, but it doesn’t look like it’s falling apart nevertheless. It looks more like ”Wow, do you really think we could build things like that?” than a city in mayhem.
If you want to understand what happens to funds after they’re stolen by North Korea/Lazarus Group, the Chainalysis 2022 report is great
Step 1: Swap any ERC20s (like stETH) into ETH
Step 2: Swap any ETH into BTC
Step 3: Cash out BTC to cash (Chinese Renminbi) using Asian exchanges
This process can take years. They are in no hurry.
In 2022, it was noted how North Korea was still sitting on $55 worth of funds from hacks that happened six years earlier (2016).
In the meantime, @Bybit_Official will have to shore up ~$1.5b worth of ETH.
They’re doing that now by loans
But the reason to go the loan route was likely because there was a chance to retrieve the funds.
Then it’s easier to use the confiscated ETH to pay back the loan than going out and market blasting $1.5bn worth of ETH and ending up with double the money if you get it back.
But seeing as this is confirmed to be the Lazarus Group, there’s very little chance that those funds will ever be returned.
So @Bybit_Official will have to buy the ETH to pay back their loan (or pay back the USD amount owed, which would then constitute an OTC buy), and there’s really not much sense in waiting that long to do this.
So net net, Bybit will be buying ETH and Lazarus will be dumping ETH for BTC.
Net effect on ETH should ~cancel itself out.
BTC will catch a bid from Lazarus and over the years turn into sell pressure, but that can take long.
i'm still mulling over the fact that the @OpenAI board fired @sama because he couldn't be trusted and the entire superalignment team quit over safety concerns
for months i've been wondering what actually happened and there's quite a lot of content out there for anyone who's interested.
my goal has been to understand if this happened because there was too much money involved in the ai industry, and if it made sense for engineers/employees to switch jobs since ex-OpenAI engineers are hard currency for any other AI startup
so i've been doing my own research into the individuals involved and unfortunately it doesn't seem to me as if there are any mitigating circumstances here.
You have (all former):
- Jan Leike (senior engineer @ superalignment)
- William Saunders (researcher @ superalignment)
- Ilya Sutskever (chief scientist, cofounder)
- Daniel Kokotajlo (researcher @ governance)
- Leopold Aschenbrenner (researcher @ superalignment)
- Helen Toner (board)
they all paint pretty much the same picture. the incentives push @OpenAI to participate as any capitalistic enterprise in an arm's race and to neglect safety.
to the extent that i'm able to intuit what a person is about and what their motives are (i've read mostthere is to read from these people and listened to nearly all the podcast episodes they've done on the subject) and i can't come to any other conclusion than that they're being sincere about what they experienced.
it's most clear to me from leike (and also aschenbrenner)
i've watched long clips from leike from before the superalignment team disbanded and he struck me as genuinely excited about the work he was going to do - only to discover that the resources his team was promised (20% for alignment research) wasn't going to happen
what i've heard from saunders and kokotaljo also confirms the picture. sutskever is always been a bit political (understandable), and toner i don't know that well, but the picture comes together in a way that's hard to refute.
i did not find any breadcrumbs of insincerity or something that could allow me to spin an alternative theory for why they're saying what they're saying.
i'm a big fan of @OpenAI's products and it just sucks to have it so confirmed that it's an untrustworthy organization
(yes, i should have known, worldcoin eye scanner orb bad etc etc)
i'll post my sources below for anyone who's interested to make their own assessment:
Why did BRC-20 take over not only Bitcoin, but also *Ethereum, Solana, Near, Polygon, Celo and Fantom*?
Because burning gas/wasting blockspace is one if the last distribution mechanisms that exists with _open access to retail_.
Read on 🧵👇
How are you supposed to get access to a low cap cryptocurrency these days? Say, a sub-$1m mcap coin?
Retail-facing ICOs are simply illegal at the moment. Only accredited investors can buy. You’ll get access to these coins at exchange listing, at $100m+ FDV market caps.
What about airdrops? Yes, you can farm airdrops. This means you have to fuck around with every chain and dapp that doesn’t have a token yet, hoping you do it before the snapshot date, hoping you fulfill the evermore elusive criterias trying to exclude routine farmers like you.