April 2022 - cypherpunks@lists.ogf.org

Crypto Long & Short: The Trouble With Ticker Symbols
by Gunnar Larson 29 Apr '22

29 Apr '22

Would the real USDP please stand up <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Tell_the_Truth#Basic_rules>? Last month, Paxos, the issuer of the seventh-largest <https://www.coingecko.com/en/stablecoins> stablecoin <https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/12/29/what-is-a-stablecoin/> in the $2 trillion global cryptocurrency market, renamed the token, previously called the Paxos standard, to the Paxos dollar. As part of the rebranding, the crypto exchange changed <https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/08/24/paxos-renames-standard-stableco…'> the ticker symbol from PAX to USDP. There was one hitch: Another stablecoin was already using the ticker. Unit Protocol, a decentralized lending platform that went live in February, had been calling its token USDP since at least July of last year, when it published a white paper <https://github.com/unitprotocol/protocol_docs/blob/master/unit_wp.pdf>. For a hot minute it seemed the plucky team was not about to let a bigger rival use the four-letter identifier without a fight. “We are currently disputing Paxos’ trademark application for USDP,” Benjamin Meredith, a representative for Unit Protocol, told CoinDesk on Aug. 27. To show that the original USDP was a known quantity in the market, Meredith pointed to blockchain data <https://etherscan.io/tx/0x381ec163ca4031a142a79e86f9218b3b2e6a56e591b5a1962…> indicating that 138 million units of the token had been minted, each worth just under $1. He also shared writeups on the market data sites CoinGecko <https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usdp> and CoinMarketCap <https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/usdp/> as further evidence this stablecoin was an established asset – even if the Paxos stablecoin’s market cap was 7.5 times larger. As of this writing, however, no formal objection was filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In a later email, Meredith said the Unit Protocol team decided to first talk to a Paxos executive. Still later, he said the call didn’t happen. “We’re just going to go along our merry way for the time being,” Meredith said. Paxos, for its part, seemed unwilling to budge when contacted by CoinDesk. “It’s common for projects to share tickers in the cryptocurrency space,” said Paxos spokesperson Becky McClain. “There are dozens of instances of shared qtickers or tickers that share letter strings, and we feel confident these uses are distinguishable and coexist without confusion for consumers.” She did not answer a follow-up question about whether Paxos checked if the ticker was already in use before choosing it. This anticlimactic tale highlights an issue that has come up a handful of times in crypto and may do so more often in the future as the industry grows. Without a standard for exchanges to assign identifiers, investors are apt to get confused. “Tickers are designed to make assets instantly recognizable to clients, so it’s important each ticker refers to a single asset,” said Kevin Beardsley, lead product manager for pro trading at the Kraken exchange. “However, two projects sometimes claim the same symbol, and the winner is mostly decided de facto by the community.” https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/09/05/crypto-long-short-the-trouble-w…

1 0

Fw: Mailman privacy alert
by zeynepaydogan 29 Apr '22

29 Apr '22

What's going on? I just got an email like that. anybody else get an email like that? ------- Original Message ------- <cypherpunks-bounces(a)lists.cpunks.org> wrote: > An attempt was made to subscribe your address to the mailing list > cypherpunks(a)lists.cpunks.org. You are already subscribed to this mailing list. > > Note that the list membership is not public, so it is possible that a bad > person was trying to probe the list for its membership. This would be a > privacy violation if we let them do this, but we didn't. > > If you submitted the subscription request and forgot that you were already > subscribed to the list, then you can ignore this message. If you suspect that > an attempt is being made to covertly discover whether you are a member of this > list, and you are worried about your privacy, then feel free to send a message > to the list administrator at cypherpunks-owner(a)lists.cpunks.org.

2 2

Wake The Fuck Up: Thread
by grarpamp 29 Apr '22

29 Apr '22

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7cecQsuHKA Another censored conversation Globalist power is coming for your freedom and that of people you care about and around you. All of the signs and pieces are being put together. Integrated arbitrary lightswitch control and worse. Fight back against power. Freedom depends on it. The day you fight back, is the day they start falling, and the day you start winning.

6 9

Another Raid of Deutsche Bank, Another Dead Whistleblower
by Gunnar Larson 29 Apr '22

29 Apr '22

Another Raid of Deutsche Bank, Another Dead Whistleblower <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/04/another-raid-of-deutsche-bank-anothe…> By Pam Martens and Russ Martens <https://wallstreetonparade.com/about-3/about/>: April 29, 2022 ~ [image: Deutsche Bank Headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany] <https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/deutsche-bank.jpg> Deutsche Bank Headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany The Financial Times is reporting this morning that “Germany’s federal police office, criminal prosecutors and the country’s financial watchdog BaFin are raiding Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt” this morning, according to a statement from prosecutors. The raid comes just four days after the body of Valentin (Val) Broeksmit, 46, was discovered at about 7 a.m. Monday at Woodrow Wilson High School in El Sereno, just outside of Los Angeles. Val Broeksmit was the son of William Broeksmit who was found hanged in his London home on January 26, 2014. The senior Boreksmit was a senior executive at Deutsche Bank involved in assessing risk on the bank’s balance sheet. (See our report: Documents Emerge in Senate Hearing from William Broeksmit, Deutsche Exec Alleged to Have Hanged Himself in January <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2014/07/documents-emerge-in-senate-hearing-f…> .) According to a profile of Val Broeksmit written by David Enrich <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/business/val-broeksmit-deutsche-bank-tru…> in the New York Times on October 1, 2019, the younger Broeksmit had obtained “a cache of confidential bank documents” left by his father that provided a “tantalizing” look into the internal workings of Deutsche Bank. Val Broeksmit was sharing the documents with the FBI. Enrich explains what was going on around Deutsche Bank at that time: “Federal and state authorities were swarming around Deutsche Bank. Some of the scrutiny centered on the lender’s two-decade relationship with President Trump and his family. Other areas of focus grew out of Deutsche Bank’s long history of criminal misconduct: manipulating markets, evading taxes, bribing foreign officials, violating international sanctions, defrauding customers, laundering money for Russian billionaires.” Russian billionaires are now back in the news <https://www.cnn.com/interactive/business/russian-oligarchs-yachts-real-esta…> and Donald Trump is being fined $10,000 per day <https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-10000-a-day-fine-ignoring-subpoena-…> for failure to turn over documents to the New York State Attorney General’s office. David Enrich had written an earlier piece in May of 2019 <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/business/deutsche-bank-trump-kushner.htm…> for the New York Times describing how a Deutsche Bank whistleblower, Tammy McFadden, and four of her colleagues, had their efforts blocked by the bank when they tried to file suspicious activity reports on bank accounts affiliated with Donald Trump and his son-in-law/advisor Jared Kushner. The suspicious activity reports (SARs) should have been filed with the Federal agency known as FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) but were quashed by a unit of the bank that manages money for the super wealthy. The coroner has not yet released a cause of death for the younger Broeksmit. His father’s death was ruled a suicide. The two Broeksmits are not the only individuals connected to Deutsche Bank to have turned up dead. On October 24, 2014 the body of Calogero Gambino, 41, was found by his wife hanging from a stairway banister in their Manhattan home. Gambino was a lawyer for Deutsche Bank who had been cooperating with U.S. regulators on Deutsche Bank’s involvement in the rigging of the interest rate benchmark, Libor. Nor is this the first time that Deutsche Bank’s headquarters have been raided. As we previously reported, on November 29, 2018, Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Germany were raided by 170 members of law enforcement. Prosecutors said at the time that “Deutsche Bank helped customers found offshore organizations in tax havens by transferring illegally acquired money without alerting authorities to suspected money laundering.” On September 24, 2019 the German police raided Deutsche Bank headquarters for the second time in less than a year. Deutsche Bank is a major derivatives counterparty to Wall Street’s mega banks. The Bank was having serious problems throughout 2019 and in the days before its trading unit, Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., began to secretly tap trillions of dollars in cumulative loans from the Fed’s repo loan bailout facility. Deutsche Bank’s attempt to merge with Commerzbank fell through in April 2019. It announced a plan to fire 18,000 workers <https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48901565> in July 2019 and had plans to create a good bank/bad bank, isolating off toxic assets that it planned to sell. Deutsche Bank had incurred losses in three of the prior four years. Its share price had lost 90 percent of its value over the prior dozen years and was trading close to an historic low in September 2019. The Monday after the emergency repo loan operations began, Deutsche Bank announced that it would be moving clients and staff from its prime broker unit (that makes loans to hedge funds) to BNP Paribas along with its electronic trading operations. Newly released documents from the Fed show that on September 17, 2019, the first day of the Fed’s emergency repo loan operations, Deutsche Bank borrowed $1.5 billion in a one-day loan. By September 24, Deutsche Bank had upped its one-day repo loans to $7 billion. By September 25, Deutsche Bank increased its one-day borrowing to $9 billion. On September 27, Deutsche Bank took a $3 billion 14-day term loan and rolled over $6 billion in a 3-day loan. Later documents released by the Fed show that Deutsche Bank borrowed a cumulative, term-adjusted total of $1.39 trillion from the Fed’s repo loan program in the fourth quarter of 2019 and another $1.24 trillion in the first quarter of 2020. The Fed will release data for the second quarter of 2020 on June 30 of this year. The Fed is releasing the information on a quarterly basis following a two-year lag. Deutsche Bank units were also secretly bailed out by the Fed during and after the 2008 financial crisis. According to an audit conducted by the Government Accountability Office, Deutsche Bank units borrowed a total of $354 billion in cumulative loans from the Fed’s bailout programs, with the bulk of that amount coming from the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) which ran from March 11, 2008 through February 1, 2010. As *Wall Street On Parade* has previously reported, Deutsche Bank has also acquired an unseemly history of fines for its illicit activities. Below is a sampling: April 23, 2015: Deutsche Bank pleads guilty <https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/apr/23/deutsche-bank-hit-by-recor…> to the U.S. Department of Justice for its role in rigging the benchmark interest rate known as Libor. It pays fines of $2.519 billion to various regulators. January 17, 2017: Deutsche Bank reaches a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice in which it agrees to pay $7.2 billion in fines and restitution for its improper “packaging, securitization, marketing, sale and issuance of residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) between 2006 and 2007.” January 30, 2017: Deutsche Bank is fined a total of $630 million <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-deutsche-mirrortrade-probe/deutsche-fine…> by U.S. and U.K. regulators over claims it laundered upwards of $10 billion on behalf of Russian investors. January 29, 2018: Deutsche Bank is ordered to pay $30 million <https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/7682-18> by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for manipulating trading in the precious metals market. November 8, 2019: Nomura and Deutsche Bank, along with numerous employees, were convicted <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-italy-montepaschi-verdict/italian-court-…> in a trial in Italy for helping the Tuscan bank, Monte dei Paschi di Siena, commit fraud in derivatives deals to help it hide losses. January 18, 2020: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission fines Deutsche Bank $10 million <https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8185-20> to settle two cases: one involving failure to properly report swap transactions and the other for spoofing. July 7, 2020: The New York State Department of Financial Services settles a state civil matter with Deutsche Bank for $150 million over its involvement with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. October 13, 2020: The Frankfurt, Germany Public Prosecutor’s Office fined Deutsche Bank €13.5 million for failing to submit Suspicious Activity Reports in a timely fashion regarding potential money laundering activities. January 8, 2021: The Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission settle charges against Deutsche Bank for $120 million <https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2021-3> for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The charges related to paying bribes to foreign officials to obtain business. Why the Fed continues to prop up a serial miscreant is a question that every concerned American should be asking their representatives in Congress. -- *Gunnar Larson - xNY.io <http://www.xNY.io> | Bank.org <http://Bank.org>* MSc <https://www.unic.ac.cy/blockchain/msc-digital-currency/?utm_source=Google&u…> - Digital Currency MBA <https://www.unic.ac.cy/business-administration-entrepreneurship-and-innovat…> - Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ip) G(a)xNY.io +1-646-454-9107 New York, New York 10001

1 0

Fw: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
by revevilgod＠gmx.com 29 Apr '22

29 Apr '22

> This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. > > A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of > its recipients. This is a permanent > The following address failed: > > owner(a)lists.cpunks.org: > SMTP error from remote server for RCPT TO command, host: mail.pglaf.org (65.50.255.19) reason: 550 5.1.1 <owner(a)lists.cpunks.org>: Recipient address rejected: Why? No owner ?

3 2

Popular crypto wallet discontinued after fatal flaw discovered
by jim bell 29 Apr '22

29 Apr '22

Popular crypto wallet discontinued after fatal flaw discovered https://www.techradar.com/news/a-vulnerability-in-this-popular-crypto-walle… https://share.newsbreak.com/yl4lzkpr

3 2

[spam][crazy][logs] Funny things computers can do
by Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many 29 Apr '22

29 Apr '22

My system right now gives a routing error trying to connect to port 3000, but connects to port 22 fine. I'm sure this is normal now, but it isn't something I'm used to. Routing errors are usually not given related to ports or processes connected via. $ curl -v [gently-censored-ip]:3000 * Trying 108.26.195.204:3000... * connect to 108.26.195.204 port 3000 failed: No route to host * Failed to connect to 108.26.195.204 port 3000: No route to host * Closing connection 0 curl: (7) Failed to connect to 108.26.195.204 port 3000: No route to host $ ssh user@[gently-censored-ip] Welcome to Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.4.0-109-generic x86_64) * Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com * Management: https://landscape.canonical.com * Support: https://ubuntu.com/advantage System information as of Fri 29 Apr 2022 05:59:42 AM EDT ...

1 5

Cryptocurrency: Banks and Politicians Will Always Fail at Policy
by grarpamp 29 Apr '22

29 Apr '22

Because they will always have low knowledge and are unnaturally meddling in natural market forces that are far greater than them... Oops! Our Bad! IMF Director Admits "We Printed Too Much Money" https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society https://schiffgold.com/commentaries/oops-our-bad-imf-director-admits-we-pri… Mostly we get lies, spin and obfuscation from central bankers, politicians and bureaucrats. But every once in a while, one of these people accidentally wanders into the truth. IMF Director Kristalina Georgieva did just that during a recent panel discussion hosted by CNBC. She conceded that central banks globally “printed too much money and didn’t think of unintended consequences.” I think we are not paying sufficient attention to the law of unintended consequences. We take decisions with an objective in mind and rarely think through what may happen that is not our objective. And then we wrestle with the impact of it. “Take any decision that is a massive decision, like the decision that we need to spend to support the economy. At that time, we did recognize that maybe too much money in circulation and too few goods, but didn’t really quite think through the consequence in a way that upfront would have informed better what we do.” How this economic brain trust missed failed to consider that injecting trillions into the economy would cause prices to rise is a bit of a head-scratcher. This is economics 101. Expanding the money supply pushes prices higher than they otherwise would be. I knew this would happen. Peter Schiff knew this would happen. Heck, you probably knew this would happen. But the people charged with running the global economy didn’t? These people are either wildly incompetent, or they are lying to you. Either way, they are “bad economists” as defined by Frédéric Bastiat. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference — the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee.” Good on Georgieva, I guess. They say admitting your problem is the first step on the road to recovery. So, you might think this confession is a step forward. But I assure you, it’s not. The ego, arrogance, and hubris that make these people think they can micromanage the global economy remain firmly in place. They just think they need to try a little bit harder. Although Georgieva admits a mistake, the rest of her comment reveals she hasn’t learned the lesson. We act sometimes like eight years old playing soccer. Here is the ball, we are all at the ball. And we don’t cover the rest of the field. “Our ability to deal with more than one crisis at one time is very, very limited. and we have to zero in on the really big things that could determine the future and keep our attention on them.” Basically, she’s saying, “Oops! Our bad! We messed up because we didn’t consider the unintended consequences. But we’re going to do better next time because our focus is going to be right on point.” Georgieva, Powell, Biden, LaGarde, and the whole lot of these central planners don’t understand that it is impossible for them to take into account all of the unintended consequences of a given policy prescription. That’s why central planning is always doomed to failure. Economist F.A. Hayek got to the root of the problem in his seminal paper, “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” In a nutshell, Hayek concluded that central planning will always fail because it is impossible for the central planners to possess all of the information necessary to factor in all of the ramifications of any given policy. The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” Or as FEE put it in its introduction to Hayek’s work: Hayek points out that sensibly allocating scarce resources requires knowledge dispersed among many people, with no individual or group of experts capable of acquiring it all.” Simply put, unintended consequences are inevitable in central planning. No matter how hard the central planner try, they are going to miss stuff. No matter how smart an individual or a group of individuals might be, they don’t have all of the knowledge they need. They can’t have it. It’s impossible. The problem is that people like Georgieva don’t understand this. They they their crew is smart enough, wise enough and that they care enough to get the job done. If the make a mistake, they just need to try harder. And that’s where they’re wrong. They need to quit trying, get out of the way and let the market function.

1 0

Calls for a global " Patriot Act "?
by professor rat 29 Apr '22

29 Apr '22

Calls for a global " Patriot Act " - Earth Defense League? https://cointelegraph.com/news/fincen-acting-director-says-patriot-act-prov… I could have told them it wouldn’t work nearly 20 years ago. " . . . Dorschner would not say whether there was an investigation into Professor Rat, calling the matter an issue of “internal security.” The columnist for The Boston Globe, whose sin, in the eyes of Professor Rat, was to criticize civil libertarians for objecting to the Patriot Act of 2001, said he did not take the threat at all seriously. He learned of the threat only last week, when told of it by The Denver Post, he said. The Post is withholding the names of the subjects of posts by Professor Rat to avoid promoting any specific threats. “The way I see it, this kind of talk is pretty cheap on the Internet,” the columnist said. “This is something I would consider casual hate speech. This person didn’t send me an e-mail saying 'I’m going to kill you.”’ But officials in Denver see nothing casual about the statements, Dorschner said. . . "

1 0

Combatting Red Army Rapists
by professor rat 29 Apr '22

29 Apr '22

Abortion Pills Sent to Ukraine as More Reports of Russian Rapes Emerge Newsweek 13 hours ago Rush to get emergency contraception into Ukraine as reports of rape rise The Guardian 7 hours ago

1 0