ECP Nethappenings Newsletter Security and Bitcoin

NetHappenings

We just learned that President Biden’s first year in office was the strongest year for economic growth since 1984.

Clarence Thomas is the next SCOTUS Justice to retire! and we need his wife MAGA Moscow Ginny to go back to Russia.
We wantto see Anita Hill nominated.

A major music service picking Joe Rogan over Neil Young is everything Neil Young has been warning us about for fifty years.

Security

Windows 7 BitLocker™ Drive Encryption Security PolicyFor FIPS 140-2 Validation

A Million-Dollar Lawsuit Uncovers Backdoor Art World Contracts
The IRS Should Stop Using Facial Recognition
Taxpayers should be wary of the U.S. government for pushing ID.me’s face-based biometric technology on them.

Did you know Google tricks us into sharing our personal location data, revealing where we shop, pray, live, and more? Not only is that extremely valuable information but Google lied about surveilling us for years.

Pennsylvania’s medical marijuana market is controlled by larger companies because of high licensing fees and financing requirements, access to capital, and a limited number of licenses combine to keep smaller outfits out of the game, experts say.

The comms director for the D.C. Democratic Party was moonlighting for the new faction challenging leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union, we learn via an errant fired tweet!

Edward Snowden@Snowden
Think about the worst economic injustice you’ve ever seen.
Think about how much it would cost to make better.
And then think about the T R I L L I O N dollar budget bastards like this get Congress to rob from the nation *every year.* Raytheon CEO openly celebrating a drone attack in the UAE + rising tensions in Eastern Europe and the South China Sea.

IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access
If you created an online account to manage your tax records with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), those login credentials will cease to work later this year. The agency says that by the summer of 2022, the only way to log in to irs.gov will be through ID.me, an online identity verification service that requires applicants to submit copies of bills and identity documents, as well as a live video feed of their faces via a mobile device.

U.S. science no longer leads the world. Here’s how top advisers say the nation should respond | Science | AAAS

Isaiah Jackson is working with the City of Miami to give $1,000 worth of Bitcoin to local students.

Biden Admin will order agencies to regulate digital assets such as #Bitcoin as a matter of national security.
Candidate for Governor of Texas lays out plan for #Bitcoin to become legal tender.
It’s doable with some gymnastics.
“the Supreme Court has held that, where the marshal of a state court received state bank notes in payment and discharge of an execution, the creditor was entitled to demand payment in gold or silver.” Abbot has already been friendly to Bitcoiners; specifically he wants miners’ dependability as electricity users in order to build out and shore up the electrical infrastructure. On top of that, Texas has already recognized ‘virtual currencies’ enabling business to borrow/loan BTC.
Rio de Janeiro: We want to be a #Bitcoin hub like Miami.

We’ve uncovered the US government’s strategy to tame crypto.
The banking agencies—OCC, FDIC and the Fed—are colluding to give the stablecoin industry to the banks
Full exposé here: ‘Snow Job’: The Plot to Hand the Crypto Industry to the Big Banks
The Biden Administration’s secret crypto strategy is becoming clear: it wants to force stablecoin issuers into the arms of big banking.
Interviews with former regulators and executives at top crypto firms reveal a sophisticated plan not to crush crypto, but to co-opt it by handing a core part of the crypto industry—stablecoins—to the big banks.
“It’s a very thought-through doctrine about how to stop the crypto industry from growing too fast and too much,” says Maya Zehavi, a crypto entrepreneur and investor who has advised regulators.
Who exactly is behind the strategy? While many view the ambitious SEC Chair Gary Gensler as the architect of the Biden Administration’s anti-crypto policies, his influence has been overstated. It is instead Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and a clique of Federal Reserve veterans who appear to be calling the shots. According to Zehavi and others, the Biden Administration doesn’t want to kill stablecoins altogether. Instead, the aim is to cull what these lawmakers perceive as “shadowy” operations like Tether while bringing “regulator-friendly” ones like Circle and Paxos under the umbrella of the U.S. banking system.

–Not sure it’s a plot or a stable job, but stablecoins are the most susceptible vector for regulation in crypto. If the Biden thinks curbing stablecoin issuance to good old banks & re-intermediating is the way to clamp down on crypto, it’s in for a surprise
Plugging big banks in to stablecoin to cover the existing regulatory gaps & serve as gatekeepers is essentially confirming everything that’s wrong about bank innovation & incentives. Nothing can stop bank lobbies even if they have to partner with their arch-nemesis – Sen. Warren

Essential read! The SEC’s new ATS definition is a rewriting of what constitutes an exchange, morphing the definition into any communication protocol where users’ express “trading intent”. This is the SEC’s first real “shots fired” in the war against DeFi

The over ambitious definition essentially places any and every market place under the SEC’s scrutiny, including freedom of speech in general.

@lex_nodeanalysis is spot on as usual

Educational CyberPlayGround NetHappenings: Banks are Dead

Corporate greed is Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone becoming nearly $3 billion richer during the pandemic and owning $6.1 billion in wealth while middle class taxpayers are forced to subsidize the starvation wages of more than 3,000 Home Depot workers across just 9 states.

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