Ep. 59 Mining On Riot's Credit Card
On this episode of the unhashed podcast: Colin absent, so it’s no surprise all the nicknames in the intro were more or less completely botched. We also finally discover who the victim of the AWS mining operation was, being none other than riot games co-founder Marc Merrill. What prevented Amazon and Riot from figuring this out sooner? And...decentralized and encrypted chat is now possible using the lightning network. What sorts of naughty messages should Mario send Ruben when no one is looking?
Weekly News Wrap Up:
On his blog, Jameson Lopp recently went through his annual sync tests of major Bitcoin software implementations. The results, while interesting, were not very surprising, with Bitcoin Core syncing faster than any other implementation by almost 3:1 (6.5 hours vs 18.5 hours for Bcoin).
A hacker named Matthew Ho recently stole the identity, and more importantly, the corporate credit card number of RIOT Games co-founder Marc Merrill. Ho then used the card to rack up $5M in Amazon web services fees to mine BTC and ETH. At one point he even become the largest AWS customers by data usage. More worryingly, it took a few months for RIOT and AWS to realise what was going on.
Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty adjusted downwards more than at any time since its 2018 price low on Nov. 8, data shows. As noted by entrepreneur and cryptocurrency commentator Alistair Milne on Monday, difficulty fell by around 7% after the network’s latest readjustment.
Lightning Labs Dev Joost Jager revealed a project called WhatSat, a way to send encrypted messages over standard LN transactions. The advantage over other encrypted messaging apps like Signal, is that there is no central server which could shut down the network if so ordered. Additionally, because Lightning is already a payment network, there exists a way to incentivise others to pass along messages. Similarly, Matt Odell recently tweeted about kumo.chat, a self destructing LN chat room.
In July 2019, John M. Griffin and Amin Shams, academics from the University of Texas and the University of Ohio, respectively, published the cleverly titled report “Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered?” Their “findings” echoed through mainstream and cryptocurrency media alike. The duo boldly claimed that bitcoin’s 2017 price rise was fueled by unbacked USDT; in essence, their argument goes, Bitfinex/Tether issued the stablecoin without having any dollars in the bank to back them up, meaning bitcoin’s price rose on little more than hot air.
The community taproot review is underway. The idea is that participants will be given some guidance/structure for going through the BIPs, and at the end should be able to either describe issues with the BIP drafts that warrant changes, or be confident that they’ve examined the proposals thoroughly enough to give a so-called “ACK” that the drafts should be formalised and move forwards into implementation/deployment phases. Participants are expected to spend at least 4 hours per week over 7 weeks.
Price Analysis:
Number go down...and then up!
One Final Note:
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