Unhashed Podcast – FIFA Grinding, The Silly PoW

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On this week’s episode of the Unhashed Podcast we talk about the latest in NFT weirdness with celebrity “Stoner Cats”, how video game grinding is the original PoW, Blockfi’s regulatory setback, ThorChains incompetency, the new EU proposal on crypto regulations, and more!

1. In a hard hitting piece from Coindesk, a new animated web series, “Stoner Cats,” launches Monday, featuring Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, Jane Fonda, and others. To watch the first five-minute episode, viewers must purchase a non-fungible token (NFT) for 0.35 ETH each, which is both a digital artwork of a character from the show, as well as a ticket to unlock all “Stoner Cats” episodes as they are made. Actress and entrepreneur Mila Kunis, along with Sound Ventures Partner Maaria Bajwa were interviewed to “share insights” into their project.

2. Last week, Ukrainian authorities busted a massive illegal Sony PlayStation 4 farm for what they believed was a crypto mining operation. As it turns out, the warehouse was actually grinding for FIFA Ultimate Team coins and cards. According to the Ukrainian business journal Delo, which undertook an investigation itself following skepticism from initial findings by the authorities, the 3,800 PS4s discovered weren’t actually being used to mine cryptocurrency, which makes sense given how their hardware and graphics cards aren’t ideal. It also pointed out that in many photos you can see game discs actually sticking out of the consoles. The Security Service of Ukraine has refused to comment on Delo‘s findings, explaining that the ongoing investigation must be kept a secret. For those unfamiliar, the Ultimate Team game mode within FIFA allows gamers to build their own custom teams with various player cards. To get better players, you’ll have to play and win more matches, giving you in-game currency to buy packs. Alternatively, you can also pay with real currency to buy coins to unlock these packs. On the flip side, the in-game currency earned or cards you obtain can be sold back in black markets for actual money. To give you a sense of just how big this market is, official FIFA Ultimate Team transactions brought in $1.6 billion USD for EA in just the past year. – https://hypebeast.com/2021/7/ukraine-playstation-4-farm-fifa-ultimate-team-account-grinding

3. Big woes this week for Blockfi. It started with the state of New Jersey, Blockfi’s home turf, sending in a cease and desist, causing Blockfi to stop offering its Bitcoin Interest Account (BIA for short) to new customers from the state. Within the next several days, Alabama, Texas and Vermont followed suit. At issue is whether or not the BIA is to be deemed a security. In a piece for Coinbase, Preston Byrne lays out the security laws at issue. TLDR, you bank can pay you interest on your dollars and that is not a security because of the tiny risk (due to FDIC insurance), but with BlockFi and other platforms, according to Byrne’s interpretation and the suits by the states, you are actually trading your bitcoin for BIA promises, and these promises are securities. – https://www.coindesk.com/blockfi-securities-law-defi

4. Last week, the Thorchain protocol was drained of around 4,000 ether. A couple of days ago Thorchain was hit by another exploit, this time costing around $8 million. The hacker claims they deliberately minimized the damage from the exploit in a bid to teach THORChain a lesson, stating: “Do not rush code that controls 9 figures,” and “Disable until audits are complete.” The hacker adds that they could have stolen Ether, Bitcoin, Binance Coin, Lycancoin, and many BEP-20 tokens if they had wanted to, asserting that “multiple critical issues” were found and that a 10% bug bounty could have prevented the incident. – https://cointelegraph.com/news/possible-white-hat-hacker-exploits-thorchain-for-8m-proposes-10-bounty

5. Proposed changes to EU law would force companies that transfer Bitcoin or other crypto-assets to collect details on the recipient and sender. The proposals could take two years to become law. The Commission argued that crypto-asset transfers should be subject to the same anti-money-laundering rules as wire transfers. “Given that virtual assets transfers are subject to similar money-laundering and terrorist-financing risks as wire funds transfers… it therefore appears logical to use the same legislative instrument to address these common issues,” the Commission wrote. While some crypto-asset service providers are already covered by anti-money-laundering rules, the new proposals would “extend these rules to the entire crypto-sector, obliging all service providers to conduct due diligence on their customers,” the Commission explained. Under the proposals, a company transferring crypto-assets for a customer would be obliged to include their name, address, date of birth and account number, and the name of the recipient. David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, told the BBC: “This is just applying existing rules to crypto. This has been coming since 2019.” He said that although these were European proposals their impact would reach much further. “If you want to make real money, you have to follow the rules of real money,” he said. – https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-5790111

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