You don't have to be earning $1m before you be rich

“There was no history of my ever purchasing it, or ever owning it,” said one confused NFT buyer. “Now there’s nothing. My money’s gone.”

Last month, Tom Kuennen, a property manager from Ontario, coughed up $500 worth of cryptocurrency for a JPEG of an Elon Musk-themed “Moon Ticket” from DarpaLabs, an anonymous digital art collective. He purchased it through the marketplace OpenSea, one of the largest vendors of so-called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, in the hopes of reselling it for a profit.

“It’s like a casino,” he said in an interview. “If it goes up 100 times you resell it, if it doesn't, well, you don’t tell anyone.”

He never got the chance to find out. A week later, he opened up his digital “wallet,” where the artwork would supposedly be available, and was faced with an ominous banner reading, “This page has gone off grid. We’ve got a 404 error and explored deep and wide, but we can’t find the page you’re looking for.”

The artwork, which he expected to be on the page, had disappeared entirely. “There was no history of my ever purchasing it, or ever owning it,” he said. “Now there’s nothing. My money’s gone.”

Was it a glitch? A hack? Did Kuennen perhaps misunderstand how, exactly, NFTs work and how they’re stored? You can’t blame him; over the past few months, numerous individuals have complained about their NFTs going “missing,” “disappearing,” or becoming otherwise unavailable on social media. This despite the oft-repeated NFT sales pitch: that NFT artworks are logged immutably, and irreversibly, onto the Ethereum blockchain.

So why would an NFT go missing? The answer, it turns out, points to the complex working of NFTs that are often misunderstood even by the people willing to shell out large sums for them.

How to make an NFT disappear

When you buy an NFT for potentially as much as an actual house, in most cases you're not purchasing an artwork or even an image file. Instead, you are buying a little bit of code that references a piece of media located somewhere else on the internet. This is where the problems begin.

Ed Clements is a community manager for OpenSea who fields these kinds of problems daily. In an interview, he explained that digital artworks themselves are not immutably registered “on the blockchain” when a purchase is made. When you buy an artwork, rather, you’re “minting” a new cryptographic signature that, when decoded, points to an image hosted elsewhere. This could be a regular website, or it might be the InterPlanetary File System, a large peer-to-peer file storage system.

Clements distinguished between the NFT artwork (the image) and the NFT, which is the little cryptographic signature that actually gets logged.

"I use the analogy of OpenSea and similar platforms acting like windows into a gallery where your NFT is hanging,” he said. “The platform can close the window whenever they want, but the NFT still exists and it is up to each platform to decide whether or not they want to close their window.”

So when Kuennen bought that Moon Ticket, there was no JPEG logged onto the blockchain itself. There was just a certificate, pointing to an URL. And that pointer, Clements explained, can be suppressed for a number of reasons, including a violation of a marketplace’s terms and conditions. Copyright violations and stolen artworks are a feature of the emerging NFT space.

"Closing the window" on an NFT isn't difficult. NFTs are rendered visually only on the front-end of a given marketplace, where you see all the images on offer. All the front-end code does is sift through the alphanumeric soup on the blockchain to produce a URL that links to where the image is hosted, or less commonly metadata which describes the image. According to Clement: “the code that finds the information on the blockchain and displays the images and information is simply told, ‘don't display this one.’”

“NFTs come in all different shapes and sizes,” Mewny, a pseudonymous developer at cryptocurrency data insight organization eGirl Capital, said after getting input from their team. “Usually OpenSea will either have to render the image from on-chain metadata or retrieve it from a link in the metadata.”

But “in both cases,” he said, “it can simply choose not to.”

An important point to reiterate is that while NFT artworks can be taken down, the NFTs themselves live inside Ethereum. This means that  the NFT marketplaces can only interact with and interpret that data, but cannot edit or remove it. As long as the linked image hasn't been removed from its source, an NFT bought on OpenSea could still  be viewed on Rarible, SuperRare, or whatever—they are all just interfaces to the ledger.

The kind of suppression detailed by Clements is likely the explanation for many cases of "missing" NFTs, such as one case  documented on Reddit when user "elm099" complained that an NFT called “Big Boy Pants” had disappeared from his wallet. In this case, the user could see the NFT transaction logged on the blockchain, but couldn’t find the image itself.

In the case that an NFT artwork was actually removed at the source, rather than suppressed by a marketplace, then it would not display no matter which website you used. If you saved the image to your phone before it was removed, you could gaze at it while absorbing the aura of a cryptographic signature displayed on a second screen, but that could lessen the already-tenuous connection between NFT and artwork.

Missing from the blockchain

For Kuennen, though, this explanation was wholly unsatisfactory. He was doubtful that his NFT violated OpenSea’s terms and conditions, and he received no correspondence to that effect. No email, no warning, nothing.

He said he couldn’t even find a record of the token itself on the Ethereum blockchain, though he was able to view the transaction in which he spent $500 and bought the image. This was truly disturbing, because even if an NFT artwork has been taken down, the signature should still be available.

We called up a few developers, and they were just as baffled as Kuennen.

“This one’s a pickle,” said Mewny, speculating that the token hadn’t actually been minted at all, and that it would be minted “properly” at a later date in order to save on expensive Ethereum fees. It’s not unlike those cafeterias which sell customers little plastic tokens that can later be exchanged for food after queuing. Except in this case, the token is invisible, the queue never ends, and the “food” is a JPEG stuck to a wall—which abruptly disappears after about a week.

Sam Williams, the founder of Arweave, an Ethereum file storage application, pointed to a recent OpenSea update in which the company began to mint tokens only after a sale is made to minimise losses from gas fees in the case of a botched sale.

As it turns out, however, the resolution to the riddle of Kuennen’s missing NFT record on the blockchain has to do with even more arcane Ethereum minutiae. Strap in.

NFTs are generally represented by a form of token called the ERC-721. It’s just as simple to locate this token’s whereabouts as ether (Ethereum's in-house currency) and other tokens such as ERC-20s. The NFT marketplace SuperRare, for instance, sends tokens directly to buyers’ wallets, where their movements can be tracked rather easily. The token can then generally be found under the ERC-721 tab.

OpenSea, however, has been experimenting with a new new token variant: the ERC-1155, a “multitoken” that designates collections of NFTs.

This token standard, novel as it is, isn’t yet compatible with Etherscan, said Williams. That means ERC-1155s saved on Ethereum don’t show up, even if we know they are on the blockchain because the payments record is there, and the “smart contracts” which process the sale are designed to fail instantly if the exchange can’t be made.

Take, for instance, the buyer B39A88, who last week purchased this collection by the artist “Foswell Banks.” (Who may or may not be this reporter.) The payment record is there and the art is on OpenSea. But under the ERC-721 tab the NFT tied to the artwork is nowhere to be seen. We know, however, that it is online; it’s just not compatible with Etherscan.

Mystery solved

In the end, it turns out that the case of Kuennen's missing NFT came down to two causes: a terms of service violation on OpenSea that resulted in the image being suppressed, and an unreadable ERC-1155 standard that made it inaccessible on Etherscan. We know this because we reached out to OpenSea CTO Alex Attalah and he took a look at Kuennen’s Moon Ticket screenshot.

“Checked our moderator logs,” Attalah wrote. “The creator made a collection, our mods saw it and initially it looked good and non-Elon related. Then they modified it significantly to look like a SpaceX collection (including an official-looking SpaceX banner), and users started to report items including 'Moon ticket #29'. Our team took it down before other users were deceived by it.”

“Unless there's a blue checkmark on the collection, we ask buyers to do their research in our TOS," he added. "Your friend still owns the item in his wallet, though—nothing is being removed from it. Just OpenSea's TOS means we can't show it.”

Atallah recommended that Kuennen simply hook up his wallet to a different marketplace, such as Rarible, where it might not have been taken down.

Kuennen did just that, and returned to us with something of a half-victory: A screenshot in the “collectibles” section of his new Rarible wallet showing, in place of a 404, a blank frame where the image should have been. The image was still either being suppressed or was removed at the source, but Rarible showed that the NFT existed—unlike OpenSea, which plans to replace its impenetrable 404 banner with a proper notification soon, said Atallah.

This is all illustrative of a common problem with Ethereum and cryptocurrencies generally, which despite being immutable and unhackable and abstractly perfect can only be taken advantage of via unreliable third-party applications.

Kuennen, for his part, seemed a little nonplussed. “While I still don’t understand what has happened at least it is still somewhere,” he said via WhatsApp. “Yay.”

He wondered whether there was any way he could restore the image without having to gaze into the blockchain itself. Probably not. Could he, at least, somehow restore the link to the image? But where was it even hosted? Was it even hosted? None of this seemed even remotely hopeful. The best bet, he figured, would be to just resell it as it is, and call it avant-garde.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdj79/peoples-expensive-nfts-keep-vanishing-this-is-why

A system that allows you to easily regulate the cryptocurrency market and influence it thanks to the classification given by their scalability. The opportunity to be included in a different table will push programmers to adapt to the legislation. It will no longer be the right to have to adapt to information technology.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3811723

What do you think?

Ethereum Cofounder Reveals How Radical Upgrade Could Challenge Bitcoin For Crypto Price Dominance

Now, a proposed upgrade to the ethereum blockchain that will destroy (or "burn") ether tokens could mean ethereum becomes more "sound" than bitcoin, according to ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin.

Ethereum's upgrade, known as EIP-1559 and part of a broader move toward ethereum 2.0, will see the network's current transaction-fee system overhauled, with users sending a fee to the network itself instead of the so-called miners that maintain the network. These fees will then be burned, reducing the overall ether supply—something that is itself a controversial topic among the cryptocurrency community.

"If bitcoin and its fixed supply is sound money, then if you have a decreasing supply, does that make [ethereum] ultrasound money," asked Buterin, speaking on a recent episode of the Tim Ferriss Show podcast alongside tech investor Naval Ravikant. "Sound money" refers to a currency's stability and utility as a store of value.

While Buterin called the question a "joke" he went on to explain that there's a distinct possibility the radical upgrade to the ethereum network, approved by developers last week and expected to be deployed in July, could result in the ethereum supply shrinking.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2021/03/12/ethereum-cofounder-reveals-how-radical-upgrade-could-challenge-bitcoin-for-crypto-price-dominance/

Regulation of cryptocurrencies is one of the most complex issues facing the crypto world. And it is that, for many years, governments around the planet have been reluctant to recognize cryptocurrencies as real money with exchange value. However, this seems to be changing little by little, as more governments and regulatory agencies are open to recognizing the value of virtual currencies. The best example of this being that Texas could recognize Bitcoin as a currency.

The regulatory problem

It is impossible to minimize the damage that the lack of a strong regulatory framework causes to the cryptoassets ecosystem. Well, although more and more people around the world acquire and use Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies as a method of payment and savings. The fact that they are not recognized by law, leaves crypto users in a situation of total defenselessness.

Thus, despite how convenient they may be, cryptocurrencies are banned in many countries, or they face such legal uncertainty that companies and citizens are not willing to use them. Fearing the possible legal consequences that this may have, or the lack of protection that the state can provide when doing business with Bitcoin and other currencies.

For this reason, the advances that the main governments of the world are slowly making are important. Which are opening the doors not only to the emergence of a greater number of crypto companies. Even allowing them to go public legally as is the case with Coinbase. If not in addition to the use of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as current money, this being the case of Texas and its new law.

Texas could be Bitcoin territory

This is so thanks to Bill 4474 introduced by Tan Parker, a member of the Texas House of Representatives. It proposes to include the rights of buyers who obtain control of the virtual currency for the purposes of the Uniform Commercial Code.

If this law is passed, Texas could recognize Bitcoin as a legal tender under its own regulatory framework. Qualifying cryptocurrencies as a digital representation of value that functions as a medium of exchange, unit of account or store of value.

This would not only be providing legal protection to the inhabitants of Texas and state companies that decide to carry out operations with Bitcoin, but also with any other virtual currency. Thus expanding the possibilities for crypto trading within the United States, and creating an incentive to carry out operations with crypto assets in the state. Becoming Texas, if the reform is finally approved and implemented by September 1, the second state after Wyoming to recognize the legality of virtual currencies.

https://www.forex-news.com/crypto-news/texas-could-recognize-bitcoin-as-a-currency/

Wyoming Passes Bill to Recognize Cryptocurrencies as Money

In the United States, the state of Wyoming passed a bill that will allow for cryptocurrencies to be recognized as money on Jan. 31, according to the state legislature website.

On Jan. 18, Wyoming legislation presented the bill, which would help to clarify the classification of cryptocurrency.

As reported by Cointelegraph earlier this month, the bill will place crypto assets into three categories: digital consumer assets, digital securities and virtual currencies. Any digital assets that fall into those three categories will be defined as intangible personal property, granting virtual currencies the same treatment as fiat money.

The proposed bill also authorizes banks to “provide custodial services for digital assets consistent with this section upon providing sixty (60) days written notice to the commissioner.”

The bill will go in effect on Mar. 1, as stated on the Wyoming legislature website.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wyoming-passes-bill-recognize-cryptocurrencies-175700330.html

I do not know if I want my car to be developed, based on a Open sourced decentralized network. A car can be a weapon if it is not done by a well-trained certified specialist. (You can cause a accident or you can be in a accident, if this is not done correctly)

Let the car be developed by a centralized automotive industry, but give the backyard mechanic the option to tweak some parameters that are developed by these specialists. (They can play around with that, based on your driving style)  

Most backyard mechanics cannot work on new cars today, because it is all electronic these days and everything is done by the onboard computer. (These guys do not have the tools and software to work on these cars)  

why would Tesla "hire" thousands of people all around the world to make their car better? Why do they have that kind of responsibility? That is crazy and I do not want my car to be done by some freelancer on some other nation putting few more lines to "make it better" with his coding, maybe he did something horrible? Maybe that's actually a bad thing? I wouldn't feel safe in a car like that. I want tesla to continue the way it does, and if someone else wants to copy it, they might do that, I won't buy it but I wouldn't mind it.

Janet Yellen will use her first major address as Treasury secretary to argue for a global minimum corporate tax rate, Axios has learned, as she makes the case for President Biden’s plan to raise U.S. corporate taxes to fund his $2 trillion+ infrastructure plan.

Why it matters: Convincing other countries to impose a global minimum tax would reduce the likelihood of companies relocating offshore, as Biden seeks to increase the corporate rate from 21% to 28%.

• “Competitiveness is about more than how U.S.-headquartered companies fare against other companies in global merger and acquisition bids,” Yellen will say today in a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, according to an excerpt of her prepared remarks obtained by Axios.
• "It is about making sure that governments have stable tax systems that raise sufficient revenue to invest in essential public goods and respond to crises, and that all citizens fairly share the burden of financing government."
• "We are working with G20 nations to agree to a global minimum corporate tax rate that can stop the race to the bottom."

The big picture: President Trump lowered the U.S. rate from 35% to 21%, arguing that U.S. companies were at a global disadvantage and were being incentivized to relocate offshore.

• The average corporate rate in the G7 is 24%, with some nine countries recently lowering their corporate rate, according to the Tax Foundation, a conservative tax group.
• Biden’s plan would also raise the international minimum rate for foreign profits from U.S. companies from 10.5% to 21%, which would still be lower than the 28% domestic corporate rate.

Driving the news: Biden has tapped five Cabinet secretaries to explain — and sell — his plan to the American public, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

• Yellen’s task is to make the international case. Her speech also is designed to set the tone for the annual spring International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in Washington, which will begin virtually this week.

Between the lines: Biden has been relying on Yellen to convince the business community and reassure Wall Street that his $2 trillion+ infrastructure proposal, on top of his $1.9 trillion stimulus package, won’t lead to inflation.

• Now he’s deploying her to convince international finance ministers and central bankers that the world’s biggest economies need to act in concert on corporate rates to avoid a race to the bottom.

Go deeper: Yellen will also challenge the world’s economic powers to focus on climate change and on ways to improve vaccine access for the world’s poorest countries.

• She will call for $650 billion in new “Special Drawing Rights” — essentially lines of credit at the IMF that can help developing countries access more U.S. dollars.
• The Trump administration was skeptical of new SDR allocations and many congressional Republicans are still opposed.

The bottom line: By trying to convince other countries to impose a global minimum tax, Yellen is acknowledging the risks to the American economy if it acts alone in raising corporate rates.

• “Together we can use a global minimum tax to make sure the global economy thrives based on a more level playing field in the taxation of multinational corporations, and spurs innovation, growth, and prosperity,” she will say.

https://www.axios.com/janet-yellen-global-minimum-tax-rate-51c7395b-e46a-4a5c-b18b-bdcf5d8bd352.html

.... you bet on a team team and it teases a comeback just to fxxk you over.

This happens to me every 3. game I bet on basketball.
Just now, my team was down by 19 in the 1st half and 17 at HT. 2min before the end of the 3rd they come within 1 just to give up 8 straight again.
90sec before the end the make it a 1 point game again just to give up 9 straight, WTF.

Conditions of degeneration in the organic world are approximately known. These conditions are often of two distinct kinds, deprivation of food, light, etc. so leading to imperfect nutrition and enervation; the other, a life of repose, with abundant supply of food and decreased exposure to the dangers of the environment. It is noteworthy that while the former only depresses, or at most distinguishes the specific type, the latter, through the disuse of the nervous and other structures etc. which such a simplification of life involves, brings about that far more insidious and through degeneration seen in the life history of myriads of parasites.

--Patrick Geddes

Tesla Is Plugging a Secret Mega-Battery Into the Texas Grid

A Tesla subsidiary registered as Gambit Energy Storage LLC is quietly building a more than 100 megawatt energy storage project in Angleton, Texas, a town roughly 40 miles south of Houston. A battery that size could power about 20,000 homes on a hot summer day. Workers at the site kept equipment under cover and discouraged onlookers, but a Tesla logo could be seen on a worker’s hard hat and public documents helped confirm the company’s role.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tesla-is-plugging-a-secret-mega-battery-into-the-texas-grid/ar-BB1emHXQ

World's biggest battery developed by Elon Musk's car firm Tesla is powering 30,000 homes in Australia and has saved residents $116 MILLION in energy costs over two years

Elon Musk owned Tesla installed a battery farm in South Australia in 2017 and has since helped residents save $116 million in energy costs, Bloomberg reports.

The company installed the world's biggest lithium-ion batter to help reduce the risk of blackouts as the country moved to renewable power generation.

Operating via the Hornsdale Power Reserve, it has helped to restore stability to the network and lower the costs of running the power grid, according to reports.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8082841/Elon-Musks-Tesla-battery-farm-saved-South-Australia-116-MILLION.html

is this already applicable to crypto trading or just stock for now!

In the relentless quest to speed up stock trades, space may be the final frontier.

Today, high-frequency traders use microwaves, lasers and advanced kinds of fiber-optic cable to shave fractions of a second off the time it takes to execute trades. It’s a business that depends heavily on the ability to transmit data as quickly as possible between financial centers. price moves in key markets drive fluctuations in other markets, and HFT firms must race from one exchange to another to adjust their trading activity in light of the latest data. Otherwise, they risk losing money to faster HFT firms with fresher information.

Satellite networks orbiting a few hundred miles above the Earth’s surface could represent the next technological leap forward. Starlink, deployed by Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., has already launched more than 1,000 satellites. Amazon.com Inc., OneWeb Global Ltd. and Telesat Canada are building rival networks set to go live in the coming years. And a UK. space entrepreneur is planning a network that would cater to the high-frequency trading crowd.

The satellites in such constellations would orbit the Earth far closer than older generations of telecommunications satellites. They are also smaller and cheaper to launch. This makes it possible to deploy networks of hundreds or thousands of satellites, in which at least one satellite is always nearby, no matter where on the planet you are, even as the satellites whiz by at thousands of miles an hour. The more advanced projects plan to use laser links between satellites to create speedy data networks covering the globe. With such a network, a Chicago trader could beam U.S. futures prices to a satellite overhead, which would relay them over a chain of several satellites, then down to London. Such space-based connections could be faster than existing networks on Earth.

That has the potential to change the way that high-frequency traders send data between exchanges in North America, Europe and Asia.

what is certain, that smartphone provider must adjust to this rule.  do you think this is a good step to increase Russia's competitiveness against foreign countries that we know are the US?  or this is a bad move that will slow down Russia's competitiveness!

Russia threatens to ban Twitter over illegal content

Russian authorities on Tuesday said they are prepared to block Twitter in a month's time if the social media giant does not comply with demands to remove upwards of 3,000 posts of banned content, AP reports.

Driving the news: Russia claims Twitter failed to heed previous warnings to remove posts about child suicide and pornography, and information about drugs. Authorities in the country have a fraught relationship with social media platforms, which for years have provided a forum for political dissent.

https://news.yahoo.com/russia-threatens-ban-twitter-over-163153656.html