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A Short History of Bitcoin! The vaguely threatening Tim Copeland kicked off the day with a listicle outlining the “seventeen moments that defined Bitcoin’s history,” ranging from Bitconnect Egg Carlos Matos, the physical embodiment of the ICO mania’s worst excesses, to the sepia-tinged days of spending 10,000 Bitcoins for two pizzas ($38 million worth today!) If this isn’t good for our long-tail search results, nothing is. Read it ici, s’il vous plait.
(Timmy McTimface left one notable moment out—the day he and I, fresh-faced and hungry for money insightful analysis of the crypto space, met in the subterranean, birch-panelled Decrypt vestibule, and shook clammy hands for the first time, cementing the future of phoned-in crypto journalism.) That link again is here!
A Rick and Morty Laff Riot. Tim did another list, this one utterly incomprehensible, about a Rick and Morty spinoff entitled, rather ingeniously, “Blockchain and Morty.” Tim attempts to eke out “eight hilarious jokes” from the episode, which revolves around a vast, disembodied entity with control over the thoughts and actions of thousands of people, who also just happen to be Ripple followers, a la the XRP army. Get it?! Uh, HA! HA! Enrich yourself with laughter, here.
Coinbase. Tim’s third delight of the day was a spirited trawl through the many hopelessly confused reactions to the XRP/Coinbase listing; some cry insider trading, others intimate that Coinbase took an undisclosed fee from Ripple, while still others frame it as yet another black mark on Coinbase’s once stellar record. Read all the best reactions to the blessed event here.
Slow news day grips Cryptoverse! Ben M was able to concoct an “article” based on three (3) tweets he found while brushing his teeth. Here’s the skinny—it turns out that Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin got into a rager of a spat with Tron dude Justin Sun. Honestly, you’ve got to read this one to believe it, but let’s just say—spoiler alert!—that Buterin rebuked Sun with a lung-achingly hilarious metaphor about avocados. Read it and feel smarter.
Other stuff
New owner, who dis? BitcoinPaperWallet, which offers a range of printed-out paper “crypto-wallets,” has fallen into mysterious new ownership. “At the end of April 2018, I sold the bitcoinpaperwallet.com website, service, and associated domain names to a new owner,” wrote former proprietor Canton Becker on code repository GitHub. Further questions were referred to orders@paperwalletshop.com.
Meanwhile, as Twitter man @Jonf3n pointed out, an unlikely “endorsement” from Bitcoin educator Andreas Antonopoulos remains on BitcoinPaperWallet’s website, while several of the public addresses featured on the GitHub page for “donations” are at odds with those on the website. We’ve no idea what this means, but have emailed “orders@walletshop.com” for more details. (Mind you, we do have our own suspicions as to who the new owner is.)
This is a drill. Inappropriately jocular subheading just there, tbh: A Dutch crypto trader was tortured with a drill in his own home by a group of men, disguised as law enforcement, hoping to get at his stash. Both he and his young daughter—who suffered psychological trauma—have been submitted to hospital.
Regulatory throwback. Bitcoin Cash shillissimo Roger Ver has joined Australian crypto startup LivenPay in an advisory role ahead of its forthcoming ICO, for which it hopes to raise $28 million. LivenPay is a payment platform that lets “thousands” of vendors take crypto payments.
In the press release, Ver hams about real use cases for cryptocurrencies and being very excited and ETCETERA but we have emailed him (via his willing publicist) to ask some real questions of him, bro, like — “why are you doing an ICO in 2019,” and “don’t you love Bitcoin Cash anymore,” and, “may I have one Bitcoin, please?”
Blockbacks. An EOS ‘block producer” shunned his duties by failing to ‘blacklist” a hacked account, letting a thief make off with $7.7 million worth of EOS tokens. The EOS “constitution,” lol, obliges block producers to blacklist any compromised accounts—leading some observers to speculate that the producer in this instance was bribed. Full disclosure: it was me. I did it. I bribed the block producer.
Got any story ideas? Or any ideas at all? Email then to Ben M at ben@decryptmedia.com. Not responsible for unclaimed thoughts left for more than 14 days.