Author of books about why cryptocurrency is bad. NOT USING TWITTER right now, DON'T DM HERE. dgerard@gmail.com he/him SEE MY🦣: @davidgerard@circumstances.run
it’s “distressing” that the Bahamas liquidator filed ch15 in SDNY and not Delaware. They want the ch15 cases moved here to coordinate with this proceeding.
Nov 16, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
that time an Effective Altruist spent $50,000 spamming Wikipedia to promote EA
Vipul Naiuk, to be precise. his tasklist: archive.ph/QzbPS
Wikipedia admin discussion: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia…
"Effective Altruism is mostly about giving money to Yudkowsky for the AI stuff"
"Yes but we can’t actually *say that out loud*"
what EAs admit among themselves, right there on Tumblr archive.ph/d9jxQ
Nov 16, 2022 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
The principals of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange were into Effective Altruism.
Let me explain what Effective Altruism is:
* Some charities are more effective than others, and you should donate to the more effective ones.
yeah, sounds obvious and sensible >>
>>
* As a first-worlder, you are basically rich, even if you don’t feel like it, and you therefore have an ethical obligation to contribute to those who aren’t - almost certainly more than you do now.
this is pretty sound reasoning actually, I can get behind this
>>
Nov 16, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
old person here: “queer” was a/the common and used word for like frickin’ ages, like decades, so expect us old people to keep using it
p much as a single syllable for membership in LGALPHABETSOUP
which is sort of a thing, even if it’s the most dysfunctional “community” >>
>> and a worse subculture cluster even if you like the idea of a lifetime of disco music
it’s a reclaimed slur, which presents difficulties in common usage. otoh LITERALLY ALL THE WORDS ARE SLURS and IF THEY'RE NOT THEY WILL BE SHORTLY, so. >>
Nov 16, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
You and I in a shitcoin shop
Buy a bag of coins with the ether we've got
Set them free at the break of dawn
'Til one by one, they were gone
At FTX, bugs in the software
Flash the message, "Something's out there!"
Floating in the summer sky
Ninety-nine dead shitcoins go by
Ninety-nine dead shitcoins
Floating in the blockchain sky
Panic bells, it's margin call!
There's nothing here from somewhere else!
The liquidator springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky
When ninety-nine dead shitcoins go by
Nov 15, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
ADVICE FOR RETAIL CRYPTO BUYERS:
After the Terra-Luna collapse in May, a string of big crypto bankruptcies hit ordinary investors hard: Celsius Network, Voyager Digital, FTX.
The bad news is that the money's just not there any more. Investors should expect pennies on the $. >>
>> The Celsius and FTX bankruptcies don't just show liabilities>assets - they show real liabilities but imaginary assets. Huge proportion of FTX assets are their own made-up FTT & Serum tokens, given a spurious value in the billions. Celsius did the same with CEL tokens. >>
Nov 12, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Thiel and Sacks sincerely thought they could use Musk to turn Twitter into Parler/Truth.social/Gettr by coming in as cuckoos. Change the rules, and the giant network behaves their way!!
this turns out not to have been reality based thinking.
lol.
davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/202…
there is no great scheme at Twitter. Musk, Thiel and Sacks are just being very stupid. Thiel is extremely smart and has a stupendous track record of blithering dumbassery. The last chapter of "Neoreaction a Basilisk" by @elsandifer is a catalogue of stupid Thiel tricks.
Nov 11, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
so, fun thing about FTX going ch11
if the US Trustee (part of the Treasury) thinks there might have been fraud then they can ask for an examiner to be appointed
and they always get that when they ask >>
>> compare celsius and voyager right now.
the voyager bankruptcy is just proceeding. they were hoping to sell themselves to FTX US, but lol. But if that had gone ahead, 72c/$ return to creditors, not the worst deal in the circumstances (screwed by 3AC), all fine. >>
Nov 11, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
it's a delight the degree to which the thing that REALLY infuriates the basement dwelling crypto degens is not that FTX set their money on fire, it's that they got laid like crazy in the process
FTX: giving slutting around a bad name since 2022
Nov 11, 2022 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
LessWrong Rationalists - the Roko's Basilisk people - are frickin morons, every one of them
Slate Star Codex is a bad writer who trains his readers to be incompetent
FTX was these guys. Effective Altruism/Longtermism is these guys. Dom Cummings is one of these guys.
this was an early example of the genius of the LessWrong Rationalists: rationalwiki.org/wiki/MetaMed Thankfully they went bust before they racked up a body count.
Nov 9, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
i get the feelling picking a mastodon server instance is *really important*
e.g. the journalist instance sounds obvious, but whoops! it got defederated
if there's a crypto instance then lol
anyone claiming the server doesn't matter means it doesn't matter *to them*
otoh mastodon has its immediate plus points lol
Sep 17, 2022 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
CUNTING FUCKING GOAT COCK PICCADILLY LINE AAAAAAAA so I missed my flight. Moved to tomorrow for a few quid, ALL IS FUCKING WELL and my panel is Monday IT'S FINE ALL FINE I'M FINE fuck
and yes I did apologise profusely to the superlatively helpful Air Canada lady after yelling FUCK to all of Terminal 2
Sep 15, 2022 • 29 tweets • 5 min read
being asked about Vitalik Buterin's essays on the fabulous future of society, powered by Ethereum
so it's not worth treating Buterin's essays as saying anything useful
ethereum is best understood as a tech startup that succeeded wildly and made a bundle for everyone involved
mostly joe lubin
vitalik is joe's front man, a magical boy wizard beyond mortal ken
Apr 17, 2022 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
A short history of @nbatopshot - an NFT project started just before the 2021 bitcoin bubble, by Dapper Labs, creators of CryptoKitties, and the National Basketball Association, the top league in US basketball.
@nbatopshot NBA Top Shot was conceived in 2019. The launch wasn't until late 2020. It rode on the bitcoin bubble of 2021 - but it also rode on the many other guys frantically promoting NFTs as art, e.g. Metakovan.
Apr 17, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
In penny stocks there is a barber showing photographs
Of every cut he's had the pleasure to know.
And all the people that come and go
Say "ICO"
On the corner is a banker with a blockychain,
And crypto children laugh at him behind his back.
And the banker never wears a MAC
In the bubble rain, very strange.
Penny stocks are in my ears and in my eyes.
There beneath apocalyptic skies
I sit, and meanwhile back
Mar 11, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
there's fucking idiots trying to argue again that cryptocurrency is very leftist akhully
this is nonsense.
crypto started in right-wing anarchocapitalism and so continued. this is historical fact.
anyone making this claim eventually resorts to claiming words don't mean things.
i beseech you: read a book.
eg. @dgolumbia's "The Politics Of Bitcoin" sets out the early history and the people involved.
satoshi's release notes for Bitcoin 0.1 include a central bankers rant straight out of 19th C Rothschild conspiracy theories
none of crypto is about technology. it's about people and the flows of cash. it needs finance journalism, not tech journalism.
if someone asks me what is a blockchain, i now start with "it's the promise that you can get rich for free"
the tech was always just a promotional meme
the tech of blockchain is utterly trivial, it can be explained and dismissed in a few sentences. never take the tech seriously.
it's financial engineering, not software engineering
the world's most collapsible bridges, civilisation's shittiest three-storey skyscrapers
Feb 9, 2022 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
thinking about the 2016 Bitfinex hack and the alleged money launderers, Morgan and Lichtenstein.
The DoJ hasn't charged them with the hack. But could they have done it?
I think ... *possibly*. 1/8
In 2016, Bitfinex kept customer funds segregated in their own multi-signature blockchain addresses. Access needed two of three keys held by Bitfinex, BitGo and the customer.
BitGo had built an API for Bitfinex to use - not public, only the two companies knew about it. 2/8
Jan 28, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
today's question: Are the BAYC actually neo-Nazi by intent, or just the product of broadly-accepted background levels of casually racist behaviour, especially in a space that's full of Pepe memes? 1/7
as someone who knows neo-Nazi dogwhistles, follows the anti-fascists who track this stuff in detail and has discussed the precise area of neo-Nazis and NFTs/BAYC with the researchers, I'm sort of inclined to suggest the second ... but not entirely not the first. 2/7
Jan 27, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
gov "secret" strategy to hand stablecoins to banks
summary: gov just hates crypto cos it's too beautiful, ok
(they've been shouting their opinions on stablecoins since 2019 Libra hearings)
this piece reads like a CoinDesk op-ed. that's not a compliment
archive.is/3rpXT
yes, the biden administration is not the trump administration. however, the opposition to Libra was bipartisan.
the key thrust is: these crypto morons *cannot* be allowed to fuck with the real economy. Libra showed the danger, and the bureaucracy didn't forget with the new admin
Jul 29, 2021 • 34 tweets • 5 min read
a Nano pumper demanded I listen to their promotional podcast. I said I'd do it for $50/hr in advance. They offered me a pile of their Nano-branded digital cat turds, and are now performatively *outraged* that I won't accept digital cat turds as being dollars.
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