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On April Fools day, pranksters the world over try to give their loved ones cardiac arrests by lying to them. That’s no less true of the notoriously good-humored crypto community, which has collectively put out no less than (at least) five impish hoaxes today.
In lieu of any jokes or wit of our own, we wrote the pranks up as if the Washington Post itself had reported them (or an approximation of them, since I am illiterate). Beware of the twist: One of the stories is kind of true!
1,337 ETH stolen from Ethereum Foundation multi-sig account
Ethereum Foundation grandee Hudson Jameson announced early Monday morning that 1,337 ETH ($189,000) had been stolen from the foundation’s multi-sig wallet, after a grant administrator misallocated the funds to the “Prisoner of War” memorial in Prague, known colloquially as PraguePow.
Blaming “bad audio quality” for the michigas, Jameson added that the rest of the funds had been “stolen by [Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin] in order to fund his research into disproving infinite set theory and other shenanigans with aleph numbers.”
Infinite set theory supposes that there are infinite modes of infinity. For some reason Buterin takes issue with that.
Asked by Ethhub developer Anthony Sassano whether he would use his “Masternode” to reverse the theft, Buterin said, “Yeah hold on a sec, it's still downloading the 2 terabyte archive data.”
The Masternode is the controversial alien supercomputer that Buterin uses to control all Ethereum transactions, which critics say makes the network less decentralized.
Ethereum stalwart pivots to XRP love
In a surprising pivot, the minds behind flagship Ethereum learning resource ETHhub have announced a spinoff project called XRPhub, which will seek to “fight back against the FUD that the Ripple/XRP community suffers from daily.”
“#XRPtheStandard #StackRipples #NotASecurity,” explained ETHhub’s Anthony Sassano, helpfully.
The site can be reached here.
Ripple to consolidate litigious reputation with Craig Wright acquisition
Cross-border payments startup Ripple has taken on bitcoin inventor Craig Wright as its chief marketing strategist, Ripple booster Steven Diep wrote on Twitter.
Diep, whose Twitter bio reads “demolish FUD and HYPEs with FACTs,” said that Wright would be “educating Bitcoin maximalists about the potential of XRP.”
Wright will assume the role once he has finished drafting legal threats to all of his ex-Twitter followers.
MyCrypto launches invisible digital wallet
Popular digital wallet service MyCrypto today announced the launch of a paper wallet that users can keep anywhere, even in plain sight—because it’s invisible.
Though on the surface the “Invisible Ink Paper Wallet” looks like a regular old blank piece of paper, it in fact bears a concealed private key that can only be seen when applied with “ICO Saltwater, CryptoKitty Urine, Unicorn tears, EVM Oil or Headlight fluid." Users can download and print Invisible Ink using this link.
Asked whether the Invisible Ink Paper Wallet was a real product, MyCrypto said “no.”
Ripple boosted by the World Bank
Ripple fans were jubilant when the World Bank, a large lender that funds international development projects, published a blog post on its website arguing that cross-border payment solutions, like Ripple, had found a “potential use case” for distributed ledger technology.
Contributor Rodrigo Mejia-Ricart wrote that Ripple’s xRapid service had saved 40 percent to 70 percent in foreign exchange costs, with the transfer of funds taking mere seconds instead of hours.
“So world bank accepted ripple or xrp?” asked user “Heizenburgs” on the official Ripple Telegram channel, joining a chorus of investors excited by the major bank's apparent endorsement.
Sadly not. Mejia-Ricart is a research and public policy analyst at the Better Than Cash Alliance, a UN-based consortium of businesses and governments seeking to implement better digital payments infrastructure. He does not speak for the World Bank and got his statistics from, er, Ripple’s own uncorroborated press release.
You got us good, World Bank!