Notes of Satoshi Mamoto: Reasons why the U.S. government arrested Ethereum developers
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U.S. Government Detains Ethereum Developer Virgil Griffith
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has issued a press release announcing the arrest of prominent Ethereum community member Virgil Griffith. He was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on Thanksgiving on Thursday, November 28, 2019 and appeared in federal court in Los Angeles on Friday, November 29, 2019
Griffith is an Ethereum (member of the global Ethereum blockchain developer/stakeholder community). Affiliated with the Swiss non-profit Ethereum Foundation (EF). Like many researchers at EF, he conducts research on different projects.
Griffith allegedly attended and took the oath at the Pyongyang Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference in North Korea on or about April 26-27, 2019, along with 100 other participants. The topic of Griffith's speech was: "Blockchain and Peace".
Why is the U.S. government prosecuting U.S. citizens who traveled to North Korea to introduce blockchain technology? The short answer is: cryptocurrencies. The slightly longer answer is that this presents a relatively easy case to prosecute that could result in binding judicial precedent against treating Eth as money and/or a financial instrument. The allegations, presented in the words of a crypto-anarchist, “show off” knowledge and help “rogue regimes” circumvent targeted financial sanctions. Prosecutors would paint Griffith as a technical adviser to sanctions dodgers.
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Game of Thrones cryptocurrency version
This is a very interesting series of articles. The author uses the Fantasy Narratives method, substituting the Game of Thrones gathering, to describe the power change in the history of the currency circle. If you look at the catalog, you will find it very interesting. It can be viewed as an interesting historical novel, although there may be a little bit of soft implantation of the HEX project.
Chapter 1 — The FiatLand Empire
Chapter 2 — The Bitcoin Kingdom
Chapter 3 — New CryptoKingdoms are born
Chapter 4 — The Ethereum Kingdom
Chapter 5 — Ethereum Kingdom and the token Apocalypse
Chapter 6 — The HEX Kingdom
Chapter 7 — Merlin's Crystal Ball
The world is informed by fiat currency.
The legal currency is centralized.
Centralized to the point of corruption, deceit and serfdom.
However, it will be hard to move, its winter is coming...
Here are some excerpts from Chapter 3:
Whenever a new bull market expands the land of cryptocurrencies on the territory of fiat empires, many cryptocurrency kingdoms will rise, although most of these new cryptocurrencies will soon fail or become worthless.
The country of Litecoin, it is the forever loyal servant and intimate companion of the Bitcoin Kingdom. Like Bitcoin, Litecoin Nation’s vision is to empower warriors to take control of their finances and help them emerge from fiat-based debt crises.
In March 2013, Bitcoin's market cap surpassed $1 billion. From October 2013 to December 2013, the size of Bitcoin Kingdom increased 10 times to $1150 per Bitcoin! The Bitcoin kingdom was unable to maintain its border expansion and crashed back to $200 in a sad 2014 and a boring 2015.
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Blockchain is not the same as financial market infrastructure (FMI)
Should public blockchains act as financial market infrastructure? The main intention of the article is to give back to the vigorous development of Defi. We all know that the development of Defi in Ethereum is growing rapidly, but don’t generate Defi maximalism, which limits the development possibility of the blockchain.
If a blockchain is an FMI, blockchain operators will be required to "support the stability of the broader financial system." Whether or not a blockchain is an FMI is therefore a big question, with wide-ranging implications.
1) Despite superficial similarities between blockchain forms, processes and institutions and existing financial forms, processes and institutions, blockchains are qualitatively different from non-blockchain financial networks. (2) Blockchain is not a financial market infrastructure. (3) The positioning of 'blockchain equals financial market infrastructure' will severely limit the economic potential of blockchain technology.
Some core developers want blockchain to be financial infrastructure, but not everyone. Many different stakeholders are building financial and many non-financial applications (dIDs, games, dispute resolution processes, SCM processes, NFTs, DAOs, LAOs, etc.) on top of Ethereum and other blockchains. Stakeholders have a baseline expectation that certain characteristics of their blockchain will remain fundamentally expected. Forcing blockchains to comply with financial infrastructure standards limits these expectations and developments, with a net negative impact on the economy and society.
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Venezuela's paper money is worthless, so its people seek virtual gold
Here's an article from The Economist. It mainly introduces that Venezuelans obtain income from replacing the national currency by seeking virtual currency, and this virtual currency is not limited to Bitcoin.
Corruption, incompetence and sanctions have decimated Venezuela's oil industry, the country's main source of hard currency. But Venezuela's economic crisis prompted another rise.
Venezuelans spend a lot of time going to RuneScape and earn 500,000-2m gold per hour. At current exchange rates, a gold farmer (game currency farmer) can earn $40 a month, which is a lot of money in a country where the minimum wage is $7.50 a month. Some farmers use the game currency instead of bitcoin, which, while more volatile than most traditional currencies, is more stable than the Venezuelan bolivar. It's another source of income for desperate Venezuelans.
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Billion Defi Market
An article on Trustnode talked about the rapid development of Defi and talked about the recent Upbit theft and an idea related to Defi.
The amount of assets locked in decentralized finance (DeFi) has grown more than tenfold since last year, from $50 million to now an all-time high of $700 million.
MakerDAO’s DAI continues to dominate, as around $336 million worth of eth is currently locked there.
A big change happened in the second position. Synthetix has more than doubled to nearly $200 million. Synthetix is a curious project as it is not eth or bitcoin locked in it, but the Synthetix Network Token (SNX).
Other projects should be familiar to everyone, Compound has grown to 101 million US dollars.
Defi can be a headache for law enforcement,
Recently, the coins of some hackers encountered by Upbit were transferred to Huobi, which has a great risk, because Huobi can lock funds. On the contrary, if eth is sent as collateral to Maker or Compund and traded for DAI or any other token, then any asset can be traded on a dex or centralized exchange, if possible, it is very difficult to trace what happened.
