Episode 200 - Hong Kong, Yang Gang, and Scams galore.

FLAGSHIP FRIDAY (8/23/19)

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• Rapid Fire
  • Pro Crypto Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne resigns. 
  • Banano has released their whitepaper, and I'm pissed it's not called a Yellow Paper. Holy shit I clicked on it and it's a yellow paper. Pepe is on the cover. Omg it's animated lol
  • Horizon State (HST) Folds - maybe we should have a that's a scam rapid fire?
  • Lumiflux and his Dust Attack
    • Someone on reddit posted a reminder that this would not work on Monero.

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• (2020 Presidential candidate Andrew Yang is in favor of blockchain voting) - K

  • Running on Dem ticket, outsider type

  • On his site in his policies he has "modernize voting" section

    • With current tech we shouldn't have to wait in line at polling stations
    • Machines being used are just as vulnerable to tampering/hacking
    • "Americans should be able to vote via their mobile device, with verification done via blockchain. This would dramatically increase participation in all elections, whether local, state or federal."
    • "It is 100% technically possible to have fraud-proof voting on our mobile phones today using the blockchain."

    Modernize Voting - Andrew Yang for President

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CRYPTO AROUND THE WORLD

• Bitcoin & The Hong Kong Protests - K

  • Going into 11th weekend of protests, 1.7m people marching (about 25%)

  • One of the Crypto ATM providers, Genesis block, giving out water bottles and umbrellas

    • Funded by international BTC donations

    • Bottles themselves have QR code to donate more btc to fund more supplies (rant)

      

    • Overall ATM providers say they see a decrease in volume (about 10%) and premium price in HK dollars

• Ukrainian Power Plant Officials Accused of Unauthorised Cryptocurrency Mining - K
  • There is definitely a demand for cheap power, operations setting up in
    • SBU discovered cryptocurrency mining operations at one of the country's nuclear plants
      • alleges that the internet connection installed to facilitate the mining operation posed a significant security risk
      • local court said confidential data about the plant’s operation has also been leaked online.
    • Iceland, thanks to its near-endless geothermal energy
    • Canada - Hydroelectricity
    • Iran - Subsidized energy
  • So the people working at the plant saw a chance to pay no power costs
  • Saw this in Venezuela as well since government subsidizes power
  • A miner in China serving 3.5yrs for stealing energy from a train network for a 50 rig set up (rental near train lines)

• Moscow's blockchain voting system cracked a month before election - K

  • French security researcher, Pierrick Gaudry, has found a critical vulnerability in the blockchain-based voting system
  • Officials planned on using it for the elections...next month

  • Gaudry figured how to derive private keys from public keys

    • He basically said its because they used a method which uses encryption key sizes that were too small to be secure.

    • Dude's Quote

      It can be broken in about 20 minutes using a standard personal computer, and using only free software that is publicly available

    • We dont know exactly what he could do with the private keys, protocols not in English yet.

    • "In the worst case scenario, the votes of all the voters using this system would be revealed to anyone as soon as they cast their vote."
  • TBF - This was thanks to officials posting it on Github and asking researchers to attack
    • Moscow officials agree key is too small, that it was only for trial period. They said they would go from 256 bits to 1024
    • Gaudry thinks they need 2048
    • And Gaudry will get $15k (1m Ruble)

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THAT'S A SCAM

• Long Story of a Scam - Reddit - B
  • Guy under the username Montana02115 named Dean starts it.
  • User reporting is IdkWutImTalkingAbout
  • Asks him about some project called NKN.
  • Dude says he works with a team that handles private sales of equity for IEOs etc and invites the guy to his Team Speak.
  • Gets welcomed to the research team.
  • Sends a SAFT for a token called Perlin -
    • WTF is a SAFT? Well it stands for Simple Agreement for Future Tokens. This is basically a pinky promise to deliver tokens when something is operational. Since it's "later" it skirts the acredited investor rule.
  • They then ask people what they want to contribute. The people really do send ETH transactions, and are either also scammed or in on it. First one is for 1100 ETH.
  • That's the only transaction he saw, and they said they'd collected 11K ETH so far, so this guy sends 10 ETH, all of his money, and he gets sent a Perlin token. Well it looks like it's a fake token that's been created to LOOK like Perlin.
  • The token even was being held in a Binance wallet, but of course whoever made it could have sent it there.
  • Perlin hasn't had their token generation yet.
  • He brings that up and is instabanned from the group. Then he convinces them to let him back in, and they're doing another one for a token called Sovrin which also hasn't had a Token Gen. They scedule another sale, and he isn't there and gives some excuse.
  • Miraculously no one else is there either so they decide to have it the next day. That day when he said he was low on funds he got banned from the chat.
  • Reddit figured out who the guy was and he created his own subreddit called BinanceIEO
• List of scams - A

• Messari.io - B

  • I saw that Cardano joined the Messari Disclosures Registry so it piqued my interest.
  • They focus on transparency for these projects.
  • They also have their own market cap numbers
  • They have a methodolgy for prices and for supply numbers that is interesting.

  • They use - Maximum, Diluted to 2050, Outstanding, Liquid, Ciruculating