Welcome to the Daily Debrief, which keeps me off the streets.
Our stuff
Fortnot. The vast Guillermo J interviewed Fortnite creator Tim Sweener to clarify rumors about an alleged collaboration with crypto startup MagnaChain. Guillermo, who also reached the MagnaChain peeps, inches toward an estimable version of the truth—MagnaChain is only in a "partnership" with Fortnite in the same way the salmonella I procured in Laos is in a "partnership" with my lower intestine. Find out what that analogy means here.
Ol’ Blightychain. The unhandsome, impolitic, charismatic, reprehensible, kind, cold, loving, bohemian, untrustworthy, hot-tempered, cool-headed, gaunt, buxom, angular, rotund, and all-too-human Timbo C today wrote about a new “Blockchain Bootcamp” jump-started by the UK government that seeks to infuse some of the UK’s "tech talent" into the country’s growing blockchain scene. All the while cracking down on innocent traders!
Same old, same old. Today, Ben M heroically observed a trend—and wrote words about it! Silicon Valley giants Google and Facebook in the last few days have rather publicly swiveled their mealy gazes to crypto and blockchain, and their intentions seem much the same as usual—exert centralized control, suck up all creativity into a large corporate vacuum, then spit out whatever mulch is produced and label it “innovation.” While taking all the money. It’s big news, but it’s also inevitable news.
Other stuff
BigTorrent. Since 100 billion of BitTorrent’s “BTT” tokens were sold last week, the value of the token has increased ten-fold, soaring from $0.00012 a pop to $0.001202, with a $270 million 24-hour trading volume. Now I’m no mathematician, but that looks like an 1000-percent increase! Wahey!
The token sale itself was somewhat fraught, with Binance, which hosted the sale, “airdropping” some 50 million extra tokens to compensate those excluded from the ICO because of technical issues. Beyond Binance, exchanges UpBit and KuCoin have also listed the token. A lot of awful people are making themselves filthy rich.
These next two are a few days late because I was blind drunk yesterday.
Rippling. Crypto firm Ripple has reportedly moved $302 million worth of its currency XRP from one of its escrow accounts to an “unknown destination,” according to the venerable “zycrypto.com.” The transaction bore the message “Crawl… Walk… Run… ;).” Is Ripple transferring the money to fund the next stage in human evolution? Or is Ripple maybe maneuvering to sell the stash and pump the market to fill its coffers? Most important of all, can I have some? Stay tuned for zero answers.
Life-swap. A twenty-year-old college student was given a ten-year jail sentence for a series of so-called “sim-swap” attacks, whereby a hacker tricks a cellphone provider into reassigning a victim’s number to the hacker’s phone, granting access to the phone’s passwords. Joel Ortiz was the first to be sentenced for the crime, though several more suspects—among “hundreds” of victims—are currently facing charges, according to Motherboard.
Written by Ben M, who is running for president. If you’re a large investment bank/Silicon Valley billionaire/gun-rights lobbyist, send him donations at ben@decryptmedia.com.