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Gab in the dark
Trying times for budding alt-right cesspit/social network Gab, which has seen banks withdraw support, one by one, after an avid Gab user shot dead 11 Jewish congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue last month.
With no means of sustaining itself the traditional way, Gab has now been forced to turn to bitcoin. In an online post (included in prev. link), Gab founder Andrew Torba wrote that, as well as taking BTC, the company would be setting up a post box for diehard Gabbers to “mail cash/checks to.”
“This is what we need to resort to in order to have any revenue,” Torba thundered. “This is the level no-platforming has reached,” he added, saying he had done “absolutely nothing wrong.” Indeed, besides welcoming and facilitating the hate speech of a mass murderer, what has he done?
Bitmain under fire
Buyers of Bitmain ASICs—well, the three that are left—might have some cause for concern.
First-time buyer Gor Gevorkya, a miner based in North Carolina, has filed a class action suit against the company alleging that his new machine was configured to mine bitcoin and pocket the profit before he had the chance to set up his own account, enriching Bitmain at his expense.
By changing its startup procedure so that its machines begin mining before customers have had the chance to link them to their personal accounts, Gevorkya alleges, Bitmain has generated millions in illicit profit—the company’s total revenue, he asserts, is at “3-4 billion” for just this year.
Though that may have gone down recently.
Ethereum backroom deals
When CoinDesk’s Rachel Rose O’Leary published the minutes of a closed meeting at Devcon between top ethereum developers, the wider community went rug-chewing mad.
Bob Summerwill, the founder of blockchain firm Varrotech, tweeted that such closed meetings were “poisonous” and that developers should “grow some balls” and face the reporters who had, apparently, been purposefully excluded. “How the hell did that happen?” beseeched Ethereum dev Afri Schoedon.
So who originally leaked it? ‘Twas one Greg Colvin, a dev on the “wrong side of a closed door” who in fact didn’t leak the top-secret minutes but rather, er, shared a link to where they had already been posted online. Quite the scoop.
Elsewhere on Decrypt
- A new generation of mining chips has been languishing in secret. Until now.
- Security token exchanges may threaten current crypto exchanges
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