David Gerard

For me hijacking its users' links and referrers to grab money [0] (while stripping this money from actual affiliate links its users may have followed) was enough. Software that does this is actually malware. That's actual loss of trust. I would not bet on it while waiting the next time they would get caught doing sth malicious. [0] https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-web-browser-…

David Gerard has the best summary: ‘He was released on bail for a $250 million bond — “the largest ever pretrial bond,” apparently — secured only on his parents’ home in Palo Alto, where he will be living. ’SBF will surrender his passport and remain in home confinement with electronic monitoring — he’ll wear a bracelet. He will also be required to undergo regular mental health evaluation and treatment. No financial transactions over $1,000 except legal fees, no new lines of credit, and he can’t start a business. Also, no firearms. ’That is: Sam lost all his money in crypto, and has moved back into his parents’ basement.’ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/12/22/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-…

And it's not just Ukraine. Major UK provider Vodaphone is also no longer working: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/12/16/twitters-decline-conti…

For a well thought-out piece of ad hominem covering all that breadth and depth, have a look at David Gerard’s take on the philosophy of SV special smart boys. It’s worth a reread from time to time,— till the OpenSeas evaporate and the BlackRocks laid bare, I suppose. Bonus is DG called out there the Berkeley-based EA (Effective Altruism) tribe, which inspired SBF.. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/09/16/vitalik-bute...

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain by David Gerard is an excellent summary of the crypto landscape. The author takes the view (which I agree with) that crypto is a scam in its entirety, so there is a lot of ground to cover. The book's only flaw is that it was published in 2017 so it misses all of the recent drama. Author's Site: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/book/ My Review: https://sheep.horse/2019/12/book_-_attack_of_the_50_foot_blockchain_by…

For more of David Gerard discussing blockchain topics, be sure to follow Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain at https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/

What they're doing is not actually using the USDP in any manner. The USDP sits in Novi's account in Coinbase Custody. The USDP in the Novi app is just accounting entries in their system. wrote this up here: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/11/02/facebooks-novi-hooks-u… I'd be amazed if the new Novi-in-WhatsApp thing didn't work the same way. It's the best possible way to use the blockchain: say "blockchain" in the press release, absolutely do not touch the thing with your system.

Crypto critics: https://amycastor.com/blog/ https://davidgerard.co.uk https://schiffradio.com/ Warren Buffet They are not necessarily predicting the collapse of bitcoin but they are against crypto for many reasons. Something to think about - bitcoin only wins if it becomes a reserve currency. Until then it’s a negative sum game measured in dollars. Because it’s people swapping in and out dollars but with the expense of mining thrown in which has to be paid in dollars. —- People that are critical of bitcoin but pro crypto? … not sure that would be interesting.

Some of us have maintained a strong anti-Bitcoin position at all times. [edit] David Gerard comes to mind - author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain and Libra Shrugged - and HN user (dgerard I think) (https://davidgerard.co.uk/) More recently Amy Castor, also an HN user (amycastor) (https://amycastor.com/) And of course Bitfinex’d is back and public again on Twitter. (https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed)

He once tried to sell investors on using a classical computer to simulate a quantum computer to mine Bitcoin faster [1]. Granted, this was before Ethereum. > He comments on technical issues and engineering problems, things he knows a thing or two about. He still doesn't seem to truly understand BFT [2]. [1] https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25984251

I love how people get their panties in the bunch over FOSS, yet they are completely fine with tomfoolery like their browser hijacking links and inserting their affiliate codes into them. I am talking about Brave. Skip it. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-web-browser-…

They're just rebranding to annoy author David Gerard, who recently published a great book "Libra Shrugged" looking into Libra and Facebook's bad ideas: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/libra/

If one of the best use cases for blockchain is "data about name owners" and "DNS information", the future of blockchain is bleaker than I'd imagined. Handshake isn't a super-persuasive example to cite, since it's backed by a minor altcoin that's primary use case (according to CoinDesk) is crypto day-trading.[1][2] [1] "Update (May 28, 20:11 UTC): The headline and body of this article have been edited to clarify there were reportedly $10 million worth of HNS trades on Namebase since the token launched, but* only a fraction of those users bought domain names." https://www.coindesk.com/handshake-domains-bring-in-10m-as-race-for-ce… [2] https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/05/31/news-not-craig-wrights…

> Something about Ethereum feels like a 19th century perpetual motion machine. Funny you'd say that: "Vitalik's project immediately before Ethereum is that he was collecting investments from people to fund building a computer program to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, supposedly by simulating a quantum computer." http://archive.is/8wHvq "Buterin later said he had “greatly overestimated” the likelihood of the team breaking mathematics" https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/ More: http://bitcoinerrorlog.com/2016/08/vitaliks-quantum-quest/

I also know of this description of Yudkowsky: "a crank AI scholar who thinks preventing his ideas for sci-fi novels from becoming reality is more important than preventing malaria, and who freaked out once when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt him." https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41198053 Make of that what you will, and if you like, read the book or find the author Sandifer's talks on podcast or video. But many people do make the case, in detail, that this "logical reasoning", "rationalists", "holistic view", "longtermism" etc has at best gone off the rails, and at worst was never on them in the first place. This is what grandparent poster means by "fringe viewpoints and problems with cults of personality" I mean, who wouldn't agree with "effective altruism". It sounds great, what's the alternative, being ineffective at it? Well, "if you do the numbers, you’ll understand that the most effective possible action is to fit out a really nice castle where movement leaders can sit and contemplate the future robot apocalypse" https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/02/06/ineffective-altruism-f…

I followed the blog post this article provides[1], which leads to another blog post[2]. It's another bullshit article > Decentralisation was always a phantom. At most it’s a way to say “can’t sue me, bro.” Every process in Bitcoin tends to centralisation — because Bitcoin runs on economic incentives, and centralised systems are more economically efficient. How exactly does anything specific about bitcoin imply anything about decentralization in general? And how do we know that centralized systems are more efficient? These quotes sum up the author's thinking: > Bitcoin is not about the technology. It’s never been about the technology. Bitcoin is about the psychology of getting rich for free > The marketing pitch is that the actual-money economy will surely collapse any moment now! And if you get into Bitcoin, you can get rich from this. This says all that needs to be said about the author. Cherry picking ridiculous examples, making broad generalizations about the interest behind bitcoin, this author has all this in common with the news media. I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who thinks it's their "moral duty" to shill for the central banks. These folks can churn out all the shitty blog posts and editorials they want, at the end of the day, they'll never be able to freeze wallets like they've frozen bank accounts. This is what upsets them [1]…

> The creation of new ideas being restricted to only experts, those who "actually know stuff" shrinks the pool of creators of new knowledge. Abstractly, I agree with what you've said here, but I don't think the part of Gerard's post that you quoted is making the point that you're countering. Broadly speaking, a lot of discovery work comes from domain experts precisely because of the work it takes to become such an expert. My read on the phrase "actually knowing stuff" is that it refers not just to a solid understanding of the nuts-and-bolts of your field, but also a more general grasp of the field's history. This kind of contextual knowledge is extremely helpful when attempting new or experimental research because it gives you an idea of which areas of knowledge might contain some novel insight while also cluing you in to which approaches might help you arrive at that insight. I interpreted Gerard's critique of Buterin here not as one of insufficient academic clout, but of arrogance, a reification of great man theory [1] through a techno-libertarian lens that positions himself among a host of other so-called "great men" and frames every societal problem as solvable through whatever lens the Great Man might think is particularly interesting. Gerard's critique of Buterin's approach to sharding (which goes into further detail here [2]) seems to back this interpretation up: > Buterin blogs extensive essays full of great thoughts on how to reorganise the world, and how…

CMU and other schools with blockchain courses should be teaching about the ethics and legal penalties and ecological consequences of running blockchain pyramid schemes and scams, instead of teaching students how to hype, evangelize, and retroactively contrive use cases for existing Ponzi schemes like CMU Coin. The world already has more than enough Bitcoin shills. Universities don't need to be pumping and dumping more of them out. David Gerard's book "Attack of the 50 Foot BlockChain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts" would be an excellent down-to-earth textbook for a realistic course about blockchain. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/book/ >Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: The Book >“A sober riposte to all the upbeat forecasts about cryptocurrency” — New York Review of Books >“A very convincing takedown of the whole phenomenon” — BBC News https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3165196 >An experimental new Internet-based form of money is created that anyone can generate at home; people build frightening firetrap computers full of video cards, putting out so much heat that one operator is hospitalised with heatstroke and brain damage. A young physics student starts a revolutionary new marketplace immune to State coercion; he ends up ordering hits on people because they might threaten his great experiment, and is jailed for life without parole. Fully automated contractual systems are proposed to make business and the law work better; the contracts people…

> A lot of people are saying that crypto is a scam because there are malicious actors in the industry. Perish the thought. It doesn't even take any malicious actors to be a scam. It's a new kind of scam: a Nakamoto Scheme. To your https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ > victim factories, which in the next crash will produce hundreds of thousands of howling investors with little formal legal recourse due to four years of inaction on the regulators’ part. How did we get here? As https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-but-bitcoin-… points out: > It’s been nine years. Nobody has a practical use case for blockchains proper. It's now closer to ten. Same article: > Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing it doesn’t do is add a ridiculously wasteful proof-of-work mechanism for who’s allowed to add transactions to the <s>blockchain</s> repository Now, this leads to your second statement: > Don't let these small bumps distract from the greater picture and all the amazing work the developers at Ethereum, Bitcoin etc are doing. Which is what? This ties back to it being a scam: without a practical use case, it lacks any intrinsic value and the only reason people temporarily paid a lot for it were downright scams (Tether), hodl zealots, other hype. It won't take a few more years and it'll settle on its true value which is zero. ps. The Washington Post already…

Brave also got caught hijacking links and swapping in their own affiliate codes https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-web-browser-…

Not real audits by a major firm. Just pinkie promises. David Gerard discussed a while back: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/03/30/tether-produces-a-new-…

Why not firefox? the recent firefox privacy policy stuff seems way overblown to me, like you can read the firefox source code and know they aren't shipping your inputs off to google or whatever. On the other hand, brave has provably run afoul of stealing cryptocurrency donations, and trying to trick users into adding referral codes unintentionally. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-web-browser-… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 Firefox hasn't had anything of that magnitude, has it?

Brave used to insert their affiliate parameters by default when visiting websites. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027 You may also be interested in these topics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-l… They've made good changes after community backlash but their core business model is mostly middle-man stuff with a splash of crypto on top. Firefox's is the Google search engine deal. Pick your poison, I guess.

Was able to find one article calling it out, https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2024/04/03/vortax-a-fake-scam-ai-… Genius approach on their part tho. The landing page looks legit, the site even has blog posts.

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-web-browser-… https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-l… Brave's close association with cryptocurrency and Web 3 is also concerning. Most fraud occurs at the endpoints, not in the middle. While the centralized banking system has mechanisms like chargebacks to address fraud, the crypto space lacks such safeguards. Cryptocurrency has limited real-life utility and is largely sustained by con artists looking to scam people. Once people recognize one scheme as a scam, new crypto concepts, like NFT games, are quickly invented to keep the deception going.

Anyone who's been paying attention knows that Tether is an opaque money-laundering scam, and it's only a matter of time before it totally unravels. The only reason Tether is making noises about cooperating with the US government is because they're being told in no uncertain terms that their continued near-term existence depends on it. Check back in a year. [1] https://amycastor.com/2023/12/28/crypto-collapse-mt-gox-payouts-tether… [2] https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/12/06/bitcoin-goes-up-can-5-…

That might also have been Brave. Tom Scott was targeted by their crap[0] and I recall them fucking about with unsolicited donations for the archive.is operator as well. It seems their business model has changed nowadays (unless they've lapsed again, which Brave has done a few times I think?) but that's definitely been the Brave model in the past. [0]: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-l…

Recently number go up, so there will be people tempted to "invest" in number going even upper. Of course, number going up is purely due to consumer and institutional demand and has nothing to do with, say, Tether printing another 5 billion USDT recently. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/12/06/bitcoin-goes-up-can-5-…

The sequel https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/12/24/return-to-nothingness-…

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/01/13/sec-sues-genesis-and-g… has some background from a week ago.