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Yes, I know you don’t want regulation of your precious crypto. But you keep demanding to be taken seriously, while throwing around numbers in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Being taken seriously involves oversight. People’s susceptibility to anthropomorphizing an even slightly convincing computer program has been known since ELIZA, one of the first chatbots, in 1966. It’s called the ELIZA effect.
Ethereum developed token standards: ERC20 for fungible tokens, and later ERC721 for nonfungible tokens. Because these tokens were developed with a standard, they could be instantly incorporated into the entire crypto ecosystem — digital wallets, crypto exchanges, and NFT platforms. How did Sam and Caroline get into taking high doses of ADHD medication? We think it was via Scott Alexander Siskind, the psychiatrist behind the rationalist blog Slate Star Codex. The bitcoin use case shows up again! It’s money laundering. Caio Marchesani, an Italian fintech owner in the UK, allegedly converted hoards of cash into crypto via Binance for Sergio Roberto de Carvalho — who Interpol called “one of the world’s most wanted kingpins” — and Flor Bressers, a.k.a. “the finger cutter.” Nice. De Carvalho and Bressers were both arrested in 2022. [ Bloomberg , archive] If ChatGPT has plagiarized good sources, the constructed text may be factually accurate. But ChatGPT is absolutely not a search engine or a trustworthy summarization tool — despite the claims of its promoters.David Rosenthal says that the IOSCO report on DeFi seems to have been heavily influenced by his advice. He urged regulators to always look for the man behind the curtain. [ DSHR blog] Byzantine quorum system of size 20 could achieve better decentralization than proof-of-work mining at a much lower resource cost." A statement from Commissioner Kristin Johnson offers some details on the new compliance requirements. [ Statement of Kristin N. Johnson]
In its official statement, Binance wrote: “We are confident that Binance will emerge as a stronger company as we lay the foundation for the next 50 years.” This is good news for bitcoin! [ Binance , archive] CFTC settlement
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A major limitation with Mastercoin was that you could create new currencies, but you couldn’t create more complex rules around those coins. By the end of 2014, the platform’s native token, mastercoin (MSC), was nearly worthless. The DOJ and FinCEN will have 24/7 access to current and historical customer information as they need it. A professor at Texas A&M worried that his students were using ChatGPT to write their essays. He asked ChatGPT if it had generated the essays! It said it might have. The professor gave the students a mark of zero. The students protested vociferously, producing the evidence they wrote their essays themselves. One even asked ChatGPT about the professor’s Ph.D thesis, and it said it might have written it. The university has reversed the grading. [ Reddit; Rolling Stone]
Altman has a long-running interest in weird and bad parasitical billionaire transhumanist ideas, including the “young blood” anti-aging scam that Peter Thiel famously fell for — billionaires as literal vampires — and a company that promises to preserve your brain in plastic when you die so your mind can be uploaded to a computer. [ MIT Technology Review ; MIT Technology Review] Real estate coin Realux paid influencers to promote the idea that it could help close the racial “wealth gap” by “democratizing real estate.” Then it rug pulled. Redistributing wealth! From you to me. [ Vice] The way “land” works in Second Life IIRC is that there’s an initial cost for paying Linden Labs to deploy a new server instance for a “sim” (a relatively large fixed chunk of land that corresponds to that server instance), and then there is a monthly maintenance fee to keep that server instance live. Because a server instance is quite large, there is a significant market in rental subdivisions, which frequently include some amount urban planning, i.e. roads that allow avatars to walk between plots without crossing any private plots and that incidentally take up space without using much of the server “prim” (3D object) quota, so that the plots can have a higher “prim” density than the sim as a whole.Altman told the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee that his autocomplete system with a gigantic dictionary was a risk to the continued existence of the human race! So they should regulate AI, but in such a way as to license large providers — such as OpenAI — before they could deploy this amazing technology. [ Time ; transcript] Winnipeg Free Press: “Too often it reads like a wistful romance novel penned by a betrayed, and self-absorbed, heroine.” [ Winnipeg Free Press , archive] Erez Raviv wrote a very good obituary in Davar, which is quite readable in English through a translator. [ Davar, in Hebrew; Google translation] Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) flew into Seattle from Dubai to personally plead guilty to willful violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. Per the plea agreement, “Defendant prioritized Binance’s growth, market share, and profits over compliance with the BSA.” The plea agreement also contains a statement of facts in the case. [ CZ plea agreement , PDF] I was going to drop in and mention Second Life’s land market. (I used Second Life for a couple years circa 2008, and most of this is from memory, not from actually looking it up.)
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