Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this week's Flagship Friday! We do apologize for last week's absence but Brent had to scramble off to NY and Karim and Adam just couldn't figure out a recording time. Lovely lads.
Anyway, enough about our inability to function - today we're looking at topics like Brave 1.0 and the Samsung Blockchain being released, Bitcoin's all time highs going under investigation, scams galore (who would've thought?) and much, much more. Bonus: we don't talk about Libra OR Craig Wright. This is truly an exceptional episode.
Dive into the cryptoverse with us on this week's Flagship Friday.
Rapid Fire
Brave 1.0 has been releasedIphone and Ipad users now have full access to Brave 1.0 which now gives access to Brave Rewards, Brave Ads, and Brave Shields.Previously in beta, Brave has 8.7 monthly active users and 300k verified publishers already.
Ledger Vault secures $150 mil Crime Insurance PolicyLedger Vault, the custody are of hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger has developed a crime insurance policy with broker and risk advisory firm, Marsh and insurance company, Arch Insurance UnlimitedLedger now provides a crime insurance program and protects against third-party theft of the master seed and private keys—even insider theft caused my collusion
Iran Offering Bounties For Illicit Mining OperationsPreviously reported, Iran is a hot spot for crypto mining with low costs per kilowatt per hour. The Iranian government had to slap a tariff to stop exporting electricity.Now they are offering bounties for up to 20% of damages to anyone who reports illegal mining operations within the country.
Coinbase has announced new confirmation requirements.Basically your transactions will get faster for most coins they changed. BTC cut in half, Zcash cut 33%, ETC cut about 40%ish (But still a ton of confirmations)LTC has doubled.
Pornhub models were all blocked from using Paypal and had to switch their payout methods. (Use Case)
John Mcafee Launches WHACKD — An Epstein didn't kill himself cryptoIt will be launched on
McafeeDex.com, his own exchange lol.
Was BTC manipulated to reach its historic highs? -K
Peer-reviewed study "Is Bitcoin Really Untethered) by UTexas John Griffin, and Ohio state U Amin ShamsBitfinex appears to have massively manipulated the price of Bitcoin in 2017"By mapping the blockchains of Bitcoin and Tether, we are able to establish that one large player on Bitfinex uses Tether to purchase large amounts of Bitcoin when prices are falling and following the printing of Tether."One player associated with more than half of the USDT/BTC exchangeOne of the authors' main hypotheses posited that Bitfinex creates Tether regardless of demand from cash investors. As such, any "additional supply of Tether can create an inflation in price of BitcoinBitfinex of course denied, said paper lacked academic rigor "updates or not"Coin telegraph has a
counter articleCircle CEO tweeted response“Exchanges use omni-bus wallets that pool all customer balances and transactions on and off the exchange. So an analysis that shows that ‘a single wallet’ was involved in flows from Bitfinex to other exchanges is meaningless. All it shows is that traders were trading,”People saying all markets are manipulated, which fair. But tether not really addressed imo
History of Bitfinex and Tether (black brant shoutout) highlights2016 Bitfinex loses 120k btc ($70m), becomes insolvent, just takes 36% from everyone, and they got BFX token, tracking $ denominated losesNot Coinbase after threatning to sue allegedlyBFX tanks, Bitfinex offers to redeem for equity in the company, conveniently at $1 per share. Then they repurchased them at $1They were banking through Taiwan, those banks dont have access to US financial systemSo they were using Wells Fargo as intermediaryWells Fargo announced they would no longer clear USD wires to/from BitfinexBitfnx sues, unsuccessfully.When they lost banking, there were $55m Tether, now $4bThey finally got accepted by Noble Bank in PRTurns out board didnt want them, worried about Bitfinex ruining relationship with BNY Mellon, a holding bank for banks outside US (inside system). Would kill themBut Tether lead a $2m Series A investment in NobleTether deposits hundreds of millions, people figure out who and why, kills Noble Bank, they move to Deltec BankSo bitfinex was using a company called CryptoCapital CorpAppears to be a money laundering operationbasically identified banks with poor compliance controls, opened account pretending to be in real estate, then shuffled money until they got shut down and repeatcustomer would want to deposit money with Bitfinex, they would contact Crypto Capital Corp, who would give them the name, account number, and bank of a shell corporation (with names like “Global Trade Solutions A.G.”), with instructions to wire the shell corporation money with a lie designed to not rouse suspicion from their banks.Reginald Fowler, CCC's principal architext, was skimming 10% of all the depositsDude invested $25m on Alliance of American Football, which crashedIn court Bitfinex claims they thought CCC made money of interest (because they barely charged for service)Then in 2018 regulators froze some of the shell corporation bank accounts and liquidity crisis ensuedAccuses them of using Bitfinex deposits to slowly rebalance that gap ($2.1b on hand is 74% of outstandingFowler has been arrested in the US. Ivan Manuel Molina (President) extradited from Greece to Poland on suspicion of money laundering for drug cartels
Samsung block chain has officially launched. - BFirst I really like their video.Second they're releasing a SDK, which is a Software Development Kit. It makes it easier for companies to build their assets on the chain.The Samsung ecosystem for DApps is supporting ETH.Your Keystore Wallet CAN use BTC as well.This is still in the Samsung Store, not Google PlayFrom the YT Video's Top commentsJesus christ i dont understand a single comment on this videoNow i know how my grandparents feel when i talk about technology.😆The video says NO MIDDLEMAN!! The video also introduce a new middleman his name??.....SAMSUNG I'm confused already🙂Also funny - the video might spoil the next note. It shows a phone with a camera completely embedded in the screen .
$24 million worth of bitcoin in a SIM swap attack - KThis according to a WSJ reportMichael Terpin, hit on Jan 7, 20181500 BTC stolen near peak, here's howThey took control of phone number and used forgot psswd to get email accessThey hacked his wallet, and immediately moved and sold tokens"Once a hacker can breach a user's email account, they can scour for proof of asset holdings and subsequently target trading apps, bank accounts, and crypto wallets."Dude was hit with a SIM swap 7 months earlier!He added additional security with AT&T, like asking for 6 digit pin to make changesHe also switched from text authentication to Google authenticationHe kept a portion of his virtual cash in a digital vault called a “native wallet,” which required a string of 12 random words to unlock.The hackers were able to cobble the code together once they hijacked his phone and wormed into his emailApparently a lot of young kids, one was a valedictorian, got caught cuz one police department showed interestTerpin suing AT&T for 224m (200 punitive) for negligence, trying to get them to change thisATT tried to dismiss but a July judge ruled suit can move forwardRandom,
turns out someone else is suing ATT for the same thingCalifornia Blockchain Entrepeneur Seth Shapiroalleging that a couple of the firm’s employees had perpetrated a nefarious SIM-swap scheme that resulted in the former losing $1.8 millionalleged that he is currently in possession of chat logs that clearly show the AT&T employees and hackers discussing their plans to use the stolen funds to acquire their dream cars and other valuable objectsThis guy had also asked ATT to prioritize his call and account because he was high risk
Someone is fucking with EOS -BThere's a token called EIDOS that's massively clogging up the EOS network.It seems intentional, and done to prove a point.They have a twitter account - @enumivo Their handle is "Soon - something out of nothing" lol.The whole point of the airdrop is to do maximum transactions. Size doesn't matter.Moving EOS around mines you tokens for the coin.Current block producers don't seem to care.THAT'S A SCAM
Be careful what you wish for: the first Cardano copycat emergesFunny title because Hoskinson joked about making it when we saw Cardano Cash and Cardano visionCardano Gold emerges, scamfrequent spelling mistakes and number errors on the project’s homepage"as seen in...." bestcoins, coinhills, foxico, olink..... all fake lolLists advisor, who says hes unaffiliated
CEO of South Korean exchange, CoinUp, receives 16 years in prisonMr. Kang-Mo defrauded investors out of 450 billion won ($384 million)Him, alongside a slew of other execs are receiving varying sentences with the lowest being 6 years in prison.They promised CoinUp customers up to 200% returns on crypto purchased just 4-10 weeks after purchase.They shilled projects that had a very small chance of increasing in value.At one point Mr. Kang-Mo photoshopped a pic of him next to Moon Jae-In that was then displayed in CoinUp offices presumably to mislead potential investors. LOL1930777613_7j3Wq6Ce_rrrrr.jpgRantsFunny story, one of the ways we get stories is sort by top on reddit for week. I misclicked year.Reddit User posts his portfolio from the ICO craze
Electrify.Asia: -95%Oyster Pearl: -99.96%Swarm City Token: -98.11%ZCash: -93%OMG: -93%Request: -93%Storj: -91%Kin: -98%FunFair: -94%Polymath: -98%Bitcoin Gold: -97%TenX: -98%Raiden Network: -96%Synero AMP: -99.6%Power Ledger: -95%Viuly: -99.6%Garlicoin: -94% (Invested 26k holyshit)Iconomi: -94%Augur: -86%Digix Dao: -93%Breaker: -96%
Coinmine Red Flag - they are now offering 6.5% APR On holding mined funds in their wallet.
