Ep. 120 Even Clowns Can Wield Hurtful Hammers
On this episode of the Unhashed Podcast, we compare Harvard’s endowment with the Unhashed endowment, get bored by even more corporate BTC purchases, comment on wumpus’ role in the community, and why you should dump all your bitcoin because it can be double-spent now.
As reported by Coindesk, some of the largest university endowment funds in the U.S. have been quietly buying cryptocurrency for the past year or so through accounts held at Coinbase and other exchanges. According to two sources familiar with the situation, Harvard, Yale, Brown and the University of Michigan as well as several other colleges have been buying crypto directly on exchanges. (Several Ivy League endowments took an interest in blockchain technology via crypto-focused venture capital funds back in 2018.) “There are quite a few,” said a source who asked to remain unnamed. “A lot of endowments are allocating a little bit to crypto at the moment.” Yale and Brown did not respond to requests for comment by press time. When reached by CoinDesk, the Harvard and University of Michigan endowments declined to comment. Coinbase also declined to comment. University endowments got a single mention in Coinbase’s annual report for 2020, but without naming any names.
Investment flows into cryptocurrency funds and products hit a record $1.31 billion last week after a few weeks of small outflows, as investors took advantage of the decline in bitcoin and other digital asset prices, according to the latest data on Monday from asset manager CoinShares. Total assets under management (AUM) in the industry slipped to $29.7 billion as of Jan. 22, from an all-time peak of $34.4 billion on Jan. 8. At the end of 2019, the total AUM was just $2 billion. Grayscale, the world’s largest digital currency manager, posted assets under management of $24 billion last week, down from $28.2 billion on Jan. 8. CoinShares, the second largest crypto fund, managed assets of $2.9 billion in the latest week, also down from $3.4 billion on Jan. 8. “We believe investors have been very price conscious this year due to the speed at which prices in bitcoin achieved new highs,” said James Butterfill, investment strategist, at CoinShares.
Marathon Patent Group announced Monday that it bought 4,813 bitcoins in a deal worth $150 million. Yawn...
Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed creator of bitcoin, has sent legal notices to two websites to take down the Bitcoin whitepaper. Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org were sent the notices on Wednesday, Bitcoin contributor ""Cobra"" said in a blog post published Thursday. Cobra said Wright's lawyers claim that he owns the copyright to the paper and is the original owner of bitcoin.org. This is not the first time Wright has made such claims. In 2019, he made at least two attempts to claim copyright and authorship of the Bitcoin whitepaper. Bitcoin.org has refused to remove the whitepaper, while Bitcoincore.org surrendered. ""Unfortunately, without consulting us, Bitcoin Core developers scrambled to remove the Bitcoin whitepaper from bitcoincore.org, in response to these allegations of copyright infringement, lending credence to these false claims,"" said Cobra. ""By surrendering in this way, the Bitcoin Core project has lent ammunition to Bitcoin's enemies, engaged in self-censorship, and compromised its integrity."" Cobra said Bitcoin.org will continue hosting the Bitcoin whitepaper. ""Others hosting the whitepaper should follow our lead in resisting these false allegations,"" he said. On Twitter, under the hashtag #BitcoinPdf, hundreds of users are reporting the upload of the white paper. Some of the entities that have joined the initiative are: Microstrategy, Fidelity Digital Assets, Coin Center, Chaincode Labs, Paradigm fund, Casa startup, NYDIG firm and renowned developer Riccardo Spagni “Fluffy Pony”. Previously, CriptoNoticias reported the publication of the book from Square and Novi, companies linked to Twitter and Facebook.
In a related story, Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Wladimir van der Laan is taking a further step back, Bitcoin Core lead maintainer Wladimir van der Laan has decided to take “even more” of a “background role” for the sake of further decentralizing the project, according to a new blog post. Bitcoin Core is the key software underpinning the Bitcoin network. While van der Laan’s work is mostly “janitorial” in nature, making sure the project’s code proceeds smoothly, some in the community view him as a leader of sorts. As van der Laan puts it, he’s become a sort of “centralized bottleneck.” ""One thing is clear: this is a serious project now, and we need to start taking decentralization seriously,"" said Wladimir van der Laan.
A hidden Biblical message has been found embedded in a transaction in block number 666,666 of the Bitcoin blockchain. The message is a quotation from the sixth book in the New Testament, the Epistle to the Romans. First spotted by @emzy@bitcoinhackers.org, it reads: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good - Romans 12:21.” The transaction in question saw an equal amount of Bitcoin — 432,100 satoshis ($160) — sent to two different addresses. The first several characters of those addresses contain the words “God” and “Bible.” Whoever sent the transactions paid over $50 in fees, equating to five times more than Bitcoin’s peak average transaction fee on the day, according to Bitinfocharts.com. This implies the sender’s goal was to have their transactions, and message, included in block 666,666 specifically.
Crypto research and advocacy group Coin Center received a $1 million donation from Grayscale Investments, as well as a commitment to match any donations made in February up to an additional $1 million. This donation is the second of its kind, which was first pioneered by Kraken back in 2018 with a similar donation and matching campaign. “The Coin Center team has been amazed by the outpouring of support that the cryptocurrency community has shown us over the years, and especially the last few months,” reads an announcement on the group’s website. “Thank you to everyone who has supported us over the years, and a thank you to Grayscale for making this matching campaign a tradition.” Donations to Coin Center go toward its operations budget and reserve. For years, the group has advocated for sensible cryptocurrency and blockchain technology regulations, regularly addressing U.S. legislators on Capitol Hill.
Hut 8 Mining Corp. has announced a partnership with financial services firm Foundry Digital to secure $11.8 million in financing, which it will put toward 5,400 new MicroBT Whatsminer M30S mining rigs, adding 475 petahashes per second (PH/s) to its mining capacity over the next six months. The financing is structured as a 12-month term with an annual interest rate of 16.5 percent. In the recently-published announcement, Hut 8 CEO Jaime Leverton acknowledged that securing new mining equipment is a big challenge for everyone in the business right now. “This partnership builds on Hut 8’s ongoing commitment to shareholders by mitigating supply constraints and reducing our capital expenditure with a proactive fleet management strategy,” said Leverton. Once the new equipment is installed, the total hash power coming from Hut 8 (named after Hut 8 in London’s Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing broke the Nazi’s enigma code) is expected to rise from 825 PH/s before the agreement to 1,300 PH/s. Hut 8 has two mining farms in Alberta, Canada, in Medicine Hat and Drumheller. Most of its energy supply comes from natural gas, which is often vented as a byproduct of oil production
On January 20, Bitmex Research reported that “there was a stale Bitcoin block today, at height 666,833. SlushPool has beaten F2Pool in a race. It appears as if a small double spend of around 0.00062063 BTC ($21) was detected.”