Following the demands from the FDIC for FTX to cease making misleading statements about FDIC insurance, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried took to Twitter to undertake crisis management. SBF stated that the message was "getting garbled" regarding actions taken by FTX to distance itself from protocols that may not comply with U.S. sanctions. To be...
FTX has allegedly warned users against interacting with high-risk services as complaints surfaced that the exchange is blocking accounts that interacted with zk money on the Aztec network. Chinese journalist Colin Wu reported Aug. 19 that a user's account was frozen for making a transfer to his zk money account....
Policy Advisor Patrick Hansen posted his thoughts on the regulatory risk now facing the Bitcoin Lightning Network following sanctions against crypto mixer Tornado Cash. U.S. authorities added Tornado Cash to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions list on...
TRMIn the wake of dusting attacks following the Tornado Cash sanction, TRM Labs issued a statement clarifying how DeFi platforms leverage its data to block affected wallet addresses. DeFi protocol Aave said on August 14...
In a recent Twitter poll on Ethereum censorship, Vitalik Buterin revealed that he voted to punish validators complying with censorship requests by burning their staked tokens. Ethereum co-founder champions censorship-resistant approach The poll was held by software engineer Eric Wall, who asked the Ethereum...
Aave has confirmed that the ban list provided by TRM Labs included Ethereum wallets that had been "dusted" with 0.1 ETH through Tornado Cash. The falsely flagged wallet addresses have now been removed from the "sanctioned" addresses and are again able to connect to the Aave front-end. The ban issued by Aave only stopped users from interacting with its IPFS-hosted web interface...
CryptoSlate spoke exclusively with a member of the Tornado Cash team who has been granted anonymity for their own protection and will be referred to as "TC Member" for the sake of this article. The Tornado Cash contributor told CryptoSlate's Akiba that "multi-sigs shut down the DAO… we're all out. Better safe than sorry, unless it all calms down a bit." Tornado Cash...
Several decentralized applications on the Ethereum network have implemented code changes to revoke access from "sanctioned" addresses. The currently identified protocols are Aave, Uniswap, Ren, Oasis, and balancer. Banteg from Yearn identified the GitHub repositories in question via a Tweet early Saturday morning. when defi apps started snitching on...
Bitcoin’s prolonged stability and global adoption are not only beneficial, but necessary for free societies to thrive.This article was inspired by Max Gagliardi’s thread on Twitter. The Bitcoin community is one of the most passionate, idealistic and driven groups of people on the internet. Besides a...
Exploring how Bitcoin’s non-confiscatable nature will introduce a paradigm shift in dispute resolution and the civil justice system.Conflict is part of human nature. Civilizations are defined by how they resolve disputes. Hamurabi’s code was notorious for its merciless application of “an eye for an eye.” Autocrats from King Solomon to James I meted out rough justice in royal courts, often arbitrarily, and...
As centralized platforms like YouTube block Russian civilians from monetizing their work, the need for Bitcoin grows.Who should have the right to deny another the capability to earn an income? Law enforcement? A government? Where is the line, and how do we determine when things have been taken “too far”?Should any individual, or group of individuals, actually possess such power? YouTube,...
Many governments are purposefully or accidentally introducing their citizens to Bitcoin and sovereign theory through their decisions.Part One: The Barbara Streisand Effect If you haven’t explored the California Coastal Records Project (resource), you should. The website hosts nearly half a terabyte of images, approximately 100,000 in all, which include,...
zkSNACKs, the company behind the privacy-focused Wasabi Wallet, explained its decision to censor certain Bitcoin UTXOs from using its CoinJoin service.Privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet Wasabi Wallet announced on Sunday it would start preventing certain unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) from joining its CoinJoin rounds, sparking...
The rivalry between Wasabi and Samourai wallets rages on. That shouldn’t be the headline, though. This story is about privacy, censorship, and regulatory pressure. It all started with Wasabi’s simple announcement, “The zkSNACKs coordinator will start refusing certain UTXOs from registering to coinjoins.” Translation: the company that runs the centralized coordinator that organizes CoinJoin transactions will not let tainted...
The founder of Bitcoin-based social media network Zion discusses censorship, Lightning nodes and the creator economy.Recently, I spoke with Justin Rezvani, the founder of Zion, a decentralized, open-source, utility-based social media protocol that is built on top of Bitcoin.The conversation focused primarily around why Zion is necessary, rather than what Zion is, and I found that to be telling about the...
MetaMask has blocked users from certain jurisdictions from accessing its services and interacting with Ethereum. Users from Venezuela and Iran have begun reporting problems with accessing their digital wallets earlier today, with hundreds of users saying none of their transactions sent through MetaMask were realized. First instances of bans were noticed on OpenSea,...
As Western powers attempt to stifle free speech and protest, Bitcoin may be our only hope to incentivize cooperation.The below is a direct excerpt of Marty's Bent Issue #1165: "Censorship, microwaves and warmongering." Sign up for the newsletter here....
With Canada's "Freedom Convoy" of truckers successfully blocking commerce, officials are taking stronger measures to censor bitcoin donations.The below is a direct excerpt of Marty's Bent Issue #1163: "If at first you don't succeed label peaceful protestors 'terrorists' and forcibly take their money."...
The Bitcoin For Truckers campaign made it on Tucker Carlson Tonight, the controversial and conservative TV host’s show on Fox News. The most important thing, though, it’s that Bitcoin’s value proposition shined bright in the mere center of his speech. Say what you will about Tucker Carlson, but this is the kind of advertising money can’t buy. Related Reading |...
In a document made public earlier this month the European Commission published a call-for-proposal for a European government controlled DNS resolver service. The reasoning behind the proposal is to protect the privacy of end-users and keep them secure by applying filtering functions to block malware, phishing and other cyber...
News