People will be paid in Ether for helping to clean up one of the most polluted beaches as part of a new movement to clean up plastic waste.

Bounties for the Oceans
The Bounties Network is teaming up with ConsenSys Social Impact to tackle the issue of plastic waste in our oceans.

Back in June, the Network undertook its first bounty-based social impact project with MakerDAO as part of World Oceans Day. However, since then, the team have been looking to see how they can make a bigger impact.

As part of their first pilot, they will be targeting Manila Bay in the Philippines. According to Greenpeace, the Philippines is the third biggest source of plastic ocean pollution in the world, making it an ideal place for the Bounties Network to start.

Taking place over two days from the 1st and 2nd of December, from 0800 until 1700 on both days, participants will be cleaning up the Las Piñas–Parañaque Critical Habitat Area. They will be paid up to 550 Philippine pesos ($10.50) per day, which will be made in Ether.

Taking to Twitter, Joseph Lubin, founder of ConsenSys and co-founder of Ethereum, announced the project.

On its website, the Network said:


The hope is that this will create a “decentralized social impact contribution network with the ability to extend across the globe.” By doing so, it will “incentivize and activate millions of hours of human capital” that will “collaborate for positive social and environmental outcomes.”

According to the UN, 80 percent of all pollution in our oceans comes from people. Additionally, eight million tons of plastic per year end up in our oceans, impacting wildlife, jobs, and tourism. With plastic causing billions of dollars worth of damage each year, steps need to be taken to tackle the issue.

With Bounties for the Ocean, it’s hoping to achieve just this.

In order to receive Ether for the cleanup, a photo of the participant and the rubbish they’ve collected must be taken at the Las Piñas–Parañaque Critical Habitat Area. This should then be uploaded with one of the Bounties anchor volunteers. If possible, the image should be shared on social media tagging @ethBounties and using #bountiesfortheoceans.

Each correct submission will be rewarded 0.03 ETH on acceptance.

https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/manila-residents-to-be-paid-in-ether-for-cleaning-up-polluted-habitat-area/

Notes.

-Darren Elkins is another guy who has looked vastly improved since moving to train out of team alpha male. Not certain he has the kickboxing or wrestling/grappling to defeat Ricardo Lamas but Elkins has shown a lot of heart and has been difficult to finish. The over prop could be worth betting if not Lamas straight.

As some may have observed, highly developed countries like the US encourages their people to use credit cards for transactions. Cash transactions are still used but mostly they prefer people to have their credit cards. I want to know if having a credit card really necessary even if they can afford to pay in cash? Are credit cards reflective of your ability to pay?

Modern financial history is littered with hyperinflation, defaults and currency devaluation. Bitcoin could put an end to that, says Saifedean Ammous

Paul Krugman, blogger, fiat-currency enthusiast and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics earlier this year justified his scepticism about cryptocurrencies in the New York Times. He asked readers to give him a clear answer to the question: what is the problem cryptocurrency solves? He wrote: ‘Governments have occasionally abused the privilege of creating fiat money, but for the most part governments and central banks exercise restraint.’ He added that, unlike bitcoin, ‘fiat currencies have underlying value because men with guns say they do. And this means that their value isn’t a bubble that can collapse if people lose faith.’

Case closed, apparently. What he omitted to mention was that bitcoin has been operating successfully for almost ten years now, with no confirmed cases of fraudulent transactions. Every day, its traded volumes run to billions of dollars. In fact, bitcoin’s increasing reputation for security and the growth it is still undergoing suggests it is not about to go away. Could it be the market knows something about bitcoin and central banks that Krugman does not?

A closer look at the track record of government money offers a perspective somewhat different to that seen through Krugman’s rose-tinted spectacles.

As I write, Zimbabwe and Venezuela are undergoing the ravages of a collapse of government money, while Argentina, Iran and Turkey teeter on the brink. A quarter of a billion humans live in these failing economies — but not enough, evidently, to dissuade Krugman from endorsing government control of money so wholeheartedly.

It’s not even as if what is happening in these countries is a new phenomenon. Hyperinflation has occurred 57 times since the end of the first world war, afflicting several billions of people. In every instance, it has been the type of money whose worth is supposedly protected by men with guns that has become, well, worthless.

Indeed, hyperinflation is a form of economic disaster unique to government-created money. There was never an example of hyperinflation when economies operated a gold or silver standard. Government money is relatively cheap to produce, meaning governments in crisis are all too happy to produce it. In this way — as we have seen too often — it is possible for a society to lose all of its savings in the space of a few months, or even weeks. This is what happens when the wrong people gain control of the financial levers. Whatever alleged benefits government-managed money may have, a single episode of hyperinflation far outweighs them all.

While most countries have not experienced hyperinflation, they have almost all experienced significant currency devaluation over sustained periods. Between 1960 and 2015, for example, money supply in all countries increased by an average 32 per cent per year.

Krugman doesn’t seem to believe the value of government money needs to be justified intellectually. Instead, he believes ‘men with guns’ will suffice as an argument. The good news for him is that intellectual justifications do not ultimately matter when set against the realities of the market. The power of the state is usually sufficient to protect the economic monopolies he defends. However, the bad news is that the flow of bitcoin — which is decentralised, digital and cryptographically secured — is far harder to stop with guns.

Krugman cites the relatively high cost of bitcoin transactions as a reason the cryptocurrency cannot compete long term with fiat currencies. He seems, mistakenly, to assume bitcoin is competing with consumer payment networks like Visa or PayPal. But as I argue in my book The Bitcoin Standard, that is not what bitcoin is best suited for. Rather, bitcoin is an international settlement network, one that competes with the central bank settlement systems that are the foundation upon which networks like Visa or PayPal depend.

It must also be said that bitcoin transaction costs are relatively cheap compared with those of traditional settlement systems. And that’s not to mention that bitcoin offers international clearance within an hour, while the current banking system usually needs days, and sometimes weeks.

Certainly, there is appetite for a credible alternative to government-controlled fiat currencies. In the nine years that it has been trading, bitcoin has appreciated 700,000,000 per cent against the dollar, despite the naysayers and warnings of its impending collapse.

Perhaps the most compelling argument for bitcoin is the completely apolitical and predictable monetary policy it operates within. Bitcoin cannot be used for quantitative easing, for example. You can’t just print more of it when the whim takes you. If bitcoin’s continued growth deprives central banks of the ability to finance catastrophic wars by printing money, or if it prevents even one more tragic incidence of hyperinflation, the energy consumption required to mine it will be the best bargain humanity ever got.

Could bitcoin collapse? Of course it could. Any investor who puts a large amount of money into bitcoin must know they are taking a significant risk. But bitcoin’s price-falls these days bottom out at prices many times higher than they did only a few years ago.

Can government currencies and bonds collapse, or drop significantly in value, despite the ‘men with guns’ that protect them? The answer — after 100 years and more of hyperinflation, financial repression and sovereign default, which together have affected billions of people — is a resounding yes.

It’s no wonder so many people do not share Krugman’s enthusiasm for the last century’s experiment with government-controlled money, and herein lies the problem that bitcoin solves. Bitcoin offers anyone in the world an escape from being controlled by economists who believe they are immune to the lessons of history.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/11/the-problem-bitcoin-solves/

Three days ago, when we reported that following Trump's latest sanctions targeting Venezuela's gold sector president Maduro was seeking to repatriate all of Venezuela's gold - some 14 tons - held at the Bank of England, we cautioned that since the BoE "sought to clarify what Venezuela wants to do with the gold", this suggested that despite Venezuela being the rightful owner of this gold, Venezuela was about to face challenges in getting it back.

Today, the worst case - for Venezuela's president - was confirmed, when the Times reported that the Bank of England has "refused to release the gold bars" worth just over $550 million to President Nicolas Maduro.

According to the Times, the reason the BoE has refused release is due to its insistence that standard measures to prevent money-laundering be taken — "including clarification of the Venezuelan government’s intentions for the gold."

“There are concerns that Mr. Maduro may seize the gold, which is owned by the state, and sell it for personal gain,” the newspaper said.

Separately, as we reported on Monday, an official told Reuters that the repatriation plan has been held up for nearly two months due to difficulty in obtaining insurance for the shipment, needed to move a large gold cargo: “They are still trying to find insurance coverage, because the costs are high,” an official told Reuters.

As we reported on Monday, Venezuela’s gold located at the BoE was previously used as collateral until last year, backing loans up to several billion dollars from global banks.

Maduro is not the first to attempt to repatriate the country's gold. Venezuela's late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, sensing which way the wind is blowing and citing the need for Venezuela to have physical control of central bank assets, in 2011 repatriated around 160 tonnes of gold from banks in the United States and Europe to the central bank in Caracas. But some of Venezuela’s gold remained in the Bank of England. Starting in 2014, Venezuela used this gold for “swap” operations in which global banks lent Venezuela several billion dollars with the gold as collateral.

Meanwhile, as shown in the chart above, Venezuelan central bank statistics show the central bank’s gold holdings by June this year had dropped to 160 tonnes from 364 tonnes in 2014, as some of the swap agreements expired without Venezuela returning the funds - leaving the gold in the hands of the banks. By 2017, swap agreements with Caracas became impossible due to U.S. sanctions, which blocked U.S. financial institutions from bankrolling any new financing operations, while leaving the legal fate of pledged gold in limbo.

Last week, Washington imposed new restrictions against Venezuela targeting the country's gold exports, accusing the Maduro government of "looting" Venezuela's stocks of the precious metals amid the country's economic crisis. The sanctions, which target US individuals and companies trading in Venezuelan gold, was announced by US National Security Advisor John Bolton last week, with Bolton also branding Caracas a member of a "troika of tyranny" along with Cuba and Nicaragua.

Venezuela has made a concerted effort to become a major gold exporter, and is engaged in certifying some 32 gold fields, and building 54 processing plants in a bid to become what Maduro said would be "the second largest gold reserve on Earth."

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-08/bank-england-refuses-release-venezuelas-gold

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin threatened the global financial messaging service SWIFT on Friday that it could be penalized if it doesn’t cut off financial services to entities and individuals doing business with Iran. The warning came just days ahead of the US re-imposition of all US sanctions on Iran that had been lifted under the 2015 nuclear deal, which will take effect at midnight tonight and cover Iran's shipping, financial and energy sectors.

Speaking to reporters, Mnuchin was quoted by Reuters as saying that "SWIFT is no different than any other entity," adding "We have advised SWIFT that it must disconnect any Iranian financial institutions that we designate as soon as technologically feasible to avoid sanctions exposure."

The Trump administration has been pressuring allies to cut Iranian oil imports to “zero” next month although on Friday the US agreed to grant exemptions to 8 countries that import Iran oil; the countries include Japan, India, and South Korea according to Bloomberg. China, the leading importers of Iranian oil remains in discussions with the US on terms but is among the eight, as is Turkey which will likely receive an exemption, the country's energy minister said on Friday. The full list of countries receiving waivers will be released on Monday.

By cutting Iran off from SWIFT, Iran would lose its ability to be paid for its exports and to pay for imports. Washington has been pressuring SWIFT to cut Iran from the financial system as it did in 2012 before the nuclear deal. Six years ago the EU imposed sanctions on Iranian banks, forcing SWIFT, which is subject to EU laws, to cut financial transactions with at least 30 of Iran’s financial institutions, including the central bank.

Iranian banks were reconnected to the network in 2016 after the Iran nuclear deal came into force, allowing much needed foreign cash to flow into Tehran’s coffers.

While SWIFT (The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), which is a financial network that provides cross-border transfers for members across the world, is based in Belgium, its board includes executives from US banks with US federal law allowing the administration to act against banks and regulators across the globe. It supports most interbank messages, connecting over 11,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries and territories.

Washington’s pressure has pushed Brussels to look at creating a SWIFT alternative. As we reported at the time, in August German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas called on the EU to set up an independent equivalent of the system. Later, EU Foreign Affairs Chief Federica Mogherini confirmed that the bloc’s signatories remain committed to the nuclear deal with Iran and are working to create special payment channels to do business with the Islamic Republic. That proposal stalled in Brussels and major European firms left Iran.

* * *

Whether with or without SWIFT's involvement, Iranians are bracing for the full force of US sanctions due to hit on Monday. The new sanctions, which also aim to cut off Iran’s banking sector from the global market, are timed to coincide with the anniversary of the 1979 storming by Iranian revolutionaries of the US embassy in Tehran, when angry students took 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days.

Iran has remained defiant, saying it is confident it can weather the impacts, and that the US will fail to bring down Iranian oil imports to zero.

On Friday, President Trump announced the reimposition of sanctions by tweeting on Friday a photograph of himself in the style of an advertisement for the Game of Thrones series, with the tagline: “Sanctions Are Coming, November 5” (much to the chagrin of HBO).

The office of Iran’s Quds force commander, Qassem Soleimani, retaliated by posting a photo of himself in a similar style alongside the tagline: “I will stand against you.”

But ordinary people, wary of the fluctuations of the currency and the rising prices of goods, are anxious. On Sunday, a state-organised rally took place in front of the former US embassy compound in central Tehran to mark the anniversary. The crowd held placards reading “Down with USA”, and “Down with Israel”, while others set US and Israeli flags on fire.

“Never threaten the Iranian people,” Mohammad Ali Jafari, the commander of Iran’s elite revolutionary guards told people gathering in front of the former embassy, officially referred to as a “den of spies”. “Do not make military threats against us, and do not frighten us with military threats,” he added.

Iran is also relying on European support: as noted above, the EU has set up a mechanism – known as a special purpose vehicle (SPV) – to sidestep US sanctions and persuade an increasingly reluctant Iran to stay inside the deal in the hope of rescuing its economy. It is unclear if Europe will be willing to actually activate this "SWIFT-alternative", however, in light of Mnuchin's threats.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reacting to Trump’s threats on Saturday, said America’s power was in decline. “The US’s goal in imposing sanctions is to paralyze and prevent the growth of national economy; but it resulted in a movement towards self-sufficiency in Iran,” he said.

Inside Iran, however, people are on tenterhooks. Economic grievances were a trigger for a wave of nationwide protests in recent months over the scarcity of the US dollar, unpaid wages and rising prices. “Nov 5th isn’t the most pivotal moment in this saga,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group told the Guardian. “Paradoxically, if sanctions prove as effective as the White House is hoping for, they are bound to push Iran to either revive its nuclear program or become more aggressive in the region. Both will significantly increase the risks of a military confrontation.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-04/us-threatens-swift-sanctions-if-iran-isnt-cut

Side-channel leak in Skylake and Kaby Lake chips probably affects AMD CPUs, too.

Over the past 11 months, the processors running our computers, and in some cases phones, have succumbed to a host of attacks. Bearing names such as Meltdown and Spectre, BranchScope, TLBleed, and Foreshadow, the exploits threaten to siphon some of our most sensitive secrets—say passwords or cryptographic keys—out of the silicon microarchitecture in ways that can’t be detected or stopped by traditional security defenses. On Friday, researchers disclosed yet another leak that has already been shown to exist on a wide range of Intel chips and may also affect other makers, too.

PortSmash, as the new attack is being called, exploits a largely overlooked side-channel in Intel’s hyperthreading technology. A proprietary implementation of simultaneous multithreading, hyperthreading reduces the amount of time needed to carry out parallel computing tasks, in which large numbers of calculations or executions are carried out simultaneously. The performance boost is the result of two logical processor cores sharing the hardware of a single physical processor. The added logical cores make it easier to divide large tasks into smaller ones that can be completed more quickly.

Port contention as a side channel
In a paper scheduled for release soon, researchers document how they were able to exploit the newly discovered leak to recover an elliptic curve private key from a server running an OpenSSL-powered TLS server. The attack, which was carried out on servers running Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake chips and Ubuntu, worked by sending one logical core a steady stream of instructions and carefully measuring the time it took for them to get executed.

The specific timing allowed PortSmash to deduce the key being processed in another logical core of the same processor. The resource providing the leak is port contention, a phenomenon that happens when multiple instructions using the same physical processor resources get assigned to various ports to await completion. The vulnerability is indexed as CVE-2018-5407. It affects PCs as well as servers, although the vector for exploit generally favors the latter.

“Our technique can choose among several configurations to target different configurations to target different ports in order to adapt to different scenarios, thus offering a very fine spatial granularity,” the researchers wrote in the paper. “Additionally, PortSmash is highly portable and its prerequisites for execution are minimal, i.e., does not require knowledge of memory cache-lines, eviction sets, machine learning techniques, nor reverse engineering techniques.”

In an email, Billy Bob Brumley, a professor at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland and one of the authors of the paper, said he expects that chips beyond the Skylake and Kaby Lake architectures are similarly vulnerable with slight modifications to the attack code. “We strongly suspect AMD Ryzen architectures which feature SMT are vulnerable, but we leave that for future work,” he wrote. “(The real reason is we don’t have the [hardware] to test it on at the moment, so we have to wait.)”

Brumley said the most likely real-world scenario for maliciously exploiting the vulnerability is in so-called infrastructure as a service environments, in which a cloud provider hosts all the trappings of an on-premises data center, including the servers, storage and networking hardware, and the virtualization or hypervisor layer.

“Personally speaking, I feel remote login scenarios are the biggest targeted threat,” Brumley wrote. “Here, a [malicious] user with credentials logs in (e.g. via SSH), compiles the exploit code, and runs it to extract information from other processes running in parallel.”

Brumley said the exploit was written in x64 assembly code that runs locally on a vulnerable computer. He said he knows of no evidence the results can currently be reproduced using JavaScript downloaded from a website. Given the ability of Spectre to be exploited in JavaScript, it remains a possibility. The researchers' proof-of-concept exploit is available here.

In a statement, Intel officials wrote:


Hyperthreading under the gun
PortSmash is the second processor attack that targets hyperthreading. TLBleed disclosed in June also used hyperthreading to determine a private encryption key. The researchers developing that attack ran a program calculating cryptographic signatures using the Curve 25519 EdDSA algorithm implemented in libgcrypt on one logical core and their attack program on the other logical core. They were able to determine the 256-bit encryption key used to calculate the signature with a combination of two milliseconds of observation, followed by 17 seconds of machine-learning-driven guessing and a final fraction of a second of brute-force guessing. The side channel in that case was provided by the translation lookaside buffer.

TLBleed was worrisome enough to prompt developers to disable hyperthreading in OpenBSD, the operating system that prioritizes security. Brumley also recommended that users disable SMT in their BIOS or choose platforms that don’t offer it at all. Better yet, he told Ars, OS developers should disable SMT at boot time.

On a vulnerability disclosure group thread discussing PortSmash, Alexander Peslyak, the security specialist better known as Solar Designer, praised the research as “top notch.” He then said that the port contention side-channel has long been obvious and “a fully expected property.”

“Maybe the problem is it wasn’t documented as such,” he wrote. “Maybe we should have put more effort into making it more obvious to everyone in 2005, like it’s finally done now.”

Peslyak went on to say that the version of OpenSSL exploited by PortSmash was doing things that in theory could leak keys even when SMT is turned off, albeit at a pace that would require much more time and many more resources.

An OpenSSL bug, too
Paul Kocher, the cryptography security expert who discovered Spectre, agreed that a key weakness that makes PortSmash so alarming was the way OpenSSL carried out sensitive operations using branch instructions that’s based on secret values.

“This kind of leakage is something that crypto library authors already understand pretty well and know they need to protect against,” Kocher wrote in an email “E.g. it’s typically assumed that any situation where secrets to affect the control flow, such as the condition for a branch, needs to be avoided. As a result, I’d say that this work describes an OpenSSL bug that can be exploited using well-known issues with hyperthreading (and perhaps other ways as well, e.g. branch predictor state).”

OpenSSL developers have since released an update that makes PortSmash infeasible. While details weren’t immediately available, they likely involve changes in the way OpenSSL uses, or interacts with, SMT.

The PortSmash paper, titled Port Contention for Fun and Profit, continues to recommend fully disabling SMT, not only to blunt the threat of PortSmash, but also those of TLBleed and two similar attacks known as CacheBleed and MemJam. But the authors go on to recognize the performance loss the countermeasure will have on thread-intensive applications.[/b] A defense that would have less of a performance cost is a proposed change to OSes to support logical core isolation requests that apps could make when carrying out sensitive tasks. The selective SMT disabling would inflict a much lower performance penalty, but it also requires a large upfront investment in the form of changes to OSes and the code libraries.

Another approach the authors recommend is for applications to use port-independent code, which “can be achieved through secret-independent execution flow secure coding practices, similar to constant-time execution.”

To repeat a point made earlier, PortSmash currently poses a threat mainly to people using computers or services that allow untrusted people to use the same physical processor. These users should pay close attention to the research and carefully consider the recommendations. For the time being, the risk to others is likely low, but that could change with more research.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/intel-cpus-fall-to-new-hyperthreading-exploit-that-pilfers-crypto-keys/

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A group of large institutional investors including BlackRock Inc and Allianz SE’s Pacific Investment Management Co has sued 16 major banks, accusing them of rigging prices in the roughly $5.1 trillion-a-day foreign exchange market.

The lawsuit was filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan by plaintiffs that decided to “opt out” of similar nationwide litigation that has resulted in $2.31 billion (£1.76 billion) of settlements with 15 of the banks.

Those settlements followed worldwide regulatory probes that have led to more than $10 billion of fines for several banks, and the convictions or indictments of some traders.

The banks being sued are: Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Japan’s MUFG Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Scotland, Societe Generale, Standard Chartered and UBS.

Investors typically opt out of litigation when they hope to recover more by suing on their own.

The plaintiffs in Wednesday’s lawsuit accused the banks of violating U.S. antitrust law by conspiring from 2003 to 2013 to rig currency benchmarks including the WM/Reuters Closing Rates for their own benefit by sharing confidential orders and trading positions.

This manipulation was allegedly done through chat rooms with such names as “The Cartel,” “The Mafia” and “The Bandits’ Club,” through tactics with such names as “front running,” “banging the close,” “painting the screen” and “taking out the filth.”

“By colluding to manipulate FX prices, benchmarks, and bid/ask spreads, defendants restrained trade, decreased competition, and artificially increased prices, thereby injuring plaintiffs,” the 221-page complaint said.

Norway’s central bank Norges Bank and the big public pension fund California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) are among the several other named plaintiffs.

Many of the plaintiffs plan to pursue similar litigation in London against many of the bank defendants with respect to trades in Europe, a footnote in the complaint said.

Citigroup’s $402 million settlement is the largest in the earlier litigation. Credit Suisse has yet to settle that case. Neither had an immediate comment on Wednesday’s lawsuit.

The law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan represents the opt-out investors.

The case is Allianz Global Investors GMBH et al v Bank of America Corp et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 18-10364.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-forex-lawsuit/big-investors-sue-16-banks-in-u-s-over-currency-market-rigging-idUSKCN1NC34J

WASHINGTON — Planetary Resources Inc., once a high-flying company backed by billionaires with aspirations to mine asteroids, only to later suffer funding problems, has been acquired by a blockchain company, the firms announced Oct. 31.

Planetary Resources said in a statement that it was acquired by ConsenSys, Inc. in an “asset-purchase transaction.” The companies did not disclose specific terms of the agreement. Chris Lewicki, the president and chief executive of Planetary Resources, and Brian Israel, the company’s general counsel, will join ConsenSys as part of the deal.

ConsenSys describes itself as a “blockchain venture production studio focused on building and scaling tools, disruptive startups, and enterprise software products powered by decentralized technology, specifically Ethereum.” Ethereum itself is a decentralized computing platform best known for supporting a cryptocurrency called Ether similar to the better-known bitcoin.

ConsenSys was founded by Joseph Lubin, one of the co-developers of Ethereum, in 2015. It said it has more than 1,100 employees on six continents. ConsenSys has more than three dozen “spokes,” or companies working on various projects that make use of Ethereum, including financial management company Balance, journalism platform Civil and gaming company Virtue Poker.

In a statement, Lubin said that Planetary Resources’ expertise in space would be folded into ConsenSys. “Bringing deep space capabilities into the ConsenSys ecosystem reflects our belief in the potential for Ethereum to help humanity craft new societal rule systems through automated trust and guaranteed execution,” he said, referring to the “smart contracts” enabled by Ethereum. “And it reflects our belief in democratizing and decentralizing space endeavors to unite our species and unlock untapped human potential.”

Lubin didn’t disclose how specifically Planetary Resources fit into his company other than that he would be “sharing our plans and how to join us on this journey in the months ahead.”

Planetary Resources first announced its asteroid mining plans in 2012 after three years in stealth mode. The company’s original vision called for prospecting near Earth asteroids for water ice that could later be extracted and then sold as propellant. “I think we’ll have propellant depots in operation within the decade,” Eric Anderson, the co-founder and original co-chairman of the company, said in a 2012 interview.

Anderson, best known in the space industry as the co-founder and chairman of space tourism company Space Adventures, established the company with Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation. The company’s initial investors featured a group of wealthy individuals, including Google co-founder Larry Page and chairman Eric Schmidt, Ross Perot Jr., and Charles Simonyi, the former Microsoft executive who flew to the International Space Station twice as a client of Space Adventures. Richard Branson later invested in the company, as did the government of Luxembourg’s SpaceResources.lu initiative.

The company developed a series of cubesats to serve as technology demonstrators for future asteroid prospectors. The first, Arkyd-3, was lost in the October 2014 Antares launch failure. A second, Arkyd-3R, was deployed from the ISS in July 2015, followed by Arkyd-6 in January on an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.

By the time Arkyd-6 was in orbit demonstrating its mid-wave infrared imager, though, the company was in financial difficulties. Planetary Resources made was industry sources said were substantial layoffs early this year when it was unable to close a funding round.

Lewicki said in a March interview the lead in that planned funding round was an unnamed “major global mining company” that delayed an investment it planned to make last year for budget reasons. “We just have to adjust everything and find the right timing and the right value proposition,” he said then.

In the statement about the ConsenSys acquisition, Lewicki and Israel offered few details about Planetary Resources’ future. Israel, a former State Department lawyer who worked on issues such as the Outer Space Treaty, suggested that the company could leverage ConsenSys’ technology for space commerce.

“Ethereum smart contract functionality is a natural solution for private-ordering and commerce in space — the only domain of human activity not ordered around territorial sovereignty — in which a diverse range of actors from a growing number of countries must coordinate and transact,” Israel said.

“I am proud of our team’s extraordinary accomplishments, grateful to our visionary supporters, and delighted to join ConsenSys in building atop our work to expand humanity’s economic sphere of influence into the solar system,” Lewicki said in the statement.

In a comment attached to the statement on the Planetary Resources’ website, one person asked if the ConsenSys acquisition would allow for alternative “tokenized” investment into Planetary Resources using Ethereum. “That’s a possibility that could be enabled by the new venture,” Lewicki responded. “Stay tuned!”

https://spacenews.com/asteroid-mining-company-planetary-resources-acquired-by-blockchain-firm/

^  Is Brunson's wrestling really that good?  I don't think we've seen enough of it as of late to be considered a threat against Adesanya.  I think Adesanya will finish Brunson ITD.

And thanks for the notes.