Buttcoin: Crypto-Critical Community

The cease fire between Israel and Iran does not appear to apply to cyber warfare. #Tether and other #stablecoin companies have been seizing a lot of Iranians' assets almost certainly at Israel's request... which is kind of funny when you know that:

1. Tether has more or less openly encouraged Iranians to use Tether as a way to evade sanctions for years

2. Benjamin Netanyahu's son Yair spends a lot of time with Tether's founders.

Jeffrey Epstein's arrest seems to have set off a wave of suspicious crypto payments that have heretofore gone unexamined.

1. The 2nd highest volume day in bitcoin history came a week after Epstein died.

2. #Stablecoin transfer volumes doubled less than 48 hours after Epstein was arrested. In particular #Tether, the stablecoin whose money is managed by Epstein's next door neighbor and #Trump's current Secretary of Commerce, saw on chain volumes skyrocket.

Also there's the matter of a bunch of suspicious deaths among Epstein's crypto circle.

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

also (be sure to ad & script block)

https://archive.is/YGxOc

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/221136

Chances are that, unless you happened to read my personal GOTY pick from 2023 or just have generally excellent taste in videogames, you're not too familiar with Stonks-9800 (which you can find on Steam). That's a shame, because the early access stock-trading sim set in the salad days of '80s Japan is an absolute banger—oozing style and with a delicious platter of gameplay loops that will keep your eyes fixed on its line graphs for days, weeks, months at a time.

Stonks-9800 is excellent, relatively obscure, and comes from a solo dev who doesn't have the legal resources of a major publisher, which might go some way to explaining why its assets, characters, and name have been purloined by crypto bros claiming affiliation with the SPX6900 coin. Their website plasters itself in art and assets taken from the game and even the Stonks-9800 name itself: "Stonks‑9800 Gave Birth to SPX6900," claims the site, falsely.

The STONKS9800 coin website, festooned with ripped art from the game. I've blurred the wallet address in the top right. (Image credit: Ripped game art by Ternox / website and AI art by anonymous crypto bros)

I say "falsely" because, well, it's false. For all its posturing as a successor and tribute to Stonks-9800, this site and its coin have nothing to do with the game beyond the assets it's ripped. To add to the brazenness, I don't think it truly has anything to do with the actual SPX6900 coin—the webpage's links take you to price-tracking pages for a far more obscure and less valuable coin called, you guessed it, STONKS9800.

"Does anyone know how to take this to court or something like that?" asked Stonks-9800's true developer, Ternox, on X when they became aware of the coin, "I have nothing to do with this, and my game has been used for some kind of crypto scam… I feel terrible because of this."

I've reached out to Ternox to ask if they've made any progress taking legal action against the memecoin, but their own prognosis didn't look great: "I don't think I can figure this out, unfortunately," said Ternox in a (machine-translated) follow-up tweet.

The actual Stonks-9800 game, which rules. (Image credit: Ternox)

Which is a shame, because the site is truly egregious in the way it claims lineage from Ternox's game: "SPX6900 is the continuation of [Stonks-9800's] spirit, a living token inspired by the design language, tone, and irony of Stonks‑9800. Where the game offered fiction, the coin became belief. SPX is for the waifu traders, the chart cultists, and the faithful. A new market built on aesthetics and conviction," reads its "manifesto."

To add insult to injury, and in yet another in the mountain of indictments of the "Global Town Square" that X dot com purports to be, Ternox has been flooded by—likely AI—replies from X accounts assuring them that having their whole game looted by anonymous crypto nonsense is actually incredible publicity.

"Great promo for your game on the flip side," assures one questionably human account, "Thousands if not millions of people will be aware of it more." Another account who is likely actually a data blip on a water-guzzling server farm agrees: "Your game will become huge because of this mate."

Which really is a picture of the internet we've got for ourselves—something genuinely great created by humans finding itself subverted and co-opted by an endless swarm of burrowing, synthetic ticks who create and produce nothing. Never before has the old line, that capital lives by sucking on the lifeblood of living labour, felt more appropriate.

The STONKS9800 coin currently has a market cap of around $350,000.

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From PCGamer latest via this RSS feed

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/221889

Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus and occasional Bond villain, has taken a break from getting trapped in his own car elevators to lead a collective of tech billionaires in founding a new crypto bank called Erebor.

First thing's first: this is not a bank for the likes of you and I. Erebor is all about investing in start-ups in the field of tech, AI, defence and of course crypto. Defence you say? Why yes, because Palmer is being joined in this venture by fellow Bond villain Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, as well as Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the military/surveillance software company Palantir.

Erebor will be based in Columbus, Ohio, with a secondary office in New York, and is digital-only. The co-CEOs will be Owen Rapaport and Jacob Hirshman (thanks, Reuters). The funny part is that it's being set up to replace Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which became the third-largest bank failure in US history in March 2023 following the late 2022 crypto crash. But this time it will be different!

Why? Stablecoins bro. Per its bank charter application, Erebor wants to be "the most regulated entity conducting and facilitating stablecoin transactions." Hirshman is a former adviser to stablecoin company Circle, and Erebor plans to hold a lot of stablecoins on its balance sheet. Of all the crypto fakery I think stablecoins are among the most nefarious, because they make the impossible-to-keep promise that their value will stay pegged to currencies such as the US dollar thanks to being backed by reserves of said currency.

Except… well, remember the crypto crash we just mentioned? The one that took down SVB? Yeah that was sparked by the collapse of TerraUSD, a stablecoin that turned out to be anything but, and whose founder Do Kwon was finally extradited to the US to face charges this year.

(Image credit: SIphotography via Getty)

The crypto-boosters will point out that TerraUSD was an algorithmic stablecoin, meaning it was not backed by real reserves, but I'm not sure many of the others are either. I mean, look, I've got two billion dollars in my closet to back the brand-new RichStantonCoinTM, and will happily sell you a million dollars' worth: I just can't show you the real dollars, mkay?

The point of SVB and thus Erebor is risky bets on fledgling startups that are unlikely to be backed by traditional finance, which has all these pesky rules and regulations. Erebor will especially look to serve such entities with "insufficient access to credit," so who knows, but I might end up giving RichStantonCoinTM a go.

2022/3 was a hell of a time for crypto, and it felt like the wheels were coming off: not before time, some would say. It's me by the way, I am some. But those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it, and from here Erebor just looks like a big juicy domino in a field full of them.

From PCGamer latest via this RSS feed

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/32611369

And of course fascist billionaire Palmer Luckey intends to name it after another Tolkien creation, Erebor.

Luckey and Lonsdale — who were big donors to Donald Trump in the 2024 US presidential election — want the bank to take over the niche once occupied by SVB as the go-to lender for riskier companies and cryptocurrency players that traditional banks might reject.

Erebor has applied for a national bank charter in the US, a licence that allows a financial institution to operate as a bank…

Its target market would be businesses that were part of the US “innovation economy”, in particular tech companies focused on virtual currencies, artificial intelligence, defence and manufacturing, the filing said. It would also serve individuals who work for or invest in these companies.

It also planned to work with non-US companies “seeking access to the US banking system”….

Erebor said in the filing it would “differentiate itself” by working with customers that “are not well served by traditional or disruptive financial institutions, in particular with respect to insufficient access to credit”.

Cryptocurrencies known as “stablecoins”, which are pegged to real-life assets such as the dollar, are expected to be a significant part of the bank’s operations. The application states Erebor aims to be “the most regulated entity conducting and facilitating stablecoin transactions”.

Yeah they’re going to be the most regulated: their goal is regulatory capture of bank cryptocurrencies.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many red flags before.

cross-posted from: https://mastodon.thenewoil.org/users/thenewoil/statuses/114787772072908716

Dozens of fake wallet add-ons flood #Firefox store to drain #crypto

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/dozens-of-fake-wallet-add-ons-flood-firefox-store-to-drain-crypto/

#cybersecurity #Coinbase #MetaMask #TrustWallet #Exodus #Phantom #OKX #Keplr #MyMonero

Bitcoin exists in a weird regulatory gray area. It’s not a security (so the SEC doesn’t regulate it), but it’s also not officially considered gambling — even though, for many users, it functions exactly like a high-risk bet.

And here’s the problem:
If an exchange loses your funds, gets hacked, or disappears, there’s often no recourse. No insurance. No FDIC. Just a tweet and a shrug.

So here’s a wild idea:
What if Bitcoin and crypto trading were regulated like gambling?

🃏 Why Gambling Regulations Might Actually Help

Surprisingly, gambling laws often offer more protection to users than the crypto industry does. If crypto was treated as gambling, you'd get:

🎯 Odds Disclosure

• Platforms would need to show expected returns.
• Tokens like Ripple (with massive insider allocations) might show:
  “Average return per $1 invested: $0.10”

🛑 Insider Restrictions

• Gambling laws often bar insiders, employees, and family members from participating or profiting.
• Crypto teams couldn't just pre-mine tokens and dump them on the public.

🔍 Transparency on Payouts

• Casinos must disclose their “house edge.”
• Exchanges would have to show where user losses go: miner fees, exchange cuts, or insider wallets.

🧾 Licensing & Audits

• Gambling operators must be licensed and audited by the state.
• Crypto exchanges would need to prove solvency and fair play — or get shut down.

🧼 AML & KYC Requirements

• Gambling sites require identity verification and must report suspicious transactions.
• Crypto’s current “anonymous wild west” would face actual oversight.

🧠 Addiction & Harm Reduction Tools

• Casinos offer betting limits, cooling-off periods, and self-exclusion options.
• Crypto users would get tools to prevent compulsive trading, not just 100x leverage buttons.

💰 Financial Reserve Requirements

• Casinos must prove they can pay out winners.
• FTX-style collapses would be much harder with enforced capital controls.

🔚 In the End, the Players Win

Gamblers would actually get more protection than so-called investors get on Binance, Coinbase, or Kraken.

With honest odds, audited exchanges, and protection from insider abuse, we might finally get a crypto market that’s at least fair, even if it's still a gamble.