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.

one piece of analysis i haven’t seen on ct yet surrounding the xrp pump is

”is asia driving this?”

if anyone remembers e.g. xrp mania was always driven by south korea whose population always went crazy for this coin for some reason

a cursory view suggest it might be (upbit): compare this imbalance to other exchanges. can’t find any other exchange of similar size that has volume so heavily skewed toward xrp pairs

(could be a result of % of retail vs institutional on the exchange—i’m a bit rusty doing these analyses these days)

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: leike resignment thread:

https://twitter.com/janleike/status/1791498174659715494

2024 predictions: 1. Bitcoin hits a new all-time high.

Time to review my 2023 predictions. As usual, it'll be most interesting to see what I was wildly wrong about, and why.

(and if I'll beat my score from last year which was 21.5/30)

https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1609798030814748672

Right.

https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1609798033482436609

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.

ok non-trolly pulsechain take:
- it’s stupid as hell but it’s not a rug
- it’s unapologetically one of the most enthusiastic defi communities
- 200 projects build on it without any grants
- end of day it’s an EVM chain like any other but with a strong community of supporters - yes it raised a gross amount of money and delivered a product that is technically equivalent of what you can buy on fiverr for $50-100k
- yes it’s a pos chain with 90%+ of the stake controlled by 1 guy so the whole thing basically has an admin key

Time is a flat circle / everything old shall be new again

Pt. 1 Time is a flat circle / everything old shall be new again

Pt. 2

PulseChain raised $1 billion dollars to ”reduce Ethereum fees” by copying Ethereum without the Layer 2s. Launch day:

TL;DR:
- an unknown bug causes ethereum to stop finalizing blocks
- ”finalization” is like a big confirm, takes 13 min. small confirms work fine in the meantime
- some people say ”ethereum froze”
- some people get mad because small confirms were still working - some people say ”omg all validators were closed to get slashed 😱😱😱”
- these people are wrong because ethereum’s consensus algo doesn’t just insta-slash everyone when there is a finalization issue
- what happens is that the non-attesting validators start to lose tiny amounts

3 years have passed. Result:

Lightning: $45 million/month
Liquid: ~0
Ethereum: $18 billion/month

https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1259887003027607554

How I came to this conclusion:

Lightning (heuristic): From the Arcane State of Lightning Vol 2 report, the response between channel capacity increase and payment volume +% could be interpreted as quadratic. Vol was $20m, the capacity is up 50% since. $20m*(1.5)^2 = $45m.

Ok real talk

90% of Lightning laser-eye maxis on Nostr use centralized, custodial solutions

90% of Magicians trading ordinal inscriptions use non-custodial trustless PSBT atomic swaps IOU Bitcoin = fiat

The laser-eye maxis are the shitcoiners.

you may not believe it but the reason you have to pay $10 to transact on the bitcoin blockchain now is because @rot13maxi inscribed this 360kb picture of donald trump for $20 on january 28th have you ever asked yourself what exactly happened on january 29th that caused the ordinals trend to go parabolic?

I'm a cyber hornet, serving the goddess of satire, feasting on the nectar of wit, exponentially growing ever snarkier, quicker, and more cunning behind a veil of polished mockery. I'm a cyber hornet, serving the goddess of banter, savoring the ambrosia of sass, exponentially growing ever more caustic, swift, and shrewd behind a facade of cultivated irony.

don’t mind me just posting a video where @PrestonPysh interviews @saylor talking about how ASICs getting better means they consume less energy

imagine trying to clown ”fake experts” while delivering a sub-2 IQ yourself, holy shit (rt’d by Preston *today*)
like i can understand if you erronously thought this was a good clip when you recorded it last year and then someone told you it was the most retarded take on mining they ever heard and you learned from it

but wtf are you doing retweeting this garbage now??

One of the boring things with growing up is that at some point you have to stop caring about what the most "decentralized" solution is and instead ask "what's the most decentralized solution I can get into the hands of a significant amount of people?" When I was younger, I asked only the first question, and therefore I was convinced that the future of crypto payments are the Lightning Network.

Inbound capacity, payments UX, things like that would sort itself out. Finding solutions is what engineers do.

You’re a wizard, Greg Fuck you Hagrid arbitrary data was always possible on the blockchain

In the depths of the bear market, it is unavoidable that you will eventually ask yourself:

”Wait. What the fuck does this industry even produce? Did we just move some imaginary numbers around? Yes, yes decentralized currency, DAOs blabla, but what real is there to touch?” That’s understandable. It is good that you ask yourself this. Sometimes we forget to ask it, so make sure you answer it now.

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.

how it started how it’s going (reflink shilling) after blocking about 100k of twitter accounts on CT that point out his BS, he can now freely shill reflinks to the remaining 1.8m noobs who follow him

🤝

Hello everyone!

It’s Sunday again. Welcome back to Bitcoin Sunday School Part 2!

Today we’re going to go one level deeper into Rainbow Math with the illustrious economist Dr. Saifedean Ammous and actually make some real-world predictions! Hope you brought your notebook! 🧵 This thread follows from last week’s class, so if you haven’t read that one, please go and finish your homework!

https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1541021866541850626