Rory MacDonald received a lucrative payout for representing a leading cryptocurrency at Bellator 192.

When it comes to cryptocurrency, Dash is one of the rising alternative coins on the market.

Touted for its instant transaction times, anonymity and decentralized model, Dash, previously known as Dark Coin, has made its foray into the world of mixed martial arts.

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts may have noticed that former UFC welterweight title challenger Rory MacDonald, now the Bellator welterweight champion, was represented by Dash in his championship bout with Douglas Lima at Bellator 192.

MMA Fighting’s Alexander K. Lee recently spoke with Dash’s head of network operations, Jeff Smith, who reached out to MacDonald and offered him a unique sponsorship deal for Bellator 192.

Smith, an avid mixed martial arts fan, explained Dash’s unconventional payment model and how MacDonald received $250,000 for representing the cryptocurrency at Bellator 192, which was more than Reebook’s total payout ($165,000) for all fighters on the UFC Austin Fight Night card last month.

“There’s actually a monthly proposal cycle, we call it our ‘treasury system,’ and so every month our treasury budget opens and closes and there’s an amount of Dash that we can use as sort of a positive feedback loop,” Smith explained to Alexander K. Lee. “So we’re using this Dash to reinvest into the ecosystem to do things that we as a network think will be better for Dash. Rory’s play was he had this opportunity to be on prime time TV and that’s something that we as a network wanted to do some advertising for, so he approached the network with the idea of, ‘Let’s get me all Dash’d up and I’m gonna be on TV and you guys can be a sponsor of mine.’

“But it’s not like a board of directors or a company where there’s just one person that has the call and that’s the big difference here. Usually, for someone to spend $250,000 to sponsor a fighter, there would be some boardroom that made the decision and stamped it for approval; in this case it’s not, it’s approximately 4700 people all over the world voting yes or no on multiple proposals. Last month I think our cycle had 56 proposals, so there were 55 other people with ideas like Rory’s on how to better Dash.”

Due to the highly volatile nature of the cryptocurrency market, the original $250,000 figure has fluctuated since MacDonald’s initial payout, but Smith says ‘The Red King’ and his team at Tristar are enthusiastic about the technology.

“A lot of the Tristar gym fighters have heard about this, like Georges St-Pierre and the boys that are around Rory and Firas (Zahabi), because Firas, Rory’s coach, kind of got this all started. So a lot of the Tristar gym fighters are starting to ask us questions and that was a question Scott Coker had for me too,” Smith said. “We were chatting after the fight and he just said, ‘You’re crazy. When these fighters find out how much money you gave Rory, your phone will not stop ringing,’ and the irony of it is that these fighters deserve it. Of all the people that deserve some payout like that, it’s the fighters.”

While MacDonald was the lone fighter representing Dash at Bellator 192, former UFC middleweight and light heavyweight title challenger Chael Sonnen has proposed that the Bellator cage, fighters and ring girls all be sponsored by Dash, or ‘Dash’d up’ as MacDonald put it.

Chael's spiel:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9hWPGnWmLg

Check out Lee’s full interview with Smith (and MacDonald) for more information about Dash’s potential collaboration with Bellator.

https://www.bloodyelbow.com/2018/3/12/17109028/ufc-bellator-mma-news-interview-cryptocurrency-dash-rory-macdonald-dash-bitcoin-reebok-fight

Earlier today, we covered news that a previously unknown security research firm, CTS-Labs, has accused AMD of 13 serious security flaws within its products. If these security flaws exist, it’s critically important AMD deal with them immediately. Nothing about their provenance or the process by which they were communicated to the press changes that. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t note the perplexing nature of how they were communicated. Security researchers are also raising the alarm regarding some highly suspicious disclosures and framing of the underlying issues.

With Spectre and Meltdown, an early disclosure spilled the beans about a week earlier than Intel, AMD, ARM, and Google had collectively planned. All of the companies in question had been aware of Spectre and Meltdown since June (meaning, for months) and had been working on fixes throughout that time. Google, in fact, had given the various hardware companies an extended deadline to get fixes ready before disclosing the existence of the bugs. That’s standard operating procedure in security disclosures; vendors are typically given at least a 90-day window to implement solutions. But in this case, AMD was notified a day ahead of the disclosure by an Israeli firm, CTS-Labs.

CTS-Labs has hired a PR firm to handle press inquiries and its website, AMDFlaws.com, doesn’t exactly follow typical disclosure methodology. In fact, the text of the site absolutely drips with scareism, with quotes like:



Image link: https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/AMD-Security-Lives.png

Under the section for “How long until a fix is available?” the site states:



Image link: https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/HowLongBeforeFix.png

If you want to know how long it’s going to take to fix a security flaw, you typically ask the company in question after telling them you’ve found one. This just isn’t how security researchers disclose product flaws. Compare the language above from Google’s own work on Meltdown and Spectre, where it details how the attacks work, links to actual, formal white papers that detail how these attacks work, and then goes into an in-depth breakdown of the attacks with code samples and examples.

CTS-Labs website and white paper completely lack this in-depth technical discussion, but the site is stuffed with pretty infographics and visual designs depicting which AMD products are affected by these issues. It’s exactly the kind of thing you might create if you were more interested in launching a PR blitz as opposed to a security notification.

AMD was given so little notice, it can’t even state if the attacks are valid or not. The company’s statement reads: “At AMD, security is a top priority and we are continually working to ensure the safety of our users as new risks arise. We are investigating this report, which we just received, to understand the methodology and merit of the findings.”

Good security firms don’t put users at risk by launching zero-day broadsides against companies when the security flaws in question could take months to resolve. Good security firms don’t engage in rampant scareism. Good security firms don’t use websites like “AMDFlaws” to communicate technical information, any more than they’d use “IntelSecuritySucks” to communicate security flaws related to Spectre, Meltdown, or the Intel Management Engine. Good security firms do not draw conclusions; they convey information and necessary context.

The reason good security firms don’t do these things is because good security firms are more concerned with finding and fixing problems than they are with publicity. When Embedi found recent flaws in the Intel Management Engine and F-Secure discovered problems within Intel’s Active Management Technology, they emphasized communicating the situation clearly and concisely (F-Secure’s blog post does have a touch of hyperbole, but doesn’t approach what CTS-Labs is doing here).

We aren’t the only site to notice. There’s a notification on CTS-Labs site that it may have a financial interest in the companies it investigates (shorting AMD stock is practically a pastime in financial circles). Other security researchers have absolutely trashed the manner in which the findings were communicated, the likely financial entanglements, and the way the brief has been communicated.

If these security flaws are real, AMD has a lot of work to do to fix them. It absolutely deserves criticism for failing to catch them in the first place, and there is at least one security researcher who has seen the code and believes the matter to be serious. But even if CTS-Labs findings are genuine, it has communicated them in a manner completely at odds with best practices in the security community. Its manner and method of communicating its findings have much more in common with a PR firm hired to do a hit job on a competitor or a company looking to make a financial killing by shorting stock than a reputable security firm interested in establishing a name for itself. Finding 13 major security flaws in a major microprocessor was guaranteed to make the news all on its own.

It’s entirely possible that CTS-Labs is a relatively new company comprised of researchers who decided to debut with a splash and sacrificed the best practices of security disclosures to do it. It’s also possible it isn’t. The company has done itself no favors with these shenanigans.

Update:

CTS-Labs has acknowledged to Reuters that it shares its research with companies that pay for the data and that it’s a firm with just six employees. Meanwhile, Viceroy Research, a short-seller firm, has published a 25-page “obituary” for AMD based on this data in which it declares AMD is worth $0.00 and believes no one should purchase AMD products on any basis, for any reason whatsoever. It also predicts AMD will be forced to file for bankruptcy on the basis of this “report.”

We stand by what we said regarding the flaws themselves — we’ll wait to hear from AMD on how that shakes out and what the risks are — but the actual reporting of the flaws appears to have been done in profound bad faith and with an eye towards enriching a very particular set of clients. ExtremeTech denounces, in the strongest possible terms, this scheme’s apparent perversion of the security flaw disclosure process.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/265582-everything-surrounding-new-amd-security-allegations-reeks-hit-job

Mimiccing its biggest rival for ad dollars - Facebook - Google will ban online advertisements promoting cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings, and "other speculative financial instruments" starting in June.

Some aggressive businesses found a loophole: purposely misspelling words like "bitcoin" in their ads. A Google spokeswoman said the company’s policies will try to anticipate workarounds like this.

The reaction was immediate across the crypto space but for now is somewhat subdued...



Link to image: https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/2018-03-13_21-07-07.jpg

Alphabet’s Google said the new policy will become effective in June across ads bought on its search and display-advertising network, as well as its YouTube unit.

But, as The Wall Street Journal reports, the policy also will restrict ads for nontraditional methods of wagering on the future movements of stock prices and foreign-exchange, such as binary options and financial spread-betting, Google said.

Google said last year it removed more than 130 million ads that were used by hackers to mine for cryptocurrency. That is a very small percentage of the ads run on Google’s ad network.

The company’s director of sustainable ads, Scott Spencer, declined to comment on how much potential ad revenue the company would be turning away by enacting the new policy, saying the decision was made to prevent consumer harm.

One wonders when the crackdown will start on inverse VIX ETFs, or just S&P ETFs, or brokerages? Aren't they all capable of doing consumers "harm"?

As a reminder, here is Facebook's justification:

We want people to continue to discover and learn about new products and services through Facebook ads without fear of scams or deception. That said, there are many companies who are advertising binary options, ICOs and cryptocurrencies that are not currently operating in good faith.

This policy is intentionally broad while we work to better detect deceptive and misleading advertising practices, and enforcement will begin to ramp up across our platforms including Facebook, Audience Network and Instagram. We will revisit this policy and how we enforce it as our signals improve.

We also understand that we may not catch every ad that should be removed under this new policy, and encourage our community to report content that violates our Advertising Policies. People can report any ad on Facebook by clicking on the upper right-hand corner of the ad.

This policy is part of an ongoing effort to improve the integrity and security of our ads, and to make it harder for scammers to profit from a presence on Facebook.

Which roughly translated is "because we know what's best for you!"

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-14/bitcoin-sinks-google-moves-ban-all-crypto-ico-ads-june

CNBC link for those who dislike ZH: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/13/google-bans-crypto-ads.html

It means that when Xi Jinping messes up (and he will, all leaders mess up eventually through either tiredness or hubris or both), they will have to assasinate him to remove him. Whereas before, it would have been a simple matter of saying, "your two terms are up, thank you for your service".

P.S. Donald Trump hasn't got a similar ability to extend term limits in the USA.

The two term limit is part of the Constitution - which means that to change it, you need two thirds of the Senate, two thirds of the House of Representatives AND two-thirds of the states to vote for it. It's pretty hard to do which is why the US constitution doesn't get changed much.

The roughly 3,000 delegates of the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, voted almost unanimously on Sunday to end a two-term limit on the presidency, one of the main leadership posts held by Xi Jinping. While the overwhelming approval by the party-controlled congress was not a surprise, the repercussions go beyond just allowing Mr. Xi to stay on longer.

Here’s what is at stake, and why ending the term limit matters.

Why is the limit in place now?
One lesson that China drew from the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution was the danger of concentrating power in one supreme, unassailable leader who ruled for life.

In 1982, when China was recovering from that chaotic era, lawmakers approved a new Constitution that said the president and also the vice president “shall serve no more than two consecutive terms.”

It is sometimes said that Deng Xiaoping, who led China after Mao, introduced the term limit to prevent the top leader from again becoming too powerful. But that’s not entirely true. Back then the Chinese presidency was not such a powerful post. Deng wielded much of his power informally, without titles or term limits, and through his control of the military.

Even so, the politicians and legal experts who drafted China’s 1982 Constitution saw lifelong tenure as a recipe for tyranny, especially in a one-party state.

“If someone stays in office for 15 years, the people won’t dare express their opinions to him,” said Fang Yi, one of the framers of the Constitution. “The French president begins with one term of seven years, with an option for a second term. But that’s different. They have opposition parties who pick their faults every day.”

How did it become important?
The presidential term limit became more important in the 1990s, when Deng prepared to pass power to his successor, Jiang Zemin.

Under Deng in the 1980s, there was turmoil in succession, as two protégés were forced to resign following student demonstrations. Deng tried to ensure the success of his final choice, Mr. Jiang, by setting him up in China’s three most powerful posts: Communist Party general secretary, chairman of the commission in charge of the military and the presidency, which Mr. Jiang took over in 1993.

But Deng also wanted to ensure that Mr. Jiang did not stay on indefinitely. He started a succession cycle by also promoting Mr. Jiang’s younger heir-apparent, Hu Jintao.

Under Mr. Jiang and later Mr. Hu, a new norm formed. The top leader had clear authority because he held all three main posts. But he had to hand them to a successor after about a decade.

“The three-in-one leadership system and form — of party general secretary, state president and military commission chairman — is not only necessary but also the most fitting for a great party and a great country like ours,” Mr. Jiang said in 2004.

That arrangement allowed two of the most stable transitions of power in China’s modern history, from Mr. Jiang to Mr. Hu in 2002, and then Mr. Hu to Mr. Xi six years ago.

Is the presidency powerful in China?
In China, the political job that matters most is the general secretary of the Communist Party. The party controls the military and domestic security forces, and sets the policies that the government carries out. China’s presidency lacks the authority of the American and French presidencies.

This difference is reflected in language. In Chinese, China’s president is called “zhuxi,” which really translates as “chairman.” Foreign presidents get a different title, “zongtong.” So in effect, Chinese people are referring to Mr. Xi as the “state chairman,” though in English his title is officially translated as “state president” to put him on an even footing with other world leaders.

Still, the Chinese presidency is not entirely ceremonial. The president has the power, acting with the legislature, to declare war or a state of emergency. In times of crisis, disagreement between a party leader and president could cause trouble.

The presidency has become increasingly prominent thanks to China’s growing global stature. At home, Mr. Xi usually speaks as party leader; abroad, he appears as president, who is the formal head of state. Mr. Xi relishes the prestige of state visits to the White House or Buckingham Palace, which might be awkward if he were not president.

Why change the system?
The official Chinese news media have said that Mr. Xi wants to abandon the term limit so that he can keep his trinity of leadership posts. According to Xinhua News Agency and other party-run news outlets, having a term limit on just the presidency is unreasonable because neither of Mr. Xi’s other two major posts — party leader and military chairman — has a similar limit.

Of course, this argument does not address the other solution to that inconsistency: imposing limits on the party and military posts. His action leaves little doubt that Mr. Xi is clearing the way to remain top leader for a long time to come, and without clear rivals.

If the term limit remained, Mr. Xi would have to step down as president at the end of his next five-year term, in 2023. Any successor could potentially become a rival.

Mr. Xi seems determined to remain “three-in-one” leader because he sees himself on a historic mission to make China into a great power. Achieving that will take more than a decade, Xi has said.

Last year, Mr. Xi showed his intent to stay in power by declining to promote a potential successor into the new Politburo Standing Committee, the party’s most powerful body. Mr. Xi and Mr. Hu both served political apprenticeships in the Standing Committee before taking over.

Will Xi will be leader for life?
Mr. Xi has produced plenty of surprises in his first five years in power, not least his decision to abolish the term limit before his second term as president had even started. So predicting Mr. Xi’s future steps isn’t easy.

Even so, The People’s Daily said earlier this month that ending the presidential term limit does not “imply a system of lifelong leadership.” The point seems to be that while Mr. Xi may be around for a while, he won’t be another Mao, who remained in power even as he grew ill and incoherent with age.

But Mr. Xi has not specified how many terms he plans on. Perhaps Mr. Xi himself does not have a firm idea yet. Or perhaps he figures he can enhance his power even further by keeping everyone else guessing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/world/asia/china-xi-jinping-term-limit-explainer.html

President Donald Trump issued an executive order Monday blocking Broadcom Ltd. from pursuing its hostile takeover of Qualcomm Inc., scuttling a $117 billion deal that had been scrutinized by a secretive panel over the tie-up’s threat to U.S. national security.

Trump acted on a recommendation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which reviews acquisitions of American firms by foreign investors. The decision was unveiled just hours after Hock Tan, the chief executive officer of Singapore-based Broadcom, met with officials at the Pentagon in a last-ditch effort to salvage what would have been the biggest technology deal in history.

"There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that Broadcom Ltd.," by acquiring Qualcomm, "might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States," Trump said in the order released Monday evening in Washington.

The order underscores the tough stance the Trump administration is taking on foreign takeovers of U.S. technology firms. In September, he blocked the sale of Lattice Semiconductor Corp. to a Chinese-backed investor. That was just the fourth time in a quarter century that a U.S. president stopped a foreign takeover of an American firm on national security grounds. At least a half-dozen technology deals have collapsed during the Trump administration in the face of concerns raised by CFIUS.

Broadcom said in a statement it was reviewing the order and that it "strongly disagrees that its proposed acquisition of Qualcomm raises any national security concerns." Qualcomm didn’t respond to requests for comment.



(Link to image: http://i67.tinypic.com/24y4twi.jpg )

The order marked an unprecedented move by the White House to stop a hostile bid for a company. Broadcom didn’t have an agreement to buy San Diego-based Qualcomm. It was fighting to win support from Qualcomm shareholders to gain control of its rival’s board and move forward with its offer. Before waiting for an actual deal, CFIUS opened an investigation to review the risks to national security.

Initially, CFIUS was split on whether to weigh in. Pentagon officials insisted on a review of Broadcom’s proxy battle, while Treasury had pushed back, according to people familiar with the matter.

But then on March 4, Treasury ordered Qualcomm to postpone its shareholder vote by 30 days, saying that a takeover by Broadcom threatened Qualcomm’s leadership in developing the next generation of wireless technology. The government said it feared Broadcom would cut investment in research and development in order to increase short-term profits. That could allow Chinese companies, namely Huawei Technologies Co., to become the dominant supplier, the U.S. said.

Trump’s order came as Broadcom was in the midst of moving its headquarters from Singapore to the U.S. Broadcom had announced the move in November after Tan met with Trump at the White House. After the meeting, CFIUS approved Broadcom’s takeover of Brocade Communications Systems, conditioned on the headquarters move, according to Broadcom.

On Monday, Tan went to the Pentagon to meet with CFIUS officials in a bid to address their concerns. Tan argued that combining Broadcom and Qualcomm would actually further U.S. interests by advancing the development of the next generation of wireless technology known as 5G, according to a person familiar with the meeting.

Tan’s meeting followed a letter from Treasury to the companies Sunday that said national security risks from the takeover may prompt a recommendation to Trump to block the deal.

"In the absence of information that changes CFIUS’s assessment of the national security risks posed by this transaction, CFIUS would consider taking further action, including but not limited to referring the transaction to the president for decision," Treasury said in the letter, which Qualcomm made public earlier Monday.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-12/trump-issues-order-to-block-broadcom-s-takeover-of-qualcomm-jeoszwnt

On Monday, Tan went to the Pentagon to meet with CFIUS officials in a bid to address their concerns. Tan argued that combining Broadcom and Qualcomm would actually further U.S. interests by advancing the development of the next generation of wireless technology known as 5G, according to a person familiar with the meeting

The scaling debate has dominated the Bitcoin space for well over two years now. As a central issue, Bitcoin’s one-megabyte block size limit was often insufficient to include all transactions on the network. This ultimately led to the replacement of this block size limit for a block weight limit through Segregated Witness, allowing for up to four megabytes of transaction data. And a group of Bitcoin companies plans to deploy a hard fork to double this by November.

But there is reason to believe the “crisis” may have been fabricated, at least partly. A recent analysis by “LaurentMT,” the developer of blockchain analytics tool OXT, in cooperation with Antoine Le Calvez, creator of Bitcoin statistics resource p2sh.info, shows that the Bitcoin network has had to deal with a load of spam transactions throughout the past two years. Now, in a three-part blog post series dubbing the spam attacks “Moby Dick,” their findings suggest that several major Bitcoin mining pools may have had a hand in this.

“Six or seven pools have played a major role in stuffing blocks with spam transactions,” LaurentMT said. “And charts display what looks like a coordination between these pools.”

The Spam Situation
The very concept of “spam” in the context of Bitcoin is sometimes disputed. Differentiating between “good” and “bad” transactions can be controversial on a network designed for permissionlessness innovation and censorship-resistant payments.

But there is little doubt that certain transactions serve no other purpose than to stuff the Bitcoin network and blockchain. LaurentMT and Le Calvez more specifically define spam as transactions that send lots of tiny fractions of bitcoins to lots of different outputs (“addresses”). These kinds of transactions can’t feasibly have been used to make actual payments, while they do present a significant burden on the Bitcoin network: all nodes need to receive, validate, transmit and (at least temporarily) store all this data.

The analysts found that the Bitcoin network has seen many transactions that fit this category: almost three gigabytes worth of data within a two-year span, adding up to more than 2 percent of the total size of the blockchain, or the equivalent of about a month’s worth of normal Bitcoin use.

“We found that there were four waves of ‘fan-out transactions’ during summer 2015,” LaurentMT told Bitcoin Magazine, referring to the transactions that create lots of outputs. “We think that the first two waves were spamming users and services. The third and fourth waves instead mostly sent the fractions of bitcoins to addresses controlled by the attackers themselves.”

These four waves of spam have been relatively easy to notice, as sudden bursts of transactions clogged up the Bitcoin network for brief periods of time. In some cases these spam attacks were even announced as “stress tests” or “bitcoin giveaways.”

What’s more interesting about LaurentMT and Le Calvez’s analysis is that the two focused on the second half of the puzzle. Almost all the fractions of bitcoins that were sent to all these different addresses have slowly been re-spent back into circulation since. These “fan-in” transactions were not as obvious as the initial waves of spam — but were similarly burdensome.

And, LaurentMT explained, blockchain analysis suggests that most of this spam can be tracked down to one or two entities:

“We’ve identified two wallets that seem to have played a central role in the attacks. They’ve funded long chains of fan-out transactions during summer 2015, and they later aggregated the dust outputs.”

The analysts also suggest that the perpetrator(s) of the spam may have been customers of the Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX. But that’s where their analysis stops.

The Mining Pools
Perhaps what is more interesting is who used this spam to fill up Bitcoin blocks: Bitcoin mining pools.

The spam outputs, generated by the first four waves of fan-out transactions, had been starting to move since autumn of 2015 — sort of. Whoever controlled these addresses had been broadcasting transactions to spend these outputs over the network. However, for a long time, miners did not include these “spam broadcasts” in their blocks; the transactions were ignored.

Up until the second half of 2016, that is. At a very specific point in time, a group of seven mining pools started to suddenly accept these spam broadcasts and include them in the blocks they mined: 1-Hash, Antpool, BitClub Network, BTC.com, HaoBTC, KanoCKPool and ViaBTC.

“So, either these seven pools had an ‘aha moment,’ and suddenly discovered that Bitcoin is about censorship resistance. Or, they had another motivation to fill up blocks with these transactions — perhaps related to the block size debate,” LaurentMT suggested.

For more clues, LaurentMT and Le Calvez looked for notable events that happened around the time of the mining pools’ sudden change of heart. In their research, they did find some correlation with “strange” occurrences. The first is an open letter from HaoBTC (now rebranded as Bixin) to the Bitcoin Core development team. The second was a rumor about a group of Chinese pools planning to end their cooperation with Bitcoin Core: the Terminator Plan.

Of course, something notable happens in Bitcoin just about every week. These events may well be coincidences and, therefore, there could be a very different explanation for the mining pools’ behavior, LaurentMT acknowledged:

“An alternative explanation could be that the different mining pools adopted new mining policies for completely different reasons. I tend to think political motivations are more likely … but that’s just a personal opinion.”

Bitcoin Magazine reached out to the seven mining pools in question. The only mining pool willing to comment on the issue was KanoCKPool, which denied being involved with any sort of manipulation or coordination, stating it just confirms “any and all transactions available.”

UPDATE: After publication of this article (and on reading the comment from Kano CK Pool), LaurentMT pointed out that Kano CK Pool, along with 1Hash and Bitclub Network, are the only pools that had been confirming some of the spam transactions even before the second half of 2016, indicating that the pool could be telling the truth.

UPDATE (2): A representative for Bixin reached out to Bitcoin Magazine to point out that the HaoBTC mining pool had only just started operations at the time when the different mining pools started including spam transactions in their blocks. He said the pool has always confirmed any paying transaction, and denies that HaoBTC (or Bixin) has taken part in any coordination across mining pools.

For a full analysis of the “Moby Dick” spam, read LaurentMT and Le Calvez’s three-part blog post series or watch Le Calvez’s presentation at Breaking Bitcoin in Paris earlier this month.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/curious-case-bitcoins-moby-dick-spam-and-miners-confirmed-it/

What are the incentives to spend your money if it always goes up in value?
Does this not stunt economic growth?

If there was only one currency, and it was deflationary - yes, it would stunt economic growth.

London's Property Crash Has Begun

Authored by Damian Reilly via Medium.com,

The average age of a first time mum at London’s Chelsea and Westminster hospital is 37, a statistic that tells you everything you need to know about the choices supposedly affluent city dwellers are being forced to make in the capital. For the middle classes, the cost of living in London — the cost of getting by — long ago went past insane (£17,040: the cost per year of educating a four year-old child at Thomas’s school in Fulham, not including uniform). It’s the incredible price of property, of course, that’s been the engine driving this madness, ratcheting the pressure ever higher on Londoners who don’t own a home while making very wealthy, on paper at least, those who do.

For the last two decades and more, the capital’s property market to all intents and purposes has behaved like a giant Ponzi scheme played on a global scale. Money from all over the world has poured into London bricks, inflating values unrealistically in relation to wages, while the lavish bonuses paid to European bankers working in the City have also stoked momentum responsible for pushing up, for example, the average price of a London semi-detached house by 553 per cent between January 1995 and November 2017, from £133,820 to £873,603.

Over the same period, the average cost of a detached house in the capital went from £257,748 to £1,453,271.

At last, however, the party is over. London property prices, now still flailing cartoonishly in mid-air despite being well over the edge of a cliff, are at the start of what we can call, for want of a better term, a death plunge. Although the carnage is only just beginning in earnest, desperate homeowners looking to sell are already dropping asking prices by tens of thousands of pounds and more. They know the tide is going out quickly.

The reasons you would have to be clinically insane to buy property in London today are blessedly easy to understand. Describing a modern financial disaster normally requires some pretence of understanding, say, derivatives markets or the myriad immensely complex ways international banks package and trade debt. Not this time.

This time the four horsemen of the capital’s property apocalypse  -  Brexit, knackered oil prices, the threat of a socialist government and absolutely astonishing levels of personal debt  -  are so obvious and easy to see coming they might as well be arriving on bright red London buses.

1) Why should we not have an internal wallet service, where when an individual advertises any crypto for sale, they should be required by the system to have the respective amount within their internal wallet of the respective crypto for the post to be approved for publication. This will help stem out scammers who advertise what they don't have and minimize scam incidences in the forum.

2) Why should the system not be updated to ensure that it offers escrow. System escrow can be trusted by everyone. I know individuals offering escrow services may be against this since they earn from it. But think of this, internal escrow creates a sense of security, and everyone involved in the trade will feel safe. The internal escrow can also be used by campaign managers to ensure trust and timely payment.

Why not just exchange your PayPal fund with bitcoin through virwox?

FOR ANYONE WHO has watched the last few years of cat-and-mouse games on the dark web's black markets, the pattern is familiar: A contraband bazaar like the Silk Road attracts thousands of drug dealers and their customers, along with intense scrutiny from police and three-letter agencies. Authorities hunt down its administrators, and tear the site offline in a dramatic takedown—only to find that its buyers and sellers have simply migrated to the next dark-web market on their list.

So when Dutch police got onto the trail of the popular dark-web marketplace Hansa in the fall of 2016, they decided on a different approach: Not a mere takedown, but a takeover.

In interviews with WIRED, ahead of a talk they plan to give at Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit Thursday, two Netherlands National High Tech Crime Unit officers detailed their 10-month investigation into Hansa, once the largest dark-web market in Europe. At its height, Hansa's 3,600 dealers offered more than 24,000 drug product listings, from cocaine to MDMA to heroin, as well as a smaller trade in fraud tools and counterfeit documents. In their probe into that free-trade zone, which would come to be known as Operation Bayonet, the Dutch investigators not only identified the two alleged administrators of Hansa's black market operation in Germany, but went so far as to hijack the two arrested men's accounts to take full control of the site itself.

'We thought maybe we could really damage the trust in this whole system.'

The NHTCU officers explained how, in the undercover work that followed, they surveilled Hansa's buyers and sellers, discreetly altered the site's code to grab more identifying information of those users, and even tricked dozens of Hansa's anonymous sellers into opening a beacon file on their computers that revealed their locations. The fallout of that law enforcement coup, the officers claim, has been one of the most successful blows against the dark web in its short history: millions of dollars worth of confiscated bitcoins, more than a dozen arrests and counting of the site's top drug dealers, and a vast database of Hansa user information that authorities say should haunt anyone who bought or sold on the site during its last month online.

"When a dark market is taken down, everyone goes to the next one. It's a whack-a-mole effect," says Marinus Boekelo, one of the NHTCU investigators who worked on the Hansa operation. By secretly seizing control of Hansa rather than merely unplugging it from the internet, Boekelo says he and his Dutch police colleagues aimed not only to uncover more about Hansa's unsuspecting users, but to deal a psychological blow to the broader dark-web drug trade. "We thought maybe we could really damage the trust in this whole system," he says.

While the Hansa takeover at times involved the close cooperation of American and German law enforcement, neither the US Department of Justice nor the German Federal Criminal Police Office responded to WIRED's requests for comment, leaving some elements of the NHTCU's account without independent confirmation. What follows is the Dutch police's own, candid description of their experience digging into—and ultimately running—one of the world's top online narcotics trafficking operations.

Pulling Loose Threads
Despite its dramatic turns, the Hansa investigation started in a traditional fashion: with a tip. Security researchers believed they had found a Hansa server in the Netherlands data center of a web-hosting firm. (Security firm BitDefender has claimed some involvement in the Hansa operation. But the NHTCU declined to reveal the name of the security company or the web-hosting firm, along with several other details they say they're keeping under wraps to protect methods and sources. Even the names of the two German men charged with running Hansa remain secret, since German law protects the names of prosecuted individuals until their trial.)

As Boekelo tells it, the security firm had somehow found Hansa's development server, a version of the site where it tested new features before deploying them in the live version that handled its formidable load of thousands of visits from drug shoppers every day. While the live Hansa site was protected by Tor, the development server had somehow been exposed online, where the security firm discovered it and recorded its IP address.

The Dutch police quickly contacted the web host, demanded access to its data center, and installed network-monitoring equipment that allowed them to spy on all traffic to and from the machine. They immediately found that the development server also connected to a Tor-protected server at the same location that ran Hansa's live site, as well as a pair of servers in another data center in Germany. They then made a copy of each server's entire drive, including records of every transaction performed in Hansa's history, and every conversation that took place through its anonymized messaging system.

Even that massive security breach shouldn't have necessarily exposed any of the site's vendors or administrators, since all of Hansa's visitors and admins used pseudonyms, and sites protected by Tor can only be accessed by users running Tor, too, anonymizing their web connections. But after poring through the contents of the servers, the police found a major operational slip-up: One of the German servers contained the two alleged founders' chat logs on the antiquated messaging protocol IRC. The conversations stretched back years, and amazingly, included both admins' full names and, for one man, his home address.

Setting the Trap
Hansa's two suspected admins, the Dutch cops had discovered, were across the border in Germany—one 30-year-old man in the city of Siegen, and another 31-year-old in Cologne. But when the NHTCU contacted the German authorities to request their arrest and extradition, they discovered the pair were already on the radar of German authorities, and under investigation for the creation of Lul.to, a site selling pirated ebooks and audiobooks.

That gave the Dutch investigators an idea: Perhaps they could use the existing German investigation as cover for their own operation, letting the German police nab their suspects for e-book piracy and then secretly taking over Hansa without tipping off the market's users. "We came up with this plan to take over. We could use that arrest," says Gert Ras, the head of the NHTCU. "We had to get rid of the real administrators to become the administrators ourselves."

Just as the NHTCU's elaborate trap started to take shape, however, it was also falling apart: The Hansa servers the Dutch cops were watching suddenly went silent. Ras and Boekelo say they suspect that their copying of the servers somehow tipped off the site's admins. As a result, they had moved the market to another Tor-protected location, shuffling it in Tor's vast deck of anonymized machines around the globe. "That was a setback," Ras says.

Even then, remarkably, the Dutch cops didn't simply cut their losses, ask the Germans to arrest Hansa's administrators, and likely used clues from their computers to find the site's servers and shut them down. Instead, they decided to stick with their stealthy takeover plan, and spent the ensuing months poring over evidence—even as the site continued its brisk narcotics trade—in an attempt to locate the Hansa servers again and quietly hijack them. Finally in April 2017, they got another lucky break: The alleged administrators had made a bitcoin payment from an address that had been included in those same IRC chatlogs. Using the blockchain analysis software Chainalysis, the police could see that payment went to a bitcoin payment provider with an office in the Netherlands. And when the police sent that bitcoin payment firm a legal demand to cough up more information, it identified the recipient of that transaction as another hosting company, this time in Lithuania.

Two For One
Not long after pinpointing those servers for the second time, the NHTCU learned of another surprising windfall: The FBI contacted them to tell them that they'd located one of the servers for AlphaBay, the world's most popular dark-web drug market at the time—far larger than Hansa—in the Netherlands. American investigators were closing in and wanted to pull the plug, just as the Dutch were planning to commandeer Hansa.

The Dutch police quickly realized that after AlphaBay was shut down, its refugees would go searching for a new marketplace. If their scheme worked, AlphaBay's users would flood to Hansa, which would secretly be under police control. "Not only would we get this effect of undermining the trust in dark markets, we'd also get this influx of people," Ras says. They'd be able to surveil a far larger portion of the dark-web economy, he says, and instill a sense in users that there was nowhere to hide. Even fleeing to another marketplace wouldn't let them escape law enforcement's reach.

With the pieces of the takeover plan in place, the Dutch police sent a pair of agents to the Lithuanian data center, taking advantage of the two countries' mutual legal assistance treaty. On June 20, in a carefully timed move designed to catch the two German suspects at the keyboard, the German police raided the two men's homes, arrested them, and seized their computers with their hard drives unencrypted. The Germans then signaled the Dutch police, who immediately began the migration of all of Hansa's data to a new set of servers under full police control in the Netherlands.

"We coordinated with the Germans, so that when they busted in the door we immediately started our action," says Boekelo. "We didn’t want to have any downtime."

Under questioning in a German jail, the two men handed over credentials to their accounts, including the Tox peer-to-peer chat system they had used to communicate with the site's four moderators. After three days, Hansa was fully migrated to the Netherlands and under Dutch police control. No users—or even those moderators—appeared to have noticed the change.

Total Control
For the next month, the Dutch police would use their position at the top of Europe's largest dark-web market to pull off increasingly aggressive surveillance of its users. They rewrote the site's code, they say, to log every user's password, rather than store them as encrypted hashes. They tweaked a feature designed to automatically encrypt messages with users' PGP keys, so that it secretly logged each message's full text before encrypting it, which in many cases allowed them to capture buyers' home addresses as they sent the information to sellers. The site had been set up to automatically removed metadata from photos of products uploaded to the site; they altered that function so that it first recorded a copy of the image with metadata intact. That enabled them to pull geolocation data from many photos that sellers had taken of their illegal wares.

As they tell it, the police eventually became so brazen that they staged a fake server glitch that deleted all the photos from the site, forcing sellers to re-upload photos and giving Dutch authorities another chance to capture the metadata. That ruse alone snagged the geolocated coordinates of more than 50 dealers.

In perhaps its most intrusive move of all, the NHTCU says it essentially tricked users into downloading and running a homing beacon. Hansa offered sellers a file to serve as a backup key, designed to let them recover bitcoin sent to them after 90 days even if the sites were to go down. The cops replaced that harmless text document with a carefully crafted Excel file, says Boekelo. When a seller opened it, their device would connect to a unique url, revealing the seller's IP address to the police. Boekelo says that 64 sellers fell for that trap.

Throughout the trickery, Hansa thrived under the NCHTU's secret control. The undercover agents had studied the logs of the real admins' conversations with their moderators and the site's users long enough to convincingly impersonate them, Ras and Boekelo say. In fact, a whole team of officers took turns impersonating the two admins, so that when disputes between buyers and sellers escalated beyond the moderators' authority, undercover agents were ready to deal with them even more efficiently than the real admins had. "The quality really went up," says Ras. "Everyone was very satisfied with the level of service they got."

Springing the Trap
That competence also made Hansa the natural destination when AlphaBay suddenly winked out of existence in early July of last year. As drug buyers became impatient, eventually more than 5,000 a day of them flocked to Hansa, eight times the normal registration rate, the NHTCU says—all of whom immediately fell under police surveillance.

One week after Alphabay first went down, the Wall Street Journal reported that the site's servers had been seized in a law enforcement raid and that its founder, Canadian Alexandre Cazès, had apparently committed suicide in a Thai prison. The news threw the dark web community into chaos. The resulting flood of Alphabay refugees became so large that the NHTCU shut down new registrations for ten days. The police were bound by Dutch law to track and report every transaction occurring on the site under their control to Europol; with roughly 1,000 illegal transactions occurring every day on their watch, the paperwork was becoming unmanageable.

During their time as black market administrators, the Dutch police only banned one product on Hansa: the highly dangerous opioid Fentanyl. All other drugs on the site continued to flow freely, a circumstance over which Ras and Boekelo seem surprisingly unconflicted. "They would have taken place anyway," says Ras without hesitation, "but on a different market."

After 27 days and about 27,000 transactions, however, the NHTCU decided to hang up its ledger. It unplugged Hansa, replacing the site with a seizure notice and a link to the NHTCU's own Tor site showing a list of identified and arrested dark-web drug buyers and sellers. "We trace people who are active at Dark Markets and offer illicit goods or services," the site read. "Are you one of them? Then you have our attention."

Fallout
The Dutch police came away from their Hansa takeover with concrete rewards: They obtained at least some data on 420,000 users, including at least 10,000 home addresses, which they've turned over to Europol to be distributed to other police agencies around Europe and the world. Since the takedown, Ras says, they've arrested a dozen of Hansa's top vendors, with more arrests planned for coming weeks. They seized 1,200 bitcoins from Hansa, worth about $12 million by today's exchange rates. Since Hansa used bitcoin's multi-signature transaction function to protect funds from police seizure, that confiscation was only possible because the NHTCU had taken over the site and sabotaged its code to disable that feature during Hansa's last month online.

The Dutch police say they've also performed roughly 50 "knock-and-talks," in-person visits to buyers' homes to let them know they've been identified by their dark-web drug purchases, though they say only one high-volume buyer has been arrested so far. "We want people to be aware," says Ras. "We have the data. It's here, and it's not going away."

As for the operation's impact on the overall drug trade, the police point to a study by the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, which found that the Hansa hijacking did have a significantly different outcome from previous dark-web takedowns. While most drug vendors who fled AlphaBay showed up soon after on other dark web drug sites, those who fled Hansa didn't—or if they did, they recreated their online identities thoroughly enough to escape recognition. "Compared to both the Silk Road takedowns, or even the AlphaBay takedown, the Hansa Market shut down stands out in a positive way," the report reads. "We see the first signs of game-changing police intervention."

Other dark-web trackers aren't so sure. Nicolas Christin, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon, says it's tough to measure the long-term impact of the Hansa operation, as drug buyers and sellers still flock to alternative sites like Dream Market, the new top dark-web drug site after Hansa and AlphaBay's desmise, and even to invite-only sites created by individual sellers. "I think in the short term, it created a lot of upheaval," Christin says. "Whether it was sustained, I really don't know."

As for Hansa's users themselves, opinion seems split. "Looks like I'll be sober for a while. Not trusting any markets," one user wrote on Reddit's darknet-focused forum the day the Hansa takedown was announced last summer.

But some insisted that the dark web would bounce back, even from the most elaborate sting operation it had ever seen. "Things will stabilize, they always do," that anonymous user wrote. "The Great Game of whack-a-mole never ends."

https://www.wired.com/story/hansa-dutch-police-sting-operation/?retry

In the cryptocurrency world, negative trends tend to skew people’s perception. More specifically, everyone is focused on the current Bitcoin price dip. It makes them lose track of the bigger picture, which still paints a very promising future for the world’s leading cryptocurrency. A lot of positive things will happen in the next few years, regardless of the current Bitcoin or future Bitcoin price.

The Bitcoin Price Dip is Temporary
If history has taught us one thing, it is how the Bitcoin price tends to bounce back strongly. We see big dips every single year and often end the year with an all-time high. This cycle has been present for some time and seems destined to repeat itself. Speculators may feel differently about that outlook right now, though. This recent Bitcoin price dip has a lot of people concerned, even though things will be just fine.

More specifically, every Bitcoin price dip is a new buying opportunity. Lower prices will attract new speculators and investors alike. This is the way it has always been in the financial sector. Cryptocurrencies are no exception in this regard. Everyone knows Bitcoin hit $19,000 last year. There is no reason to think we won’t see that price again in the future. It may not happen in 2018, but it will eventually happen again. Some people even predict a BTC value of $29,000 by the end of this year.

Fueling the future Bitcoin price growth will be some major technical developments. Most people already know SegWit adoption is increasing as we speak. This leads to lower fees, normal confirmation times, and transaction batching. All of these trends are incredibly positive for the world’s leading cryptocurrency when looking at it from a long-term perspective.

Other Major Developments on the Horizon
SegWit alone will not make Bitcoin great again, though. It does pave the way for the Lightning Network. This scaling solution seems to be closer to a main net release every single day. When it goes live, it will certainly shake things up for all Bitcoin users around the world. Even so, other technical developments are needed to improve the overall ecosystem.

In the near future, we will see more sidechains such as Rootstock. There’s also the likes of drivechain, Liquid, and a few other sidechain projects to keep in mind. All of these new features will unlock new possibilities for Bitcoin in the future. In time, they will also impact the Bitcoin price in a positive manner.

For those looking for more privacy, Bitcoin will have you covered as well. Tumeblebit and ZeroLink are two projects definitely worth keeping an eye on. Their integration may not necessarily happen in 2018, but the overall improvements will attract fresh capital regardless. The future is looking extremely bright for Bitcoin, assuming people are willing to see it. Looking past the current Bitcoin price dip is difficult, but this is only a temporary setback.

https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/03/10/looking-beyond-bitcoin-price-dip-solid-technical-improvements-ahead/

I don’t see why you are interested in getting small sums from other people.

I've seen a thread on the investor based games or from another section I really can't remember exactly since it was an old thread where he invites users to invest 0.01 btc to him and they would have to choose which coin they want to invest on and he must hold everyone's money for about a year and then give it back to them.

How long are we talking about for this hodl service you're planning to operate in the future?

Edit. : I found the thread it was from Loyce.

What do you mean? do you intend to interest us to invest money for your gamble, in return for 15 - 50% per month?