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iang Profile picture
iang
@iang_fc
fighting for the user, issuing her assets since 1995. Assets are soft, users are hard. The issue isn't the asset, the asset is you.
May 3 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
@bpreneel1 This is playing out much the same as the Crypto Wars in the 1990s. The concern was never police issues & police privately acknowledged that. The concern was from *intelligence community* which wanted access to all the world's traffic.

The child-abuse meme was convenient... @bpreneel1 to their cause, as it could not be logically denied - who would be against protecting our children? To push their agenda, they dressed up the chief policeman Louie Freeh, then director of FBI, and fought a long war with the Internet, libertarian and privacy communities.
Mar 15 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Back in the mid 2010s, there were a bunch of us literally meeting Satoshi. I thought long & hard about what & why. Eventually I came up with Prometheus' goals:

1. preserve the legend
2. protect the people
3. get them back to work

It was the 1st that didn't ring well. The legend of Satoshi was an amazing thing, a modern day, technophiliac version of Robin Hood, King Arthur, St George. Surely it should be preserved? Grown? Protected?

But even as I was thinking that, we didn't act for that - quite the reverse.
Mar 6, 2023 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
A story of hacking. Back in the day, I hacked the uni computer. This was in like '81 when we had a brand spanking new VAX780 and the admins had copied Sydney Uni’s port of Unix System V onto it. Somehow, we knew they had not got around to upgrading the part about ... 1/12 the 8 character password as standardly delivered in Unix System V then. Our guys were better and knew a 32 character password was needed.

So I and my autist-criminal mates spent 2 weeks every day going to our friendly sysadm and asking all sorts of arcane requests...
2/12
Mar 4, 2023 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
two opposing views - first up a stellar insider's account of the West/Washington political lead up to invasion:

'Something Was Badly Wrong': When Washington Realized Russia Was Actually Invading Ukraine

politico.com/news/magazine/… Politico's story is one of bravado and awe - how Washington tried to save the day! But then the counterpoint:

One Year Later in Ukraine: Washington and NATO Got It Very Wrong

mises.org/wire/one-year-…

So what's the truth? Possibly somewhere in between.
Feb 3, 2023 • 18 tweets • 7 min read
@caitoz I have no link to the thread. But the whole thing was about interference with the democracy / election of the USA. So to recap quickly:

There is one agent that is the #1 interferer in elections/democracies world wide. It's the CIA. It's ahead by leaps & bounds... @caitoz ahead of anyone else. Sorry, the Russians don't even enter the game - the CIA has interfered with more elections/democracies than years of its existence. Ie, more than 1 per year. This is documented, you just have to push past your biases and censorship to find it.
Jan 5, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Putin has unilaterally called a ceasefire from midday Saturday to midnight Sunday - for the Orthodox Christmas.

zerohedge.com/geopolitical/r…

Response was vicious: Ukraine called it hypocrisy, a trap, propaganda. Germany said inauthentic. US said cynical ploy. But Biden wins:

"He was ready to bomb hospitals and nurseries and church’s on the 25th and New Years — I mean, I think he’s trying to find some oxygen," Biden added.

Either he's having a senior moment or he's continuing the Crusades to impose One True Catholicism on all pagans.
Jan 4, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
💥 Boom! We in the cryptography community know how this works because we fought the crypto wars.

It goes like this:

1. Campaign is launched: cryptography is used by terrorist, pedophiles, bad people.
2. Cryptography must be tightly regulated by government.
3. the People are screwed.
Dec 28, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
You're occasional reminder that there is one country that isn't part of the sanctions:

Ukraine to hike transit fees for Russian oil to EU – Transneft

Kiev cited the destruction of the country’s energy infrastructure as the main reason behind the decision That Russian site is censored, as clearly we don't want Europeans to know that Ukraine is shipping Russian hydrocarbons.
Dec 27, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Ha - this is excellent, I would have used this in the IEEE event in Alexandria last week. Bullet points:

* Many other views of Intelligence

* Mensa, IQ tests, Emotional Quotients

* University examinations, games, … Leading on to the real question which was... the view of the observer, especially the close observer, and who closer to you than your parents?

Do your parents think you intelligent? And how do they know....
Dec 27, 2022 • 38 tweets • 9 min read
I like this article, it calls BS on the BSers. In a can-do world, it is refreshing to hear someone stand up and say, that's BS.

And we can't ever solve serious problems until people stop BSing themselves over it. Let's call BS on more things. Today, I call BS on governance. So does @AndrewYang but let me be more specific.

Consider blockchain v. regulators, a case in multiple courts. It's really about governance. To which the the regulators have one answer - blockchain must be regulated.
Nov 12, 2022 • 20 tweets • 5 min read
Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried: ‘I got involved with no clue what a blockchain was’

The FTX founder on hype, the problem with bitcoin and how crypto can build a fairer financial system

ft.com/content/83bc68… "Bankman-Fried studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before taking a job at Jane Street, the trading firm."

SBF was a trader! Now, this explains a lot. Traders are what are known as front-office. So he knew arbitrage. And from that came Alameda.
Nov 10, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Tether comes out with a fresh attestation from BDO.

1. Their reserves exceed their liabilities.
2. They are (now?) profitable, probably bc interest rates ⤴️
3. They have switched out of around 50% commercial paper (CP) and into around 50% treasury bills.

(Allegedly!) This represents a substantial win for Tether.

2 years back their rep was in the toilet after repeated bashings by the political NYAG and a mob of haters. A cloud hung over their CP - who was it with? Evergrande? China? Nobody knew.

I argued that they should be given time.
Nov 10, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Thinking back 2 decades or more to the gold era - when eGold and Goldmoney battled it out - communication did work better. Both of the major players, and most of the smaller ones adopted my model of governance (5PM) and did not collapse for those reasons. You can read about the five parties model here: financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/00…

It was a simpler time back then as we were only dealing with one asset. And the people involved although tempted were presumptively honest and cautious.
Nov 5, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The absolute biggest story last month was Biden's chip blockade. Banning USA companies and people from doing anything to do with Chinese chip making.

Up until now, all sanctions were mild or narrow and had a fig leaf of rationale to them. Eg natsec for Huwai telco gear. This chip blockade had no figleaf. It was not narrow. It was not mild.

(Actually, the US did provide it with a figleaf but that fell off before it reached the press... they should have saved it for another day.)

Chips are needed for everything, these days. All machines are...
Oct 26, 2022 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
Facebook Libra was an example of not learning from history. A couple of anecdotes.

1. Back in around 1995, Bill Gates surprised the world when he said that Microsoft would deliver a digital cash in Windows. He was quoted as saying Microsoft was only interested in taking ... half a cent from each transaction. Well, a back of the envelope calculation on Windows users (then, basically all of the world) multiplied by all the transactions multiplied by half a cent added up to be ... a whole lotta dosh!

The banking world went wild. Obv they picked up...
Oct 23, 2022 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
Russians may be withdrawing from north of Dnipro to defendable ground south of the river. This makes a lot of sense militarily.

BUT, as @WarintheFuture suggests, withdrawal is a hard phase of war to conduct, especially when harried by an advancing enemy. Few armies have done it. See my earlier tweets about water - this is as much about protecting the water supply to Crimea as it is to protect the approaches to Crimea itself. Which is to say it's strategic- must be defended or all sorts of problems will occur. Unlike Kharkiv.

Sep 20, 2022 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
War in Ukraine: the big picture is that the odds of Russia losing this war have increased a lot. As I wrote b4, it is all about who cracks first - now Ukraine is sitting more strongly. In more depth: 1. Ukraine managed to build a big reserve, train/equip it for combined arms operations- WWII blitzkrieg style. It ofc did this with NATO training, NATO weapons, NATO planning, NATO intel, NATO everything except troops, altho nobody be surprised when/if embedded NATO are found.
Jun 16, 2022 • 32 tweets • 6 min read
Recap on the New World War

Summary of where I see the Ukraine war. Tl;dr - it’s bad for Ukraine. Don’t read if you’re a fan.

1. Russia continues to make gains in Donbas, crunching its way forward with artillery that is estimated at 7 to 1 or more. It’s not running out of ammo. 2. Zelensky says there are 1-2 million men to come to the front, but those men are (approximately) untrained. It takes a year to train a soldier, which you can compress anyway you like, at the expense of effectiveness and casualties.
Jun 16, 2022 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
The Basics of Decentralized Identity

techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/identity-st…

As many might have asked, is the new DID based “digital identity” something actually new or just the Emperor in New Clothes? This article is basic enough to explain what it is, at least. In short, it’s (a) a method for a self-signed certificate, (b) a method for a standard Alice says of Bob something X, and (c) a way for someone to prove that a person presenting (b) is one of the parties.

So basically it’s PGP’s WoT idea but expanded for anyone’s tech.
Apr 28, 2022 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
As we’ve been writing for 2 years now, FATF has had the knife in for crypto. They want all wallets identified and traced. Which has consequences that endanger crypto as an independent means.

In particular it creates a honeypot of your personal information in any place you touch. The FATF has shown itself to be profoundly ineffective at AML - and we have the evidence that suggests AML risks are far lower in crypto than in the rest of the financial system (tip: it was always traceable).

But in contrast to their ineffectiveness at AML, FATF are...
Mar 28, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
So, note the pattern.

IRS went to USA congress and asked for filing at $600.

Republicans said “are you crazy?” and lifted it to $10k.

That might strike you as a victory, but it was an utter defeat.

Let me explain. Firstly, it’s the oldest trick in the book: ask for a price you know you wan’t get, and be bargained up to "something reasonable.” Ofc $10k was acceptable, but note that they didn’t ask for that.

2. The number can be changed any time. And will be; every crisis is an opportunity.

3. It’s in aggregate - $10k over a year.