Moving Coins, Data Breaches, and Magical Authors: Bad Crypto News of the Week

It’s been a good week for Bitcoin. The halving doesn’t seem to have done the top cryptocurrency any harm at all, with the dollar value up more than 8 percent over the previous week. Ethereum is up more than 10 percent which just shows that the opportunity for blockchain-based solutions are still red-hot. If you’re taking that opportunity to issue tokens or digitized assets and seeking legal counsel with respect to securities and regulation then you should speak to Josh Lawler at law firm Zuber Lawler. They sponsor the Bad Crypto podcast and they’re specialists in developing technology, including the blockchain.

One person who understands the blockchain better even than Josh Lawler is Satoshi Nakamoto, and it looks like the mystery inventor has been busy. Fifty Bitcoins mined as early as a month after the launch of the Bitcoin mainnet have just moved to two different Bitcoin wallets. It’s not certain that the coins are Nakamoto’s stash but few people were mining with the original Bitcoin client eleven years ago. Craig Wright said that he didn’t move the coins, which is a problem because he also told a US court that the address belongs to him. Oops.

In another mystery move, about $6 million worth of STEEM has been “rescued” in an anonymous transaction on the Bittrex exchange. The tokens, from 64 Steem accounts, were supposed to move to an account called “community321” as part of a hard fork designed to stop “malicious attacks” on the network. The account has asked Bittrex to give them back. 

And in an even stranger move Crypto YouTuber Vin Armani has packed his family off to the Northern Mariana Islands. He’s preparing for the zombie coronavirus apocalypse.

With all of that strange movement, it’s refreshing to read a move that didn’t happen. Crypto lender BlockFi has reported a data breach. But no customer funds were lost, it says, which is more than Steem’s hard fork can say. And it turns out that ISIS isn’t really moving Bitcoin around to fund its evil ways. It doesn’t even have $300 million in a secret crypto war chest.

In Congress, the “Advancing Blockchain Act” is asking for a survey of the technology’s uses and its adoption in the US. Representative Brett Guthrie (R-KY) who introduced the bill, says that he’s worried about China taking a lead in the new technology.

Congress isn’t the only place where the blockchain is getting political. The World Economic Forum Global Blockchain Council has launched its Presidio Principles, a kind of Bill of Rights for the blockchain. The sixteen principles include ensuring that participants can understand the risks and benefits of blockchain technology; that they can create, manage, and independently store cryptographic secret keys; and that they can be certain that their data is protected. It would certainly be nice to see China adopt a Bill of Rights.

The principles might just help to protect buyers and sellers on Shopify. The ecommerce platform now accepts cryptocurrency transactions using CoinPayments.

In other news, Ben Mezrich, the author of Bitcoin Billionaires, a book about the Winklevoss twins, has written an episode of the show Billions. The episode focuses on a mining farm in a boarding school. That boarding school, though, is not Hogwarts. J.K. Rowling still doesn’t get Bitcoin, though she has been trying.

And finally, Philip Euphrates Roqueforte (we’re pretty sure that’s not his real name), the Principal Operating Officer, or POO of Coinstool (and we’re pretty sure that’s not his real title), has announced the first part of the Coinstool 50. It’s just a start so it looks like Roqueforte will be pushing them out for a while.

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