Category Archives: Commentary

Interview with David Francois on Building a Real Bitcoin Business

Posted on by

Operating a Bitcoin business is difficult and, a lot of times is the first step down the road which brings pretty much 9x% to crime within six months to a year (archived). With the excess influx of Venture Capital into companies pretending as to have any involvement with Bitcoin, I sat down with David "davout" Francois CTO of Paymium, formerly known as Bitcoin-Central, to talk about the fundamentals from his personal experience in developing a Bitcoin company that can survive the ruthless climate of the world of Bitcoin. Continue reading →

Symbolics Quadruples Revenue in FY 2015 on One USG Transaction

Posted on by

The privately held firm Symbolics which holds the remaining assets and intellectual property of the former lisp machine manufacturer Symbolics, Inc is reported on the US Government's spending disclosure site to have quadrupled its revenue over last year. The transaction is reported as being for: Continue reading →

Operation Cyber Juice: Police and Their Favorite Drug of Abuse, Part 1

Posted on by

Back in September the Drug Enforcement Agency announced an action dubbed "Operation Cyber Juice" involving the bust of a handful of underground labs compounding imported raw anabolic steroid materials into oral and injectable preparations suitable for end users. Also busted were a number of distributors including persons dealing steroids at a LA Fitness club Franchise and at a Juice bar (archived). At least as interesting though, not very surprising is the number of underground labs and clearnet internet vendors who were not busted despite publicly declaring a presence in the United States. Continue reading →

Xiaoxing Xi isn't a Chinese spy after all

Posted on by

Reports are coming in that the former1 Chairman of the Physics Department at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA – one Mr. Xiaoxing Xi – has had his U.S. Justice Department-drafted indictment2 for "wrecking"3 dismissed without prejudice to the refiling of charges4. Continue reading →

  1. Xiaoxing Xi was regrettably relieved of his leadership post at Temple in May 2015 following this indictment. ↩

  2. Full indictment document here. The observant reader will note that this indictment obliges Mr. Xi to forfeit any real or personal property "derived from the proceeds traceable to the commision" of the alleged offenses to the Federal Government of the United States of America, and that this property be obtained by any and all means necessary. Just like that. Just because Peter F. Schenck, on behalf of United States Justice Department Attorney Zane David Memeger, said so. ↩

  3. "Wrecking" became a term of art in the former Soviet Union, wherein a political undesirable could be branded as a "wrecker" for, say, using too much concrete and trying to bankrupt the glorious state of the USSR, or even using too little concrete and jeopardising the security of the glorious state of the USSR. Basically, it like every socialist term in all times and in all places : a term devoid of specific meaning and therefore used as a catch-all for the vague and whimsical ends of the soi-dissant powers-that-were. The funny/sad part of recalling this fragment of all-too-recent history is that the United States of America, the current soi-dissant power-that-be, is reimplementing the exact same strategy right before our very eyes. We see this with everything from "racist" to "cyberterrorist" and we'll continue to see it for some time to come. ↩

  4. Full dismissal document here. ↩

Consumers Begin Revolting, Bitcoin Is Not Visa

Posted on by

Gavin Andressen stated early on in his pursuit of a hard limit that he wanted Bitcoin to scale to Visa levels, stating the payment network's transaction throughput as a frame of reference. There is a common misconception about the structure of traditional electronic payment networks – this has caused the lemmings of the Bitcoin world to set an unrealistic goal of competing with an industry that is filled with holes. Bitcoin's decentralized ledger prevents it from ever being utilized as a retail payment network directly. Continue reading →

Universal Shares Own Film With Pirates

Posted on by

On the 15th of this month Universal Pictures France filed a takedown request with Google (archived) demanding they remove from results sites hosting or linking pirated copies of Jurassic World. Among the addresses Universal demanded Google sanction was 127.0.0.1 which is the IP address a computer reserves for communicating with itself. This means that not only was Universal seeding its own film to pirates, it was likely doing so from the same machine used detect and prepare a report on infringement for Universal. Continue reading →