A security flaw in Trezor hardware Bitcoin wallets can reveal users private keys, due to faulty STMicroelectronics chips used in the manufacture of the devices. While Trezor has released a fix for the hack detailed in this archived Medium post, the company – along with other hardware wallet manufacturers such as KeepKey – will continue to use chips from STMicroelectronics that may contain other fault injection vulnerabilities, and result in SFYL if Government agencies or other parties gain access to the device for even a short period of time. Trezor assured users that "everything is fine" and “coins are safe” provided devices are kept within reach of their owners since the glitch isn't a remote execution attack. A blog post on the trezor.io website promises that they will "publish a detailed report in the coming days".
Author Archives: shinohai
Buttfunex Quits United States Denying Its People Butt Fun Exchanges
Buttfunex announced in a blog post today that "effective immediately, we will no longer be accepting verification requests for U.S. individuals", and would discontinue all services to existing U.S. customers over the next 90 days. The news follows a decision by Buttfunex earlier this week to suspend trading of "Digital Asset Tokens" or ICO funbux "Pursuant to the recent report of investigation issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission". (archived)
Roger Ver-ified Fork Fails To Mine Block In Four Hours And Counting, Exchange Rate Low
Summer of forks lulz have hit an inflection point today, with the "Bitcoin Cash" (abbreviated BCC, BCH, and SFYL ) altcoin breaking away from actual Bitcoin. ViaBTC mining pool, the biggest proponent of the split, mined the first Bitcoin block, 478559, following the fork which was promptly rejected by "Bitcoin Cash" nodes. At the time of the writing of this article – nearly 4 hours into the split – BCH miners have failed to find a single block on their own chain. Trading on ViaBTC exchange was slightly above 5,000 BTC and price hovered at 0.109 BTC per coin.
Bitcoin Latecomers Try Pumping Blockchain.info Flush With Fiat Cash
Blockchain.info announced they have received another $40 million in filthy fiat venture capitalist funding from bandwagon Bitcoin latecomers like billionaire Richard Branson, Lakestar, and Google Ventures. Blockchain.info opened for business in 2011 and claims to be the world's largest "online Bitcoin wallet service". The last round of funding it received in 2014 amounted to 30.5 million USD and was used to make such earth-shattering improvements as numerous trivial UI changes, creation of weak pseudo-random number generating software, and an abundance of downtime gold that would make Coinbase green with envy. The latest round of funding is expected to swirl down the toilet just as quickly as the previous batch, leaving copious amounts of "Sorry For Your Loss" in its wake. (archived)
The Poofening: Ether Huffers Suffer Price Flash Crash (As Opposed To More Frequently Covered Service Crash)
mETH huffers, who have been anxiously awaiting an event they dub "The Flippening" (Where the Ethereum fiat market cap surpasses that of Bitcoin), instead were treated to visions of "The Poofening" on Wednesday afternoon when the price of Ethereum flash-crashed down to $13. The price recovered to previous levels shortly afterward, thanks to the efforts of seedy exchanges such as GDAX plugging the holes of the sinking ship by suddenly making signing in to their exchange impossible. Reddit tears likely flow freely tonight with one user reporting a SFYL on GDAX when $10k USD worth of ETH was sold at $16. Ethereum still struggles to not implode under the weight of DDoS attacks to its network owing to the uptick of ICO scams using the platform of late.
Today Is The First Anniversary of "DAO Emptying" Ethereum Attack
Today marks one year since the devastating hack of "The DAO" and led to Ethereum being split into two competing tire fires. Despite the event providing ample warning of what happens when one listens to serial scammers, this hasn't stopped excitable monkeys from continuing to delude themselves and others in a vain effort to build what they believe is "unstoppable code" on the remains of the platform, biding their time until Pope Butt-Erin and the Ethereum Foundation hit the rewind button and inject more Sorry For Your Loss into the mix.
Coblee And Coinbase Quit Each Other
Chucky Lee (WOT:coblee)), best known as the chief forking officer of Litecoin, has quit his position at Coinbase to focus on altcorn development. During his tenure at Coinbase, customers complained of frequent outages and degraded performance, events which often conveniently coincided with swings in US dollar price against the Bitcoin standard. Coinbase is alleged to value itself at an incredible Billion fiat dollars, and claims to have coerced 7.7 million customers into using the platform. The news of Lee's resignation comes on the heels of Coinbase/GDAX seeking $100 million US dollars in venture capital funding for further development, which users ought to hope1 will be used to make the site run for more than a week without crashing.
likely in vain ↩
Ethereum Blocks Way The Fuck Too Big: "Smart" Contract DDoS'ing Own "Initial Coin Offering" To Blame
The Bancor network, billed as a protocol for creating smart tokens using smart contracts on the Ethereum database was forced to alter the terms of its "initial coin offering" "due to massive malicious attacks on network & resulting pending transaction bottleneck". First thought by Ether huffers to be due to a bad actor attempting to prevent the "initial coin offering" from taking place, it was later discovered that transactions to the Bancor "smart" contract address itself was causing the DDoS attack on the network. During the course of the attack it was revealed that despite an advertised cap on the number of tokens proffered in the crowdsale, the contract owners could create new tokens at any time they liked at no additional cost. Despite the signs pointing to impending disaster and a possible repeat of history, the creators managed to capture over $150 million US dollars in the first 3 hours of the crowdsale.
Lazy Wreckers Actually Dare To Name Their Thing "EtherDoge"
A new token launching soon on the Ethereum database, dubbed "EtherDoge", will attempt to combine forces of the forces of twin scams of Ether and Doge to liberate US 1 Million from the pockets and couch cushions of gullible redditards by combining "the fun of Doge and the technology of Ethereum into one". A companion subreddit, r/etherdoge, was launched almost a month ago1 and currently ticks a paltry 75 subscribers. No date has been announced for the start of the crowdsale, though the official website located at www.etherdoge.org promises "So future many wow!" for anyone buying the tokens. The scheme is apparently one of the endless schemes predicted to surface when Dogetipbot scam ended last month.
Related or not, alt-Soros Zbigniew Brzezinski fucked off out of the world of the living earlier this week. ↩
Still No Consensus Supporting Bitcoin Hardfork – Barry Silbert Pretends Otherwise To His Peril
Barry Silbert's (WOT:nonperson) "Digital Currency Group" announced in a medium post that yet another delusion of consensus arrived in the Bitcoin scaling debate with "A conference sponsored by the Ethereum,1 Dash,2 and Ripple3 scams produces an agreement on how to scale Bitcoin". The post outlined the reasons the conference attendees believe they get to make decisions in Bitcoin, with claims of support for the proposals by:
- 56 "companies" located in 21 countries4
- 83.28% of hashing power5
- 5.1 billion US dollars of monthly on chain transaction volume6
- 20.5 million Bitcoin wallets 7
A selection of scam artists doing business as "companies" while lacking the charm necessary to fleece the elderly allege they will "provide technical and engineering support to test and support the upgrade software, as well as to assist companies with preparing for the upgrades". Noted names incapable of providing meaningful testing or support such as: the MLM BitClub Network, Ryan X. Charles' paywalled spam reader, and Gavin Assassinsen were offered as options for the forkcurious to seek support from.