The Bitcoin Foundation is mentioned in "The Strange Saga of Jeffrey Epstein’s Link to a Child Star Turned Cryptocurrency Mogul" hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/life…
"In early 2011, about a decade after the Digital Entertainment Network imploded, Pierce visited the Virgin Islands to attend “Mindshift,” a conference of top scientists hosted by Epstein."👀
"It was not even 18 months after Epstein had completed his slap-on-the-wrist solicitation sentence in Florida and registered as a sex offender..."..
"“the few communications that Mr. Pierce had with Epstein related to cryptocurrency” — an area in which Pierce established himself as a crypto centimillionaire, or maybe a billionaire, in the years following the conference..."..
"it is a strange tale: how a former child actor who never went to college ended up as an Epstein guest — a seemingly unlikely addition to a group that included a NASA computer engineer, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and a Nobel laureate in theoretical physics.."..
"Cryptocurrency was very much in its nascent stages when Epstein invited Brock Pierce to Mindshift. His bio on a list of attendees reads “entrepreneur, creator of virtual currencies and goods.”..
"His rep says he accepted the invitation for “the opportunity to interact w/ scientific thinkers” & participated in a panel discussion on cryptocurrency w/ prominent scientists (none of whom appeared to have any expertise in the area, based on their bios from the same document)."
"Epstein’s activities in the area of cryptocurrency remain mysterious. In 2017, he gave an interview to website The Next Web in which he expressed a vague interest in the area&The WSJ has reported that Epstein claimed that he worked for the US Treasury Depart. on cryptocurrency."
"Another strand may connect Epstein to cryptocurrency and indirectly to Pierce: In 2015, Joi Ito 🍿 — then director of the MIT Media Lab 🍿— announced a Digital Currency Initiative ..".. 🍿
"This came during a financially challenging time for the Bitcoin Foundation — the industry’s first trade group, founded in September 2012 — and Ito hired cryptocurrency developers previously supported by the foundation."..
"Just days after Ito’s announcement, Brock Pierce was named the foundation’s chairman. (Ito recently resigned from MIT Media Lab following reports that he had accepted major donations from Epstein and attempted to conceal the relationship.)"..
"Pierce was also in business starting in the mid-2000s with former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, who had his own ties to Epstein. Bannon did not respond to requests for comment but he apparently remains a fan of Pierce.."..
"Pierce’s name is familiar to people in Hollywood who remember the short-lived DEN, an ahead-of-its-time attempt to create online programming around the turn of the millennium.."
"Pierce had been making $250,000 a year at the company. He shared a 12,600-square-foot house with two other DEN co-founders, the then-40-something entrepreneur Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley, a Michigan man then in his mid-20s.."..
Pierce has said he gave Collins-Rector the idea of starting a company to create online entertainment. At the time, the technology wasn’t in place to efficiently deliver digital content to consumers,but the company attracted investors including David Geffen
"In 2017, The Washington Post published an exposé of IGE’s dubious practices — such as using the identities of unwitting U.S. residents to create gaming accounts — which were in place before Bannon came on board...".
Margaret Atwood has claimed that, according to her grandmother (maiden name Webster), the 17th-century witchcraft-lynching survivor Mary Webster might have been an ancestor:..
Webster is the subject of Atwood's poem "Half-Hanged Mary", as well as the subject of Atwood's dedication in her novel The Handmaid's Tale ..
"In The Handmaid's Tale, Gilead is the totalitarian, patriarchal theocracy that replaced the United States, established by a fundamentalist group called the Sons of Jacob after a coup. "
Unlike Palantir's explicit defense focus, DeepMind faces internal friction. Some workers have voted to unionize to block DeepMind models from being used in military or sovereign defense contracts. 🤔
Demis Hassabis , Co-Founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, has explicitly backed Google’s shift toward national security and military partnerships. This represents a significant reversal from his previous stance when DeepMind was acquired by Google.
"The intellectual arc of William Sims Bainbridge’s career confirms that his studies of 20thC religious cults & his 21st-century engineering of digital architectures are part of the exact same continuity: the systematic mapping, prediction, & control of collective human behavior.
There is a direct chronological and thematic intersection between the concepts in William Sims Bainbridge’s eGods: Faith versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming (published in 2013) and the Gamergate controversy, which erupted just one year later in 2014. 🤔