Lie Down WIth Dogs, Get Up WIth Fleas

Source

It is generally quite difficult to upset the denizens of a wretched hive of scum and villainy by further besmirching their reputation, but recently the Trump family has succeeded.

Below the fold I explain how they did it, and why the denizens of the wretched hive are not happy.

"Owning" e-books

The basic aspiration of the LOCKSS Program when we started a quarter century ago was to enable libraries to continue their historical mission of collecting, preserving, and providing readers with access to academic journals. In the paper world libraries which subscribed to a journal owned a copy; in the digital world they could only rent access to the publisher's copy. This allowed the oligoply academic publishers to increase their rent extraction from research and education budgets.

LOCKSS provided a cheap way for libraries to collect, preserve and provide access to their own copy of journals. The competing e-journal preservation systems accepted the idea of rental; they provided an alternate place from which access could be rented if it were denied by the publisher.

Similarly, libraries that purchased a paper book owned a copy that they could loan to readers. The transition to e-books meant that they were only able to rent access to the publisher's copy, and over time the terms of this rental grew more and more onerous.

Below the fold I look into a recent effort to mitigate this problem.

2024 Optical Media Durability Update

Six years ago I posted Optical Media Durability and discovered:

Surprisingly, I'm getting good data from CD-Rs more than 14 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 12 years old. Your mileage may vary.

Here are the subsequent annual updates:

• 2019
• 2020
• 2021
• 2022
• 2023

It is time once again for the mind-numbing process of feeding 45 disks through the readers to verify their checksums, and yet again this year every single MD5 was successfully verified. Below the fold, the details.

Astroturfing

I seem to be stuck on the theme of cryptocurrency gaslighting with two weeks ago More Cryptocurrency Gaslighting and one week ago Greenwashing. Now I look at cryptocurrency gaslighting in the political arena, where it is termed astroturfing:

it is defined as the process of seeking electoral victory or legislative relief for grievances by helping political actors find and mobilize a sympathetic public, and is designed to create the image of public consensus where there is none. Astroturfing is the use of fake grassroots efforts that primarily focus on influencing public opinion and typically are funded by corporations and political entities to form opinions.

Donald Trump, 2019

Currently, the crypto-bros have poured money into primaries, defeated several incumbents deemed to be insufficiently crypto-friendly, and have accumulated an immense war-chest for November's general election. This pot of gold was enough to turn Trump from crypto-skeptic to telling Maria Bartiromo:

Who knows, maybe we’ll pay off our $35 trillion dollar [national debt], hand them a little crypto check, right? We’ll hand them a little Bitcoin and wipe away our $35 trillion

Below the fold I discuss the gaslighting the cryptosphere is using in their massive attempt to purchase "regulatory clarity", and what the scale of this investment suggests about the profits they expect to garner if it succeeds.

Greenwashing

Source

You have only to scan Molly White's Web3 is Going Just Great to realize that you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than the cryptosphere. Everywhere you look you find lies, grift, fraud, and theft. Below the fold I discuss the latest example, in which a coal company marketing itself as "zero-carbon Bitcoin mining" is just the start.

More Cryptocurrency Gaslighting

SEC vs. Consensys

On 30^th June Amy Castor and David Gerard reported that SEC sues Consensys over MetaMask Swaps and Staking:

The SEC is charging Consensys for unauthorized sales of securities through MetaMask Staking and for failure to register as a broker and a dealer while offering crypto trades and staking services through MetaMask Staking and Swaps. The SEC says that Consensys took $250 million in fees as an unregistered broker.

MetaMask is Consensys’ main money maker — a popular browser-based wallet that also lets you stake ETH and buy and sell crypto via decentralized exchanges with “swaps.”

Consensys' defense strategy poses potentially serious problems for the concept of open source, because they are gaslighting about the software that is the basis for the SEC's complaint being open source. Were the court to (a) fall for their gaslighting but (b) agree with the SEC's complaint it could provide a basis for imposing liability on open source developers.

I am afraid that the explanation for why this is so is necessarily rather long but I and others think that it needs to be understood. So stock up with supplies for the journey and follow me below the fold.

Matt Levine Explains Cryptocurrency Markets

Kanav Kariya

Matt Levine's superpower is his ability to describe financial issues in wonderfully simple terms, and in a section of Monday's column entitled Crypto is for fun he is on top form:

In many cases, the essential attribute of a crypto token is liquidity: What you want, often, is a token that trades a lot, because your goal for the token is to trade it a lot. Real-world utility, a sensible business model, acceptance in real transactions, etc., are all less important than just trading if you think of crypto as a toy market for traders to play with. If a token trades a lot at a high price, that in itself justifies the price, because that is all that is asked of a token: It doesn’t need to have a good underlying business or cash flows; it just has to trade a lot at a high price.

Below the fold I discuss the astonishing story behind this explanation of why wash trading is so rife in cryptocurrencies.