"In addition to the letter, the attorney general sent a three-page questionnaire to Coinbase, Gemini, Bitfinex, Poloniex and nine other exchanges asking them to disclose, among other things, information such as what banks they use, how they hold customer funds, what fees they charge, how they come up with those fees, how they move funds around, who has access to the order books, and the scope of third-party audits."
Lawyer Stephen Palley comments on the NY AG investigation
So one of the things I should've notes is that while this sort of inquiry may be difficult for many to respond to, just because a regulator asks doesn't mean that there won't be challenges to or negotiations regarding the scope of the requests. In other words, this is round 1. https://t.co/UBYc3Mzneb
— Palley (@stephendpalley) April 18, 2018
Kraken CEO responds to NY AG's inquiry
Somebody has to say what everybody's actually thinking about the NYAG's inquiry. The placative kowtowing toward this kind of abuse sends the message that it's ok. It's not ok. It's insulting. https://t.co/sta9VuXPK1 pic.twitter.com/4Jg66bia1I
— Jesse Powell (@jespow) April 18, 2018
Banks are adding crypto trading to their resumes
(Bloomberg, by Matt Levine)
"By the way, the fact that banks, and bank clients, think that a thing is a financial thing doesn't mean anyone else has to like it. Beer-can producers sometimes get pretty unhappy that financial firms trade aluminum. And cryptocurrency true believers, who thought that crypto would usher in the end of the traditional incumbent financial system and the beginning of a new more democratic form of money, may be disappointed if cryptocurrency trading ends up being dominated by the likes of Barclays and Goldman Sachs."
What comes after the social media empires
(BuzzFeed, by Ben Smith)
"Facebook, predictably, saw this fragmentation coming long ago, which is why it has pushed so hard into Groups. But ultimately this was the territorial congress, still beholden to the laws and taxes of the larger empire, when all that will really do is a new nation."
The Facebook controversy: privacy is not the issue
(Scientific American, by Peter Bruce)
"The controversy about Cambridge Analytica that landed Zuckerberg before Congress actually began brewing over a year ago. It was a controversy not about privacy but about how Cambridge Analytica put vast amounts of personal data, mostly from Facebook, into its so-called 'psychographic' engine to influence behavior at the individual level (see When the Big Lie Meets Big Data, published here in March of 2017)."
Research on how third-party trackers abuse Facebook login
New research: third-party trackers wait for users to "Login with Facebook", then exfiltrate user identifiers from Facebook by abusing the access that Facebook grants to the website. https://t.co/xOoicfGQdW
— Arvind Narayanan (@random_walker) April 18, 2018
Neat detective work by @s_englehardt and Gunes Acar! pic.twitter.com/gD2QNh7XH4
Preston's takedown on Basis, a stablecoin that raised $133 million
On the news that Basecoin/Basis raised US$133mm today, this might be a good time to point out (1) the team doesn't understand finance, (2) the scheme collapses without new investors and (3) as-proposed there's a frighteningly complex compliance dimension.https://t.co/vHbUCsOrDo
— Preston Byrne (@prestonjbyrne) April 18, 2018
Lightning network is becoming more distributed over time
Lightning Network is becoming more distributed over time. (Improved legend) from r/Bitcoin
Decred Politeia going live on testnet
0/ We are about to go live on testnet with #Politeia. https://t.co/n6UIQsXMH0 We'd love for you guys to give the site a spin and report bugs on https://t.co/xUHRIsLp2H
— Marco Peereboom (@marco_peereboom) April 18, 2018
Decades-old graph problem yields to amateur mathematician
(Quanta Magazine, by Evelyn Lamb)
"De Grey based his graph on a gadget called the Moser spindle, named after mathematical brothers Leo and William Moser. It is a configuration of just seven points and 11 edges that has a chromatic number of four. Through a delicate process, and with minimal computer assistance, de Grey fused copies of the Moser spindle and another small assembly of points into a 20,425-vertex monstrosity that could not be colored using four colors. He was later able to shrink the graph to 1,581 vertices and do a computer check to verify that it was not four-colorable."