Welcome to the Daily Debrief. Enjoy our Special Weekend Kafka Edition.
Our stuff
Leveraging distributed ledger technology: One day, M awoke to find himself transformed into a giant, gorgeous insect. Today he took aim at all the spurious cases of miscellaneous things—babies, oranges, Estonia—“on the blockchain” in this extraordinary listicle. Laugh and cry as M explains in his pedantic monotone why all of these things are not, in fact, “on the blockchain.” Bar two, sorta.
The scalpers scalped: H reveals how renowned Dutch “comedian” Jochem Myjer fought the ticket scalpers using blockchain technology—and won. Myjer—who counts among his “jokes” the phrase “don’t eat yellow snow”—organized a 50,000 seater gig using an Ethereum-based app called GUTS, which locks ticket purchases to users’ phones. There were apparently no scalpers. From where we’re standing, it’s one of the few wildly successful uses of blockchain EVER. (Though we wonder why a centralized system couldn’t have achieved the same result.)
“Mine” craft: The future of video games is revealed in J’s much-anticipated opus today. Would anyone be surprised to learn that the future.. involves blockchain!? And much, much, more, including in-game “proof of work,” which involves picking polygonal flowers and building polygonal houses. Read it NOW you DOLT!
Fetch me a gun to shoot myself in the head: Also the cockroach C did a marvelous story about Binance. Emboldened by the success of the recent BitTorrent ICO, it is looking for another crypto payday: It announced a new coin offering around Fetch.AI, which lets smart agents such as Siri and Alexa spend money. What could possibly go wrong? C is typically silent on this point.
Our lovely T also had a sensational piece yesterday about EOS voting on whether to “burn” 25 million tokens to jack up the price of its crypto. I ignored it though because he said something mean to me. Which I don’t care to repeat, tbh.
Other stuff
Tosho: Smart contract auditor Hosho cut its staff from 37 to 7 amid the continuing bear market. [E: this is a COINDESK story you’re filching again, isn’t it, M? You aren’t fooling anyone.] Hosho, which made its bones parsing through code in the ICO boom, struggled as new forms of smart contract—and the collapse in the ICO model—made it difficult to do business. Most distressingly, Hosho actually generated revenue and never did an ICO, so we can’t even laugh at its stupidity!
A syrupy escape: Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaX, after several months of a conspiracy that involved lawsuits, fraud allegations, $26 million bank-freezes, “liquidity issues,” and a possibly-faked death in an orphanage, seems to have reached its grisly denouement: QuadrigaX has shuttered its website and filed for bankruptcy. Breaker’s David Morris—who has a personal vendetta against me because I once libeled him and I am truly, truly sorry—did a GREAT telling of the unfolding drama here.
Also JUST IN, lol: QuadrigaX might owe its clients $190 million! (Per Coindesk.)[E: M!]
By Ben M, who thinks “yellow snow” is the funniest thing he’s ever read. Tell him why he sucks at ben@decryptmedia.com Better yet, subscribe someone you hate to this email on this very page.