Do you recognize this video? This is @ShannenJPEG.
She went viral making a video about how she used to be an angry blue haired feminist (her words) and now has done a complete 180 and decided to become an ultra tradewife. She’s now into crypto.
Shannen has discovered that jumping between polar opposite ideological communities and debunking the former as a sham is a brilliant engagement farming strategy, because the new crowd she caters her message to is so prone to liking and sharing her message.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at this. The first thing Shannen did after joining Twitter was targeting the HEX community.
I think @ShannenJPEG is fantastic. Her ability to sniff out cults and cater her message to desperate communities is phenomenal. She’s a bit of a savant.
Here’s the next thing she did: BSV.
Another excellent choice. No one accidentally stumbles onto the BSV community—it’s so dying and insignificant these days you have to be particularly looking for complete idiots that are easily manipulated to derive engagement from to find it.
What really takes the prize for me is that Shannen also considers the BTC community to be one that is easily gamed. Obviously is not genuine. If you fall down the BTC rabbit hole, you don’t and come away with the understanding that *each* of BTC, BSV and HEX are legit.
While she harvest followers from all 3 of HEX, BSV and BTC she also makes sure to drop a few thirst trap tweets just to rope in the average simp.
The reason I am typing all of this is because it reaffirms a problem with the BTC community I’ve noticed that I’ve been banging the drum on for months. There is a reason that Shannen picked these 3 communities:
- HEX
- BSV
- BTC
It’s because you can insta-speedrun each.
Link to original thread.
Bitcoiners, your community is being speedrun by grifters. ”Reformed altcoiners”, corporate shills. Yes, the problem exists in all of crypto. But Bitcoin used to be different. It’s not anymore.
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.