Unhashed Podcast – No Tendies for BTC in China

Customers of leading United States crypto exchange Coinbase have spent the weekend panicking after the exchange mistakenly sent emails to users stating that their two-factor authentication (2FA) settings had been changed. On Friday, Coinbase accidentally sent the email to 125,000 of its customers, resulting in widespread public backlash. Coinbase took to Twitter on Sunday to apologize for the mishap, stating, “We’re laser-focused on building trust and security into the crypto community so that the open financial system we all want is a reality. We recognize that issues like this can hurt that trust.” Despite Coinbase’s apology, many of its users reported taking significant measures in response to the email while fearing that their accounts were being targeted by hackers, including overhauling security settings and liquidating their crypto holdings. Comments on the exchange’s social media also suggest that numerous customers were unable to access the Coinbase app for several days after the incident. “We will continue to work to gain back the trust of every one of our customers who was impacted by those notifications,” Coinbase added. The firm also announced it is reimbursing users with $100 worth of Bitcoin (BTC). – https://cointelegraph.com/news/users-panic-after-coinbase-mistakenly-sends-2fa-reset-notices-to-customers

Ethereum experienced a chain split due a number of network validators, also called nodes, failing to upgrade their software. On Aug. 24, the developer team behind the popular Ethereum software client Geth released an emergency hotfix to a security vulnerability in its code that would have prevented certain users from producing blocks. The Go Ethereum team had disclosed a vulnerability on Aug. 18, saying they would release a patch, but did not specify the exact nature of the vulnerability in an effort to prevent an attack: “The exact attack vector will be provided at a later date to give node operators and dependent downstream projects time to update their nodes and software,” wrote Ethereum team lead Péter Szilágyi in Aug. 24 GitHub patch notes. However, it would seem some users identified the exploit that was hotfixed by the Geth team and are currently exploiting older versions of the Geth software. Though the Geth team emphasized that all users should upgrade their software immediately, only about 30% of users upgraded to the latest version, according to data from ethernodes.org. As background, Geth is the most relied-upon software to connect to the Ethereum blockchain, being run by roughly 75% of the users. This is not the first time Ethereum has experienced a chain split due to users running outdated versions of Geth. In November, the Ethereum network saw a similar disturbance after users failed to upgrade to the latest Geth release, version 1.10.X. At the time, Geth developers said the event was due to a lack of communication about the urgency of the upgrade. – https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/08/27/ethereum-faces-chain-split-as-node-operators-fail-to-update-geth-hotfix/

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of El Salvador to raise their voices against President Nayib Bukele’s decision to make Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) legal tender. What Happened: On Sept 7, Bukele will introduce the much-debated Bitcoin Law in the country. According to the text of this Law, all economic agents must accept Bitcoin along with the dollar as a means of payment. Bukele says that the Bitcoin Law will benefit the people and save close to $400 million in remittance commissions. In addition, it will guarantee instant and more secure financial transactions. But the people of El Salvador are not entirely convinced with it. Hundreds of protesters, including workers, veterans, and pensioners, marched through San Salvador to voice their concerns about the use of cryptocurrency. They are worried that with the law, they will be paid in crypto for their pensions and welfare instead of the US dollar. There is also a concern that people don’t understand the technology needed to use crypto-currency. “We know this coin fluctuates drastically. Its value changes from one second to another, and we will have no control over it,” Stanley Quinteros, a member of the Supreme Court of Justice’s workers’ union, told Reuters. Protesters are wary that the introduction of Bitcoin may encourage corruption which is already seen within its borders. However, as per the law, it does not mean that everyone has to conduct their transactions in the cryptocurrency.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) heavily criticized El Salvador’s decision to adopt Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) as a legal tender. Alongside a blog post published on Sunday, the IMF tweeted that the risk of “privately issued crypto assets like Bitcoin” makes it so that “making them equivalent to a national currency is an inadvisable shortcut.” In its blog post, the IMF admits that digital assets “have the potential to provide cheaper and faster payments, enhance financial inclusion, improve resilience and competition among payment providers, and facilitate cross-border transfers.” Still, the institution points out that creating the “requires significant investment as well as difficult policy choices.” For this reason, the IMF considers adopting Bitcoin to be a shortcut on El Salvador’s part: it adopted a preexistent system instead of creating a custom-made one. The institution admits that many cryptos are secure, easy to access, and cheap to transact but claims that “in most cases risks and costs outweigh potential benefits.” For instance, the post claims that crypto’s “value is just too volatile and unrelated to the real economy.” The IMF also warned that the widespread adoption of a crypto asset such as Bitcoin could hurt macroeconomic stability. The regulator claims that “if goods and services were priced in both a real currency and a crypto asset, households and businesses would spend significant time and resources choosing which money to hold as opposed to engaging in productive activities.” Furthermore, adopting crypto exposes exchange rate risk if taxes were quoted in advance in it, while expenditures remained mostly priced in fiat currency or the reverse. Lastly, the IMF raises concern that Bitcoin mining consumes “an enormous amount of electricity” and consequently, “the ecological implications of adopting these crypto assets as a national currency could be dire.”

This week, the People’s Bank of China said Bitcoin has no value. Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies “are not legal tenders and have no actual value support,” Deputy Director of the Financial Consumer Rights Protection Bureau of the People’s Bank of China, Yin Youping, said in the local Chinese language press on August 27. And China is not the only one. On August 13, Russia’s Central Bank called it a “technological financial pyramid scheme.” First Deputy Governor of the Bank of Russia, Sergey Shvetsov, likened buying Bitcoin to “entering a minefield” and said the local stock exchange should not list any companies that trade in Bitcoin (think the local version of Coinbase). UK central bankers said the same a month earlier, on July 18, when the Bank of England’s FinTech Director, Tom Mutton, said “Bitcoin, given its performance shortcomings and energy inefficiency, is in no way a relevant comparison for the sort of technology we might use in a central bank digital currency,” Coindesk reported him saying. And also…the US – On July 16, Jerome Powell said during testimony to Congress that the Fed’s ongoing research into a digital dollar would probably just render Bitcoin obsolete. “You wouldn’t need stablecoins, you wouldn’t need cryptocurrencies, if you had a digital dollar,” he said. And finally, Japan in late May, Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda said Bitcoin was basically a casino chip used for highly speculative gambling – “No one really uses Bitcoin as a means of settlement.”

Market Rebellion – $DOGE accounted for 17% of Robinhood’s transactional revenue in Q2 – https://twitter.com/MarketRebels/status/1428177769855336449

Tascha – If you make a NFT of a real diamond, and the diamond itself gets destroyed in a fire tomorrow, you still have the same asset. Because the token still exists and is in limited supply just as before. Nothing has changed. What NFT is doing to the concept of asset, few understand. – https://twitter.com/RealNatashaChe/status/1429576700346748938

Mikeinspace – Ethereum has been engineered to thrive in a permissive regulatory environment while Bitcoin has been engineered to thrive in a restrictive regulatory environment. So the “big bet” on the future of crypto hinges on one’s perspective on the future of the regulatory environment. – https://twitter.com/mikeinspace/status/1429986344487591940

a void (leaks) – Wow. Craig Wright is paying for his litigation by taking out a loan against the “Tulip Trust” coins, to be paid back to Calvin Ayre. Coins for which Craig has testified (and his lawyer confirmed) he does not have the private keys. – https://twitter.com/Tak_Horigoshi/status/142985715743289344