Ep. 155 Fatty Steaks and Poopy Plates

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On this episode of the Unhashed Podcast, Facebook services go down - but how do we know when bitcoin goes down? We also discuss Compound Finance threatening to make people pay their taxes instead of paying them back, Brazil looking to recognize BTC as a currency, Panama Papers 3.0, El Salvadorean bitcoin reserves, and coal power in China, followed by some twitterature and dietary lightning round questions.

  1. As many listeners are aware, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were all down on Monday for over 5 hours. Facebook is claiming an upgrade took the site offline. In a statement they said, ""configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt."" As unlikely as that seems, its interesting to note that its been 3130 days since the last time the BTC network was down and BTC is closing in on 99.99% uptime since inception, (currently 99.98677756%). The last time Bitcoin was down was for 6 hrs and 20 min on August 16 2013 following the upgrade to Core version 0.8. Yay Bitcoin. – https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/04/networking-traffic/outage/

  2. From Coindesk, A faulty Compound Finance contract intended to disburse liquidity mining rewards over time was topped off with $66 million in tokens on Sunday morning. About $22 million of those funds were then exploited due to the same bug that drained $80 million in tokens throughout the latter half of last week, per one DeFi developer, who told CoinDesk that the remaining $44 million has now been determined to be at risk. In a tweet on Sunday morning, pseudonymous Yearn. Finance core contributor “banteg,” who has also been weighing in on Compound governance forums in the wake of the bug, wrote that the ability to top off the bugged contract has been “known for a few days now” but the community plan “was to keep shush and hope nobody discovers it for a week.” Compound’s contracts do not have a multi-signature scheme that allows for more immediate upgradability; instead, changes can only be made after a seven-day governance process designed to make the protocol more resilient to hostile changes. That security architecture is now serving as a barrier to a patch to the faulty code. Ironically, Founder Robert Leshner appealed to authority via twitter stating “If you received a large, incorrect amount of COMP from the Compound protocol error: Please return it to the Compound Timelock (address) Keep 10% as a white-hat. Otherwise, it's being reported as income to the IRS, and most of you are doxxed.” – https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/10/01/compound-founder-says-80m-bug-presents-moral-dilemma-for-defi-users/

  3. Federal Deputy Aureo Ribeiro (Solidariedade-RJ), said in an interview that Brazilians will soon be able to buy houses, cars and even McDonald's with Bitcoin, after approval of its law, which will happen soon. The approval took place last Wednesday (29), when the commission met and voted for the approval of the opinion, which will now be discussed in the plenary of the Chamber of Deputies. ""We want to separate the wheat from the chaff, create regulations so that you can trade, know where you're buying, know who you're dealing with, and have this asset to buy a house, a car, go to McDonald's to buy a hamburger, it will be a currency in the country as it happens in other countries” – https://livecoins.com.br/bitcoin-sera-moeda-corrente-no-brasil-em-breve/

  4. Panama Papers part III from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is out, under the title Pandora Papers. The Pandora Papers comprise a 2.94 terabyte data trove spanning 11.9 million records from 14 different offshore services providers. From CoinTelegraph, the documents claim to expose the hidden assets of more than 330 politicians and high-ranking public officials from 90 different jurisdictions, including 35 country leaders and more than 130 billionaires. According to an Oct. 3 ICIJ document summarizing the organization’s findings from its Pandora Papers investigation, offshore assets belonging to a so-called “Bitcoin czar sentenced for money laundering in connection with the largest cyberheist in history” were identified to be handled by one of the firms. While the “Bitcoin czar” identified in the Pandora Papers is not named directly, their sentencing in connection with the most significant cyberheist in history narrows the scope of possibility as to who the individual may be. While two of the six individuals have been sentenced over their role in Carbanak, the circumstances surrounding the 2018 arrest of the presumed leader of Carbanak, Denis Tokarenko (also known as Denis Katana), suggest that he may be the culprit identified in the Pandora Papers. – https://cointelegraph.com/news/sentenced-bitcoin-czar-named-among-pandora-papers

  5. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele confirmed via Twitter Sunday evening that the Latin American nation has successfully onboarded over 3 million users to its Chivo wallet app in just 26 days. The total population of El Salvador is 6.48 million, meaning nearly half of its citizens have received their $30 worth of Bitcoin within the first month of the government making it legal tender. Notably the government of El Salvador itself has so far amassed 700 Bitcoin, worth over $33 million at the time of writing, up from about $31 million on 20 September. El Salvador last purchased Bitcoin at a dip around the $45,700 mark, at a time Bukele believed the asset was undervalued by the global market. The country is now in the green in dollar terms on that purchase, but more importantly, Bukele has shown a resolve to buy, hold, and mine Bitcoin long term, and the country remains the only one to publicly hold Bitcoin in reserve. – https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/el-salvador-onboards-3-million-bitcoin-users-as-price-rises

  6. News tip from NPR via Mike in Space: ""Coal consumption shot up like crazy in the first half of the year because of a very energy-intensive, industry-driven recovery from the COVID-19 lockdowns,"" says Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Helsinki. In other words, as China's export machine roared back to life, electricity-guzzling factories churned out fast fashion and home appliances for customers in the United States and elsewhere. Regulators also loosened controls on coal-intensive sectors like steelmaking as a way to recover from China's pandemic-induced economic slowdown. Now thermal coal has tripled in price on some commodities exchanges. About 90% of coal used in China is domestically mined, but mining volumes from some of China's northern provinces have dropped by as much as 17.7%, according to respected Chinese financial magazine Caijing. Normally, those higher coal prices would have been passed on to energy consumers. But electricity utility rates are capped. This mismatch has pushed power plants to the brink of financial collapse because higher coal prices have forced them to operate at a loss. In September, 11 Beijing-based power generation companies penned an open letter petitioning a central policy decision-making body, the National Development and Reform Commission, to raise electricity rates. ""When coal prices are very high, what happens is that it's not profitable for a lot of coal plants to generate electricity,"" Myllyvirta says. The result: Coal-fired power plants have simply shut down. – https://www.npr.org/2021/10/01/1042209223/why-covid-is-affecting-chinas-power-rations

  7. https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1444155413524537344?s=20 (See Female Erica here - https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1444390937975836676)

  8. https://mobile.twitter.com/Snowden/status/1444794906967486469

  9. https://twitter.com/narodism/status/1445335283533242370?s=28

  10. https://twitter.com/electrumsv/status/1445091823215464452?s=28

  11. https://twitter.com/SquawkCNBC/status/1445347899383156738?s=2

Colin aulds