Bring Back Tone Vays: Tornado Cash, Bitcoin Slump and the Digital Gulag
“Bring Back Tone Vays” — a ForkLog editors and friends’ news podcast recapping the week’s main industry events.
Topics of the new episode: the arrest of Tornado Cash’s co-founders, a user data leak from Friend.Tech, a lawsuit from Pseudo-Satoshi, the NFT market, a Bitcoin price correction, and books about the digital industry.
Participants: Alex K., Vasiliy Smirnov, Ed.
Host: Aremefe.
Charges against the Tornado Cash co-founders
23 августа Министерство юстиции США charged the co-founders of the crypto mixer Tornado Cash, Roman Shtorm and Roman Semenov, with money laundering. Shtorm was detained, but soon was released on bail, and Semenov OFAC was added to the sanctions list.
Lawyers commenting on the situation noted that, despite the money-laundering charges, there is no evidence of transactions by Semenov and Shtorm — there is only evidence that they were involved in developing the relevant software.
Friend.Tech data leak
Data of 101 183 people registered on the Web3 social network Friend.Tech using X (formerly Twitter) accounts has been made publicly accessible.
Friend.Tech is a decentralized social app that allows trading of tokenized user shares, deployed on Coinbase’s Base L2 network.
Before the incident, the platform was rapidly gaining popularity: on August 21, the daily transaction fees amounted to $1.4 million — the third place after Ethereum and Lido.
Pseudo-Satoshi Returns
Founded by Jack Dorsey Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund filed a petition with the High Court of the United Kingdom seeking to have Craig Wright’s suit against Bitcoin Core and his Tulip Trading company dismissed.
In 2021, Wright, who claims to be the creator of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto, filed a suit against Bitcoin Core, in which he sought to regain access to two wallets allegedly stolen by staff. The wallets hold a total of 111 000 BTC (~$2.89 bn).
Bitcoin price correction
On the evening of 17 August, the price of the leading cryptocurrency fell sharply from $28,000 to $25,000. The Relative Strength Index (RSI) on the Bitcoin chart dropped below 20 for the first time since March 2020. Many experts, including Michaël van de Poppe, note the similarities of the current cycle to previous ones: in his view, the correction will last 4–6 weeks, after which the asset’s price could rise to $50,000.
Books on the digital industry
Over the past month ForkLog published several book excerpts focusing on different aspects of pervasive digitalisation.
Slovak hacker Juraj Bednar wrote the book Cryptocurrencies — Hack Your Way to the Better Life, from which we translated and published a chapter, in which the confrontation between lunarpunk and solarpunk — two main ideologies within the crypto community — is described. If solarpunk calls for building a utopian decentralized future, then lunarpunks are preparing tools to survive in an impending regulatory dystopia.
Individuum published two books about technology’s penetration into daily life. The first — Pixel. The History of a Point by Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith, in which the author details the dramatic history of computer graphics: from the first scientific breakthroughs to the business giants’ battles for industry supremacy. The second — The Strict Regime State. Inside China’s Digital Dystopia by journalist Geoffrey Cain, in which is presented the path of the PRC to building the most sophisticated total-surveillance system to date.
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