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How a Law in the United States Allows for Continued Commitments to Somalia

GAG Guy — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 15:48:00 +0000

President Joe Biden recently announced that he would send U.S. troops to “train and assist” Somali forces, which should reignite the debate over continued U.S. involvement in the “Global War on Terror.” Strictly speaking, despite former President Donald Trump’s withdraw of American military forces from Somalia in 2020, Washington has created proxy military forces in the country using section 10 U.S.C. §127e – otherwise known as 127 Echo in U.S. Code 10 or simply 127e. The 127e budgetary authority allows the government to create proxy forces abroad in place of deploying U.S. military forces. Yet 127e’s terms undercut both Congressional and public oversight, allowing Washington to continue the War on Terror, but with less regard for human rights concerns and potential blowback.

Amongst other things, 127e allows the United States to train troops in other nations but fight in Somalia, which authorizes Washington to maintain ongoing operations while claiming to have removed U.S. troops. This has been done three times under the Biden Administration. In this case, 127e allows the U.S. to continue the War on Terror from afar.

127e programs do not vet its trainee forces for human rights violations. Other U.S. legislation that regulates foreign forces’ human rights records, such as the Leahy Laws, are not applicable to 127e programs. By not considering human rights in the oversight process, Washington creates problems it should want to avoid, including armed groups using American‐made weapons to commit mass murder or kill U.S. soldiers, whether intentionally or not.

For example, U.S. weapons – provided despite preventative 2016 UN sanctions — killed at least 22 civilians in Somalia in a 2021 incident. While it is unclear if these weapons were provided under 127e authority, the group committing the crime – Puntland Security Force – has received U.S. training and weapons from Navy Seals and the CIA since the early 2000s. Similar incidents involving 127e trained forces have soured Somali public opinion on Washington for discounting civilian casualties, with some reports suggesting that the government likely knew and failed to report these casualties.

Somalia is not the only country to host 127e programs with drastic costs.

In Cameroon, Washington used this program to employ a military unit known for committing extrajudicial killings – the Rapid Intervention Battalion – without restraint. This group then murdered and tortured women and children at a base frequented by U.S. military personnel. Moreover, 127e provided funding for the group despite withheld planned security assistance.

Beyond that, because the quality of troops being trained is not subject to oversight by Congress and the American public, 127e programs create lackluster partners. This has led to the deaths of U.S. soldiers. On October 4, 2017, for example, ISIS‐affiliated militants murdered four American and four Nigerien soldiers in Tongo Tongo, Niger. The American soldiers were left vulnerable in the village attempting to support a U.S. team of 127e trainers.

Previous Congressional attempts to reform the 127e authority have all failed. In the House’s version of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Representative Sara Jacobs (D‑CA) sponsored an amendment, later repealed by the Senate, the bill would have required 127e to do human rights vetting prior to giving assistance and to conduct regular inspections throughout the operation. This would not put an end to the program, but it would mitigate its negative impacts by lowering the risk of human rights violations linked to 127e money. Unsavory organizations would receive less aid, and the United States' engagement in the African theater of the War on Terror may gradually fade away.

127e is the result of Washington's refusal to leave the region, and it has the potential to keep the United States committed indefinitely. The longer you stay, the more security threats you'll encounter, allowing malware like 127e to function unchecked. The 127e budget power permits Washington to keep its "War on Terror" on a shoestring budget. 127e allows counterterrorism activities to be escalated in Somalia, other parts of Africa, and elsewhere. Unchecked funding for special counterterrorism operations leads to human rights violations, the deaths of American soldiers, and the US military's inexorable self-entanglement in unnecessary wars, much like the Greek fable of Sisyphus being cursed to roll a boulder up a hill for forever. Washington will perpetuate the "eternal wars" until the fiscal authority changes.

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Web 3 is assisting in the investigation of war crimes in Ukraine

GAG Guy — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 09:25:00 +0000

Every day, millions of smartphone cameras have provided us with a glimpse into the horrors of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Ordinary residents are submitting gruesome photographs and videos to social media and messaging apps in minutes, galvanizing calls for the perpetrators of alleged war crimes to be held accountable.

These recordings, no matter how strong and unequivocal they appear to be, are not guaranteed to be admissible in court.

The trip these digital bits take from the camera lens to their presentation in front of a court is complicated, time-consuming, and often dangerous. The tools for manipulating digital media are as simple to use as the equipment that capture them.

The legal system is not immune to the existential concerns affecting the internet, given the erosion of trust in digital media in our day of "fake news." Because of our justified skepticism of digital platforms, digital evidence is on weak foundation. We frequently lose faith in what we observe. Our skepticism has been weaponized by bad people. It's the nefarious conclusion to a decade-long cyberwar.

The need to re-establish digital trust is undeniable. The good news is that, with the arrival of mature Web 3 technologies, a potential answer is also becoming apparent.

We see the development of tools like blockchains and distributed ledgers as an opportunity to establish a new technological, normative, and legal understanding of digital integrity, far from the hype and conflicts that surround the crypto industry.

The use of Web 3 technology to document war crimes in Ukraine demonstrates how provenance and privacy may be preserved while establishing an unbreakable chain of custody.

Our team at the Starling Lab has developed a framework to securely capture, store, and verify digital content using these open-source tools and best practices to solve the technological and ethical problems of establishing trust in digital records coming out of Ukraine.

Our new workflows combine L1 and L2 protocols, NFTs, and secure hardware wallets to build an end-to-end, immutable Web 3 solution for preserving digital evidence. In essence, these aspects are the new building blocks of digital authenticity. They show how Web 3 empowers end-users to compose solutions across new secure digital protocols when used together.

While the underlying technology is sophisticated, the framework's goals are straightforward:

- Capture – At the point of capture, register and seal digital content and its metadata.
- Store – Use cryptography to govern material and keep it safe on decentralized networks.
- Verify – Keep track of expert attestations from content evaluation and auditing.

Our system has already been cryptographically authenticating and archiving thousands of open-source intelligence records from chat apps, social media, and websites, which capture war crimes and create immutable archives of fact-checker analysis.

We anticipate that by offering an interface to this next generation of technology, we will be able to assist courts in addressing problems to evidence admission in the midst of a ferocious cyberwar, as well as stay ahead of developing digital threats.

To be sure, there is still a lot of work to be done. The courts recognize that they require assistance. The process of responsibility in Ukraine necessitates a combination of quick action and patience, as justice will almost certainly be spread out over numerous venues and span decades.

Making such a long-term commitment to accountability necessitates not only facing but also anticipating many problems on the technical frontier. We believe that all stakeholders will rise to the occasion, accelerating their own roadmaps and assisting the courts in updating outdated protocols.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for cutting-edge technology and processes to be better understood and safely deployed as long-term accountability solutions in our digital age in Ukraine – and beyond.

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The Pity of Pride Month

GAG Guy — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 15:50:00 +0000

I came in Vienna for the summer yesterday. The Austrian capital is in the midst of the High Holy Month of Pride. The trams are all done up in Pride decorations, the stores are decked out with rainbow banners, and the rainbow banner is everywhere. A visitor from another country might mistake this for a national holiday or religious event. They'd be correct.

You see what I mean?

Throughout June, the USMC takes #Pride in recognizing and honoring the contributions of our LGBTQ service members. We remain committed to fostering an environment free from discrimination, and defend the values of treating all equally, with dignity and respect.#PrideMonth #USMC pic.twitter.com/MOyvFmyJiB
— U.S. Marines (@USMC) June 1, 2022

How about that! Shoot rainbow bullets at the enemy, and suddenly the Left finds war to be glorious.

This culture war is having measurable effects on the generation raised within its rituals. The political scientist Eric Kaufmann has a new report out about it. Here’s the summary:

The last decade has seen a precipitous rise in the share of Americans identifying as LGBT, particularly among the youngest adults. Today, among those under 30, a wide range of surveys converge on a number of around 20%.
Government data from Canada and the UK indicate that surveys might be overestimating the extent of the rise in LGBT identity. This caveat must be kept in mind in understanding this report.
Nonetheless, these government sources indicate that the trend is real, even if less reliable surveys might exaggerate it. The UK’s Office for National Statistics finds that 7.6% of those 16-24 identify as LGBT, which can be taken as a low-end estimate for that country.
The most popular LGBT identity is bisexual, which is significantly more common among women than men.
When we look at homosexual behavior, we find that it has grown much less rapidly than LGBT identification. Men and women under 30 who reported a sexual partner in the last five years dropped from around 96% exclusively heterosexual in the 1990s to 92% exclusively heterosexual in 2021.
Whereas in 2008 attitudes and behavior were similar, by 2021 LGBT identification was running at twice the rate of LGBT sexual behavior.
The author provides a high-point estimate of an 11-point increase in LGBT identity between 2008 and 2021 among Americans under 30. Of that, around 4 points can be explained by an increase in same-sex behavior. The majority of the increase in LGBT identity can be traced to how those who only engage in heterosexual behavior describe themselves.
Very liberal ideology is associated with identifying as LGBT among those with heterosexual behavior, especially women. It seems that an underlying psychological disposition is inclining people with heterosexual behavior to identify both as LGBT and very liberal. The most liberal respondents have moved from 10-15% non-heterosexual identification in 2016 to 33% in 2021. Other ideological groups are more stable.
Very liberal ideology and LGBT identification are associated with anxiety and depression in young people. Very liberal young Americans are twice as likely as others to experience these problems. 27% of young Americans with anxiety or depression were LGBT in 2021. This relationship appears to have strengthened since 2010.
Among young people, mental health problems, liberal ideology, and LGBT identity are strongly correlated. Using factor analysis in two different studies shows that assuming one common variable between all three traits explains 40-50% of the variation.
Because the rise in LGBT identity is so heavily concentrated on the political left, its influence on the balance of power between the two parties is likely to be limited.
College students majoring in the social sciences and humanities are about 10 points more LGBT than those in STEM. Meanwhile, 52% of students taking highly political majors such as race or gender studies identify as LGBT, compared to 25% among students overall.
Various data sources indicate that gender nonconformity – trans and non-binary identity – reached its peak in the last few years and has started to decline.
What kind of high school or college a young person attends poorly predicts their likelihood of identifying as LGBT. The one exception is Liberal Arts colleges, where 38% of students describe themselves in this way. This indicates that schooling might not have a large effect on changes in LGBT identity.
Overall, the data suggest that while there has been an increase in same-sex behavior in recent years, sociopolitical factors likely explain most of the rise in LGBT identity.

Read the entire report.

The US Embassy to the Vatican has, for the second year in a row, raised the Pride banner— which, let’s be honest, makes the US Embassy more honest than some clerics within the Vatican. This identity splits churches, as we have seen for some time. For example, some progressive Methodists have embraced a drag queen preacher, “Penny Cost,” who describes “herself” as a “Dragavangelist”:

Recently, a video was posted by openly gay Isaac Simmons, an associate pastor at Hope UMC in Bloomington, Illinois, who has been widely celebrated as the first drag queen certified as an ordination candidate in the UMC. Simmons regularly preaches in drag as the female persona “Ms. Penny Cost,” and has been featured as a speaker for progressive United Methodists across the country.

The video immediately raises questions about the wisdom of ordaining Simmons. Blatantly titled “The Bible is Nothing” the video is now featured prominently on Simmons’ website. It contains repeated use of profanity (including blasphemy), consistent anger-filled claims against orthodoxy, casual hate, and a denial of God. Simmons opens with a shocking disparagement of the Bible’s unique authority, stating, “The Bible is no more holy than Allen Ginsburg’s howls of life, no more peaceful than Oscar Wilde’s Requiescat in pace, and no more stronger than Tammy f—ing Faye’s g—d— eyelash glue.”

Simmons delivers the poem orally as himself (wearing a shirt with the words “PROUD MARY” and an apparent picture of a statue of Jesus Christ’s mother overlaid with rainbow colors), rather than in his drag queen persona. In this video, he calls the Bible “nothing but poetry, pain, and performance” and refers to God as “God, themself” (avoiding male pronouns for God).

The poem eventually devolves into a condemnation of “theology of toxic masculinity” and “Christian terrorists who wield their flappable doctrine to inflict harm on God’s queerly anointed creation.” Simmons even likens Christians with traditional biblical beliefs to literal murderers of gay people like Aaron McKinney, Roger Nunez, and Omar Mateen.

In a generation or less, the congregations that embrace the Penny Cost fraudulent version of Christianity will be defunct. Cause of death: suicide.

I’m with Calvinist theologian Carl Trueman on all this. Pride Month is not the kind of thing you can simply roll your eyes at and get on with it. He writes:

If anybody wants to understand what is happening to the public square in America—indeed, if anyone wants to know how America, or at least her ruling class, wishes to understand itself, they need look no further than Pride Month. If the arrival of the Pilgrims, the founding of the nation, and even the contribution of Martin Luther King Jr. receive no more than 24 hours on the national calendar, the LGBTQ+ alliance has an entire month to party in the streets. And this street party is enabled by the countless commercial ventures that post rainbow flags in their windows and on their websites.

For anyone not completely hoodwinked by the erotic obsessions of our day, taking pride in one’s sexual identity—indeed, even considering sexual desire to be an identity—would seem at best pitiful and at worst a deep perversion of what it means to be human. Yet, here we are. And we should not underestimate the power of what it signifies.

It is a basic fact of history that if you control time and space, you also control the culture. The early Christians of the fourth century knew that as they slowly but surely claimed space in pagan Roman culture for churches and marked the rhythm of time with the development of the liturgical calendar. And all sides in our current political divisions know this as well. It is why debates about the naming of Columbus Day and the status of Confederate statues and the flag of the Confederacy are such contentious topics. These arguments are not just about the things themselves. They are about who owns time and space. In short, they are about who owns the culture’s memory and imagination.

This makes Pride Month something with which no Christian should have any sympathy whatsoever. It marks the beginning of summer with a dramatic assertion of human autonomy and the sovereignty of individual desire. The rebels take over time. And with their flags and their parades they assert ownership over space—public, commercial, virtual, and even—via yards signs and symbols on social media posts—personal and private. It is not about what the state allows consenting adults to do in the privacy of their bedrooms. Far from it. Rather, June witnesses as comprehensive an attempt at cultural revolution as one is ever likely to see.

Read the whole thing.

Even if you have no problem with homosexuality, you cannot support Pride Month if you are a Christian or a traditionalist. I have two homosexual conservative friends who are not religious, who are comfortable being gay (one is coupled, the other isn't but is open to it), and who despise the way sexual desire has become an identity and a cultural celebration. Though they may not agree with Trueman's (or my) assessment of homosexual behavior, they are likely to agree that Pride month is "a spectacular declaration of human autonomy and the sovereignty of individual desire" — therefore, as conservatives, they oppose it. Pride has been so successfully co-opted by consumer capitalism because both emphasize desire as a component of personhood and virtue.

This is something that Christians who identify as conservative should consider. Prior to the development of LGBT activism and awakened capitalism in general, most of us didn't have much to say about capitalism and how it moulds morality and deforms the human person. In fact, we would have assumed that merely stating such a thing was an endorsement of socialism! We were mistaken. Any philosophy that idolizes desire creates a false deity. At its finest, Christian-ethical capitalism may give the monetary rewards of capitalism without losing sight of the truth that the market is designed to serve man, not the other way around.

Pride Month is a 30-day celebration of human desire, sexual autonomy, and defiance of all that limits the expression of desire. In that sense, it is Luciferian – and it is what the West worships. All those rainbow flags accomplish — I spotted one on top of a government building this morning — is highlight the post-Christian decadence that was sweeping throughout the Western world even when LGBT was a fringe phenomena.

We are being weighed, and we will be found wanting. You watch. From Live Not By Lies, here’s a passage about how eros-worship opened the door to revolution:

Regarding transgressive sexuality as a social good was not an innovation of the sexual revolution. Like the contemporary West, late imperial Russia was also awash in what historian James Billington [in The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture— RD] called “a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier Russian culture.” Among the social and intellectual elite, sexual adventurism, celebrations of perversion, and all manner of sensuality was common. And not just among the elites: the laboring masses, alone in the city, with no church to bind their consciences with guilt, or village gossips to shame them, found comfort in sex.

The end of official censorship after the 1905 uprising opened the floodgates to erotic literature, which found renewal in sexual passion. “The sensualism of the age was in a very intimate sense demonic,” Billington writes, detailing how the figure of Satan became a Romantic hero for artists and musicians. They admired the diabolic willingness to stop at nothing to satisfy one’s desires and to exercise one’s will.

Pride goes before a fall. Like I said: you watch.

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Cryptography's anonymous culture may be dwindling

GAG Guy — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 16:11:00 +0000

Many principles popularized in the early days of the internet have been passed down to crypto.

Since the inception of Bitcoin (BTC), many users in the crypto sector have been anonymous, as utilizing this digital currency provides a degree of anonymity as long as no one knows the user's public address. The exact identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator, is still unknown.

The most recent wave of innovation, led by decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible token (NFT) projects, has been led by anonymous teams who keep their right to anonymity.

Anonymous individual 0xngmi, the creator of the DeFi analytics dashboard DefiLlama, has released a bug bounty on his identity. Rather than announcing the search to identify flaws in the DefiLlama code, he offered 1 Ether (ETH) to anyone who could reveal his identity and explain how they discovered it. At the time of writing, no one had been able to figure out who he was.

0xngmi has also been training people who want to be anonymous with a "How to Stay Anon" guide, which is a collaborative document that contributors can add to and alter to better.

Navigating through Crypto Twitter reveals a plethora of pseudonymous "celebrities" who, solely based on their reputations, have a digital persona with a sizable following.

The DeFi Edge, another Twitter account that remains nameless, stated the reasons for his decision to keep the account anonymous. For the time being, the founder of the namesake DeFi analysis site has declined to reveal their identify, but has provided some small details:

Why I've chosen to remain anonymous for now, and why I might semi-doxxed myself later: pic.twitter.com/OGZLmU9Nte
— The DeFi Edge 🗡️ (@thedefiedge) March 11, 2022

As the industry transitions to Web3 and a slew of new talent is attracted to the ecosystem, a growing number of players have decided to take a different strategy. They can later divulge certain aspects of their physical self to become pseudonymous, or they can reveal their genuine identity entirely.

Following the recent Terra collapse, a man showed up at Do Kwon's home in Seoul only to discover his wife answering the door, according to the BBC. In these times of difficulty, Terra's 30-year-old founder has been active on Crypto Twitter, using his actual name to promote his system and connect with the community. While revealing his true name to the public may have helped him build trust with investors and the community, it also put him at risk in real life. These are just a few of the reasons why many entrepreneurs in the industry prefer to stay nameless.

Protecting anonymity and avoiding being doxxed has become an essential issue of the new cultural and technological revolution taking place in online society, which is a perpetual conflict between the open flow of information and the individual's privacy.

One of the most contentious identity reveals occurred when writer Kate Notopoulos published a story titled "We revealed the genuine names of Bored Ape Yacht Club's pseudonymous founders," in which she uncovered the identities using publicly available Yuga Labs records.

Protestors in Guy Fawkes masks. In the internet age the mask has become a symbol associated with anonymity and privacy.

Doxxing is the act of revealing someone's identify

Doxxing, which is usually referred to as a hostile action carried out over the internet, refers to the ability to track out a person and reveal private information about that person or organization. Although the term was coined by extremist groups to threaten and intimidate marginalized people online, it now has a broader meaning that includes revealing one's identity without having exclusively extremist implications.

Charlotte Fang was recently identified as the person behind the anonymous account Miya, according to 0xngmi. Milady Maker, the founder of the NFT art project, is accused of using a pseudonymous internet presence to disseminate hate speech against minorities on social media.

Charlotte had to stand aside from the project after being identified as the person behind the pseudonymous account purportedly related to an online cult, while Milady Maker's floor price fell.

Anonymous teams are in charge of fortunes

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have made it possible for a large number of people to contribute to a project's governance while remaining anonymous. The bulk of these initiatives have anonymous founders and contributors, either for safety reasons or to dodge legislation. In recent years, this has been the norm.

Grug, a Twitter pseudonym, explained to Cointelegraph why he chose to remain anonymous as CapitalGrug and the importance of being judged entirely on performance and ideas:

"I believe the main reason I selected anonymity was to be able to engage in and contribute to the same type of irreverent culture that I found so appealing about crypto from the beginning."

Many good performers in the area have remained anonymous, adding value to initiatives and communities by preventing other distinguishing features from influencing people's opinions of their persona.

Being anonymous can be a good option for people looking for a fresh start, but it can also allow harmful actors to penetrate the space.

Michael Patryn, the co-founder of now-defunct crypto exchange QuadrigaCX, was revealed as 0xSifu, the founder of Defi protocol Wonderland, back in January.

The scandal-plagued exchange's co-founder had already been sentenced to 18 months in a federal prison in the United States for identity theft and credit card fraud. Patryn is not even his real name; he apparently changed his identity from Omar Dhanani after his prison sentence and before launching QuadrigaCX.

With this news, the Wonderland protocol came crashing down, and the argument over whether anonymous teams should be permitted to handle big quantities of money erupted. Even Danielle Sesta, co-founder of Wonderland, believes that anonymous teams will become obsolete in favor of teams whose full identities are known.

Redefining the concept of anonymity

Although there has been a shift toward transparency in crypto in recent years, the ethos of anonymity remains entrenched. As Grug pointed out, one does not have to be entirely anonymous in the space.

"For example, our money is all anonymous, despite the fact that we've all been doxxed." People who pull out their phones to follow me on Twitter during events are usually anonymous."

Identity, whether public or private, is a complex subject with which we all grapple. The key to a more rich and diversified crypto community will be finding a balance between complete anonymity and a public identity.

To this point, anonymous culture in crypto has proven to be beneficial, as it reduces bias and allows people to fully express themselves. Bad actors can use this to get a fresh start, which could be problematic if they continue to act viciously. However, if they become productive members of society and contribute to the environment, it may be demonstrated that people deserve a second chance.

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How to Work in the Metaverse and Web3 ?

GAG Guy — Tue, 31 May 2022 15:47:00 +0000

Is it possible for you to work in the Metaverse?

The Metaverse is the next significant career path, with companies like Meta, Roblox, Microsoft, OpenSea, The Sandbox (SAND), and many others helping to build it. So, if you want to learn how to get a job in the Metaverse, you must first understand what your function will entail. Your employment will entail a mix of blockchain, artificial intelligence, 5G, gaming, and other Web3 technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality.

Learn the fundamentals of gaining a job in the Metaverse and Web3 fields in this essay.

Develop the necessary skill set

The first step in investigating Metaverse professions is to acquire the necessary skills and information. A 3D character artist working on avatars, for example, will need to be familiar with Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D, and have some experience with skins and games. Most Metaverse positions, especially those requiring engineering, need a competitive skill set, including knowledge of NodeJS, Javascript, API integrations, and React.

Applying to a university that offers free metaverse-related courses or learning, or using financial aid on platforms like Coursera and edX, can help you develop the following skills. Finding entry-level Metaverse jobs or internships requires networking with like-minded people. Meetup.com is a good place to look for local metaverse events. You can also meet people during hackathons, such as those held by MIT Reality Hack.
In the Metaverse, you may build your brand, increase your visibility, and make money.

Start creating your brand and making sure your portfolio is up to date after you've acquired the appropriate skill set. At TheMetaverseJobs.com, you can look for employment openings in the Metaverse. Start writing in-depth, intelligent pieces on the Metaverse and get them published on platforms like Cointelegraph, Forbes, or other notable media in your jurisdiction to get noticed in the sector.

It's important to remember that writing for reputable journals involves accepting bylines as guest pieces with no monetary compensation. So, how can you profit from the Metaverse? In the Metaverse, there are a plethora of additional ways to get money. For example, in games like Axie Infinity (AXS), players can win smooth love potion or SLP tokens by fighting monsters or other players. Players can also profit by selling their nonfungible tokens (NFTs).

Another approach to make money in virtual worlds is to host metaverse events. For example, live performances by well-known singers can draw large crowds, and organizers may charge consumers in the form of bought tickets. Due to the rush of brands and companies looking for a Metaverse presence, many architects and designers are producing 3D representations of structures; as a result, you can make money as a metaverse architect or designer.

What jobs are available in the Metaverse and Web3?

Remote Web3, Metaverse, and NFT jobs, to mention a few, are available in the crypto business. You can learn more about such jobs here, as well as income ranges for Web3 developers and Metaverse jobs in particular.

If you want to learn how to get a job in Web3, keep in mind that most crypto jobs require:

NFT social media and community manager, content writers and editors, blockchain developers, frontend and backend engineers, media reporters, growth marketing managers, project managers, and gamification strategists are among the most in-demand job titles in the Metaverse and Web3 field. In addition, various scholarships for women are offered in Web3, such as the Girl with Secrets (GWS) program. The GWS scholarship program provides free educational sessions, podcasts, and hackathon participation.

Alternatively, you can seek and apply for employment in the blockchain industry at cryptocurrencyjobs.co. It is emphasized once again that you must make yourself prominent by engaging in community forums, industry-led events, and hackathons in order to secure a job in Web3 or any other crypto job.

In the Web3 space, there are numerous opportunities, but blockchain enthusiasts should stay current on industry standards and apply for Metaverse internships or NFT positions as soon as feasible.

What are the different options for job applications in the Metaverse and Web3?

While there are still a few barriers to overcome until the virtual job market is teeming with chances, the Metaverse is likely to evolve slowly and smoothly.

The more people who use the internet become accustomed to integrating technology more deeply into their daily lives, the more opportunities will arise. Web3's development would most likely be transitional, with more access to creative employment as technology and culture advance, similar to how the internet grew gradually.

Being an early adopter is simple in retrospect. However, there are a number of risks, including missed opportunities in terms of time, money, and attention. It's expensive and time-consuming to keep up with the latest crypto innovations, such as new applications or protocols. Despite this, the advantages of working in the Web3 domain, such as higher pay and more opportunity for learning, outweigh the disadvantages. The numerous ways to immerse yourself in the Metaverse and Web3 worlds are described here.

Become an intern and make a cryptocurrency pal

Interning is the most efficient approach to determine whether or not you appreciate a specific area. If you're a student at any level and have the chance to intern, this is definitely the ideal option because you'll learn about the Web3 field while gaining some practical experience.

Find someone who shares your enthusiasm and collaborate with them on any of the crypto-related topics. Learning from your peers is a terrific approach to dispel your concerns, gain confidence, become more innovative, and keep updated about the crypto world's potential.

Take advantage of no-cost mentoring opportunities

If you wish to work in the Web3 domain, you should start by building or polishing your abilities by enrolling in the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center's 18-week DLT Talents program, which focuses on the professional development of women in the blockchain ecosystem. DeFi Talents is another program that trains participants for a career in the decentralized finance (DeFi) area.

You will gain access to a variety of job prospects in the Metaverse and Web3 industries through such programs. Furthermore, you will be able to keep up with industrial trends and take the necessary action on time.

Join a DAO and participate in crypto communities

Furthermore, Web3 is all about the community, and in the crypto realm, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are the most popular community-owned company model. DAOs with a focus on the community support automation, which relieves humans of tiresome and unpleasant tasks, most of which are related to bureaucracy, while boosting quick decision-making.

This technology enables individuals to access a virtual environment using low-cost gadgets, hang out, and build communities. Hiring managers may locate motivated candidates in these communities, and job seekers can apply for open opportunities. To learn about career prospects in the crypto field, join a DAO or participate in the Discord groups of other DeFi projects.

Sushi, Index Coop, Rarible, and Yearn, for example, have separate working groups for different people. Developing experience and demonstrating that you can add value to a product/protocol in a DAO is a fantastic way to get experience, boost your visibility, and create a portfolio while also potentially receiving compensation from the DAO.

Maintain a presence on CryptoTwitter and apply for affiliate programs

Moreover, some businesses require assistance with technical consultation, product development, and administrative tasks. Stay tuned to Twitter to learn more about these groups. On CryptoTwitter, participants and those who ask meaningful questions are valued. You should do the following as a crypto enthusiast:

CryptoTwitter frequently posts job openings, recent crypto trends, and tips and tactics for getting hired in Web3, all of which can help you obtain a job in the Metaverse. Additionally, remaining active on CryptoTwitter and contributing back to the community can provide you with more opportunities.

Additionally, apply to become a partner with one of the best blockchain organizations. For example, Algorand (ALGO) has a growing network of collaborators and partners who are supporting the blockchain ecosystem in every way. Alternatively, you can sign up for job notifications from your preferred firms, such as Microsoft or Meta, to be informed about potential job openings in the Web3 field.

Choosing a hobby and participating in it

After you have a decent understanding of the skill set you can bring in, you may start looking for work. And picking the exact area of Web3 in which you are most enthusiastic is the first step toward discovering those great possibilities.

Stay active on CryptoTwitter, join Discord communities, or join a DAO in your spare time to get involved in the crypto sector, as explained above. In the decentralized world, becoming a helpful and valued member increases your visibility and helps you acquire a desired job.

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There are two types of recessions, and the United States is likely to see one that is nothing like the one that occurred in 2008

GAG Guy — Tue, 31 May 2022 07:56:00 +0000

For good reason, younger generations connect the word "recession" with disaster.

Millions of Americans lost their homes and jobs during the Great Recession, which lasted from December 2007 to June 2009. It was the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it scarred several cohorts who graduated from college or graduate school with little hope of finding a solid job, and it took nearly a decade for the labor market to fully recover.

If you don't count 2020's short-lived COVID-induced slowdown, 2008's collapse is the only actual recession that a major portion of the population has ever experienced. As a result, when billionaires and investment banks make grim predictions of coming economic disaster or a "big" recession, most Americans freak out.

Recessions, on the other hand, are a natural part of business cycles, and while expert predictions of a "everything bubble" or a global economic disaster abound, not every economist sees the worst-case scenario.

Experts such as Harvard economist Jason Furman point out that a recession is far from certain; and even if one does occur, most economists think that the chances of it being a once-in-a-lifetime all-out collapse like 2008 are minimal.

"Recessions are an unavoidable reality of economic life," said Stephen Miran, cofounder of Amberwave Partners and a former senior adviser at the US Treasury Department. "In prior cycles, we were lucky to have gone a long time without a recession. But, you know, recessions have been the norm for the vast majority of economic history."

Miran believes the US economy will have a "garden variety recession," rather than a financial crisis like the one that occurred in 2008.

Not every recession is as bad as the one in 2008

It's crucial to keep in mind that not all recessions are the same: While they all cause enormous misery and result in widespread job losses, disproportionately affecting the poor, some are worse than others.

And, despite recent stock market volatility and increased possibilities of a recession, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the US economy's prospects, even if growth slows for several quarters.

Kelly Bouchillon, a senior partner at Sound View Wealth Advisors in Savannah, Ga., told Fortune, "We're a little more positive than doom and gloom for sure." "There has never been a time when corporate America has had more cash on its balance sheets." According to bank polls, consumers are not overburdened with debt. There's also a lot of money in people's bank accounts. As a result, there appears to be some spending power."

"I believe the doom and gloom aspect of this may have caused the equities markets to potentially overreach to the downside," he continued.

While each economic slump is unique, Miran explained that the US economy has gone through two distinct types of recessions since WWII ended.

The first is a "garden-variety" recession, in which the economy "overheats," leading to an increase in inflation. The Federal Reserve responds by raising interest rates and "crushing demand to try to kill inflation," resulting in a recession.

According to Miran, this is the most typical sort of recession the US has seen in postwar history, but there is another, far more dangerous type of recession known as a "balance-sheet recession."

When this happens, a "debt bubble" develops, causing households and consumers to spend a large part of their income paying down debt rather than stimulating the economy. This form of recession results in a slow recovery and widespread unemployment. Does this ring a bell?

"In a typical recession, it takes roughly 10 months from the low point in unemployment to recover to pre-recession employment levels," Miran added. "It took around three times that much, or 32 months, to rebound to pre-recession unemployment levels during the dot-com [bubble] and the global financial crisis."

Miran went on to say that he believes the former is more plausible than the latter.

"What we don't have right now is the cascade defaults that result from too much debt," he explained.

Bouchillon feels that a recession like the one experienced in 2008 is improbable, and he's not even sure we'll have one at all.

"Remember, the main thing in 2008 was really borderline fraud in the economy because you had all these individuals borrowing money [to buy homes] who really couldn't afford it," he explained.

In 2008, bad debt circulating in the financial system caused a "implosion," although the banking industry has since undergone a number of adjustments, the most notable of which being the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.

The bill established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a whistleblower mechanism, and stress test requirements for banks, which assist determine if these institutions have enough capital to weather an economic downturn.

While President Donald Trump has scaled back some of the Dodd-Frank Act, regulations against debt bubbles are still stronger now than they were in 2008.

These measures, along with significantly stronger household balance sheets, according to Bouchillon, will help prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. He claims that stagflation, in which economic growth slows but inflation remains high, is a greater threat to the US economy.

However, don't rule out the possibility of increased hazards

While many analysts believe the United States will avoid a repeat of the 2008 recession, there are still a number of growing hazards that investors and consumers should be aware of.

First, in April, the personal savings rate—or the percentage of disposable income saved each month by consumers—fell to 4.4 percent, the lowest level since September 2008, when Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. According to statistics from the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the personal savings rate averaged 11.8 percent from 1959 to 2019.

Second, inflation is still around four-decade highs, and the Federal Reserve plans to keep raising interest rates until there is "clear and persuasive" evidence that inflation is under control, as Fed Chair Jerome Powell puts it.

When boosting interest rates in the past, the central bank has struggled to avoid a recession, according to Bouchillon.

"The Federal Reserve's track record of trying to target inflation by raising rates is that we end up in what you might call a technical recession close to 80% of the time." So I believe that's a possibility," he stated.

"There's going to be pain that we cause," Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told Bankrate in April, even if the Fed doesn't instigate a recession in order to combat growing consumer prices.

"That is true, but inflation is excruciating. You can't keep boosting the economy indefinitely and expect it to be sustainable. He went on to say, "You have to pull off the Band-Aid before it gets any worse."

Finally, investment banks continue to raise concerns about the growing likelihood of a recession, as well as its possible impact on employment and the stock market.

While most aren't calling for a recession outright, many are warning that the danger of one has increased, and even well-known bulls have recently changed their tune on the possibility of a downturn.

For months, Mark Haefele, UBS Global Wealth Management's chief investment officer, has dismissed fears of a recession, advising investors to avoid "a hasty exit from markets" in a May 13 note, for example, because the firm's "central scenario" is that "a recession will be avoided over the next 12 months."

In a Friday research note, Haefele took a different tone when describing the Fed's efforts to achieve a "soft landing" for the US economy, in which inflation is controlled without triggering a recession.

"The road to getting there is a long one. We could be in for a long period of above-target inflation if Fed policymakers misread the strength of the US economy. We will be in a recession if they overstate it. And we have no way of knowing for sure which path we're on," he wrote.

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What Trump could not accomplish, Biden accomplished with ease: Saudi Arabia now will be closest friends with Israel

GAG Guy — Mon, 30 May 2022 16:22:00 +0000

Previously, both Israel and Saudi Arabia relied on the US as a stable ally. Despite the fact that none of these countries has official relations with the US, they were both fervent supporters of the US. Former US President Donald Trump even attempted to bring the two countries closer together by establishing "Abraham agreements."

Source – Al Jazeera

In an indirect sense, Biden's efforts to limit ties with Saudi Arabia are assisting Israel and Saudi Arabia in becoming lifetime allies.

Biden was irritated Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

In 2019, Biden suggested that the monarchy should be considered as a pariah state due to human-rights crimes, such as the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, which incensed Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman. Saudi Arabia has been upset by Biden's refusal to consult Arab countries on the Iran nuclear deal, as well as his bias toward Iran and the region's Iran-backed Houthis. Biden has also been tolerant of Iran and the Houthi rebels, who are backed by Iran. Last year, the US Department of State reversed a Trump administration decision to classify the Houthis as "foreign terrorist organizations" and sanction them.

This has deeply infuriated Saudi Arabia. Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia are now attempting to build ties with Putin. Russia and OPEC+ have expanded their cooperation on oil output levels. Furthermore, when the US pleaded with Arab countries to increase crude oil supply to help bring down high oil prices, they refused. Saudi Arabia did not follow the lead of the United States in becoming a credible alternative to Russian oil. MBS even turned down Biden's phone call. Instead, he spoke with Putin over the phone. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia traded in yuan against the US's interests.

Source – CNN

From adversary to friend

After abandoning its connection with the United States, Saudi Arabia is now looking forward to a great partnership with Israel. It is worth remembering, however, that they were previously a major rival in the region. Whatever the situation, their animosity toward Israel has not changed, despite the fact that Iran is their biggest foe.

However, during the past 2-3 years, the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Israel has been diminishing. MBS stated in an interview with the American magazine 'The Atlantic' in 2018 that Israelis have the right to live peacefully on their own territory, reversing Saudi policy. Business transactions between the two countries are increasing through back routes. Israel recently evaluated Saudi Arabia's proposal to change the international status of Tiran and Sanafir in the Red Sea and hand them over to the Saudis.

However, with Biden on his way to Saudi Arabia for a special meeting with MBS, things in Riyadh are looking up. Biden is seeking to soothe MBS, and the US president is planning other actions. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has taken an interest in Israel. Jared Kushner appeared to exploit his position as a mediator during the process. Saudi Arabia may be looking at this new axis in the hopes of re-electing Trump, but the credit for bringing the two countries together belongs solely to Biden, despite the fact that he did nothing to bring them together.

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If Europe wants to avoid WW3, it must not cross the Rubicon

GAG Guy — Mon, 30 May 2022 16:13:00 +0000

The European Union is on the verge of crossing its own Rubicon in the Black Sea, which could lead to a military confrontation with Russia. And, much to Europe's dismay, the outcome of this fight would be nothing like Caesar's.

The European Union's naval mission against Russia

According to the Kyiv Independent, a state-run propaganda publication in Ukraine, the EU is considering mounting a naval mission in the Black Sea to unlock food supplies in Ukrainian ports and transport them to Europe. Such an initiative would need the European fleet interfering with Russia's blockade in the Black Sea, maybe through military means, thus triggering another World War in Europe.

⚡️El Pais: EU considers sending naval mission to unblock agricultural exports from Ukrainian ports.

According to El Pais, the EU will discuss the growing risk of famine in countries dependent on Ukraine’s agricultural exports, blocked by Russia, during a summit on May 30.
— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) May 28, 2022

The EU might make the ultimate decision on whether or not to launch such a bold naval campaign on May 30, when the bloc meets to consider the mounting threat of starvation in numerous European countries.

Russia is suffocating Europe's food supplies

Without a doubt, Russia has militarized Ukraine's food supplies to Europe in order to gain political leverage over the EU. The Russian Navy has fared better than the Russian land forces in this campaign. It was able to blockade the Sea of Azov and reclaim control of the Black Sea. As a result, a blockade has been erected, cutting off Ukrainian trade and providing a base for the Russian Navy to conduct attacks against Ukraine.

Russia’s Blockade (Source: The Moscow Times)

Ukraine is one of the world's largest producers of food grains. Naturally, grain exports are Ukraine's most important exports. Nonetheless, the Russian Navy's embargo has blocked Ukrainian grain exports, raising global food prices even higher. Approximately 20 million tonnes of grain are currently stranded inside Ukraine.

However, there is no way to get them to other parts of Europe. Prior to the war, 90 percent of Ukrainian food exports, or 6 million tonnes per month, were shipped by sea. However, over 80 percent of the world's merchant ships are currently stranded in Ukrainian ports. Some of the ships have even come under Russian fire, thus closing the naval access for Ukraine.

Europe must first face Russia

Overall, in order for Europe to have access to Ukraine's food reserves, it needs first obtain Russia's permission. However, Russia is determined about forcing the EU to lift some sanctions in exchange for the creation of a food corridor between Europe and Ukraine. So, Russia's offer is straightforward: lift sanctions on our economy and have your food stores restocked.

(Source: Modern Diplomacy)

Germany is now considering accepting Russia's offer, which is quite interesting! The suggestion was plausible, according to a high-ranking Berlin official. "I believe that in order to lift anything [such as sanctions], we would not rely on [Russia's] assurances — we would first need to see something happen on the ground – this is where the complexity of the situation resides," the official said. The subject of'sanctions on Russia' is no longer the most pressing concern for Berlin; rather, the security of food supplies is.

Plan B for Europe

In any case, if efforts to reach a "food truce" with Russia fail, the EU may be compelled to use its backup plan—launching a naval mission to free Ukraine's food. However, considering Russia's powerful position in the Black Sea, this could end up being a fatal move for the European Union. However, the possibilities of the EU attacking Russia militarily in the Black Sea remain slim. Germany and France have pushed for a diplomatic solution to the crisis. As a result, it's quite possible that Europe will eventually agree to ease some sanctions against Russia's economy in order to make the creation of a Black Sea food corridor a reality.

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How the United States Can Become a Crypto Leader

GAG Guy — Sat, 28 May 2022 15:29:00 +0000

The week of the terraUSD (UST) crash was one of the most traumatic in cryptocurrency history - and one we'll remember for a long time. It wreaked havoc on the cryptocurrency market, wiping off billions of dollars in value. While people in Washington, D.C. debate future moves, a sensible, serious discussion about prospective regulation is necessary.

Stablecoins are a critical invention that offers several benefits to users while also giving the US a competitive edge. Stablecoins increase payment and transfer efficiency, lowering costs and speeding up settlement for companies and consumers. They make the financial system more accessible by allowing anybody, regardless of their background or economic standing, to participate. They can also serve US geopolitical goals by bolstering worldwide dollar supremacy in the face of moves by foes like as China and Russia to undercut US financial leadership.

Stablecoins are supposed to be steady and trustworthy, as their name indicates. Stablecoins may be classified into two types: custodial and decentralized.

Custodial stablecoins are guaranteed by collateral held in a bank or other organization and issued by a central administrator. Stablecoins are typically completely collateralized, with the issuer holding one dollar in the bank for every one dollar in stablecoins issued. Custodial stablecoins account for the great majority of overall stablecoin circulation, and they are extremely stable and dependable if the issuer is trustworthy and transparent.

Stablecoins that are decentralized are intended to address the reality that not all issuers are trustworthy or transparent. Their purpose, like the public blockchains that allow them, is to reduce reliance on trusted financial middlemen, who often cause more harm than benefit. They do this by creating stablecoins that, rather than relying on a central issuer, strive to maintain their peg to the dollar through the use of autonomous code. Decentralized stablecoins are often backed by other digital assets kept programmatically as collateral on the blockchain, rather than cash in a bank.

Importantly, despite the fact that custodial and decentralized stablecoins employ distinct methods, none is inherently superior to the other. Each has its own set of characteristics - both advantages and disadvantages – that come together to create a vibrant, competitive market characterized by consumer choice. In both areas, we should encourage prudent innovation.

UST, on the other hand, was in a class by itself, relying exclusively on an algorithmic process to maintain price stability with no collateral, a hazardous concept that many anticipated would fail.

So, what should policymakers do in the aftermath of this month's events?

First, policymakers should follow the procedure outlined in President Joe Biden's executive order (EO) earlier this year, as US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated in congressional testimony on May 12. The EO, which directs federal agencies to examine crypto and report on regulatory priorities and solutions, gives clear direction on how to approach stablecoin regulation carefully. This is a significant and continuing project. Policymakers should establish a good grasp of the stablecoin area and the main differences between various stablecoin designs with the support of feedback from industry players and trade associations like my employer, the Blockchain Association. Before effective regulation can be created, this is an essential first step.

Second, in Congress, a bipartisan consensus should be created. Following the failure of UST, Congress became divided on the subject on both sides of the aisle. Crypto, on the other hand, is too huge for party politics, as my colleague Kristin Smith recently argued. We need leaders from both parties to get together and figure out the best way to regulate cryptocurrency. A regulatory solution must come from Congress, not the regulatory agencies, as the President's Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG) urged in its report on stablecoins last year.

Third, new regulations that are appropriate for the situation should be adopted. These regulations must be balanced and take into account the importance of dollar-dominated stablecoins to financial security in the United States in the next decades. Stablecoins require specialized regulatory frameworks that meet their unique benefits and hazards. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) have suggested specialized frameworks for custodial stablecoins, which are excellent examples of savvy regulatory approaches from both sides of the aisle in the Senate and House of Representatives. Similarly well-tailored frameworks for decentralized stablecoins can be developed over time.

Stablecoins provide much too much of a risk for us to take the chance of getting them incorrect as a matter of policy. The United States is competing with other countries to be the home of Web 3. It's time to think strategically and take action. The United States' status as a worldwide crypto innovation engine is in jeopardy.

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In the Metaverse, There Are New Ways to Make Money

GAG Guy — Thu, 26 May 2022 07:59:00 +0000

Bad business models are avoided in an open metaverse

Here's a simple fact: the decentralized web, also known as Web 3, will develop tremendously throughout this decade, but it won't have any real influence until the next. Web 3 has the potential to fundamentally alter the internet's identity, utility, and equitable revenue structures. When that time arrives, the internet will mostly be run through decentralized nodes, allowing token economies to exercise their full potential.

Enterprises, tech billionaires, and nation-states, on the other hand, will continue to dominate and influence the outdated and centralized internet (Web 2). CBDCs [central bank digital currency] and readily surveilled identity protocols are likely to be integrated by today's internet giants over time.

Web 2 might potentially serve as a portal for individuals and platforms to access the open metaverse, but only time will tell how technology develops. In such a society, today's technological manipulations and injustices – such as business models built on exploitation of users' free personal data - will be ridiculed and difficult to implement. In the end, the metaverse and the promise of token economies will fuel a multiplicity of hitherto unimaginable monetization methods. Let's keep learning and growing.

— Irina Karagyaur, Unique Network Advertising's head of metaverse growth, done tastefully

Advertising and other traditional internet business models are likely to survive in the metaverse. However, if we build the foundations correctly, one's privacy may be safeguarded in the metaverse using blockchain-adjacent technologies like decentralized identity and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP). However, utilizing these types of privacy and identification technologies, particularly ZKPs, may come with the added complication of slower latency [since] performing a zero-knowledge proof can be computationally costly.

Recommendation engines work in real time on the internet, connecting viewers to the most appropriate ad spot in a fraction of a second. Companies will need to devise ingenious solutions since ZKPs can increase delay of many seconds or minutes. In a decentralized metaverse, recommendation engines (which aren't only for adverts, but also for directing users to new experiences, events, or people) will calculate suggestions even if you're out of sight of the virtual banner in the geographical context or entirely offline.

As a consequence, meaningful suggestions for products, services, or experiences tailored to the individual may be made while maintaining privacy rights and providing complete transparency into why and how this recommendation engine decided to show me what it did, if requested. These types of events, I believe, are likely to occur in the metaverse. While we can still produce value for infrastructure providers using tried and true business models from "yesterday's internet," we can do it with more style and taste.

— SupraOracles CEO Joshua Tobkin

DeFi, meet the Metaverse

The metaverse is quickly becoming one of the numerous locations where people's digital and real-life identities collide. More social, gaming, and financial firms will begin to migrate into the metaverse, bringing their products and services there, as they understand the unique connection they can make with their people via the metaverse.

This will result in the introduction of means for consumers to transact with their crypto in the metaverse for decentralized finance, a sector that eliminates gatekeepers from economic instruments. This might include things like sending tokens to pals and communicating with staking pools. Much of the enthusiasm stems from what is potential but has yet to be accomplished.

— Teller Finance's founder and CEO, Ryan Berkun

Identifying your tribe

It's in our nature to want for a sense of belonging and connection. We establish groups based on shared interests, values, and experiences. The metaverse is just a new manifestation of our identity, reflecting the things that people are interested in and want to be associated with. Many metaverses will exist to serve certain affinities.

Individuals will be able to travel between metaverses, bringing their identities and assets with them (financial, data or otherwise). Sports enthusiasts will be able to play games and discuss their experiences with others who share their interests. Music fans will be able to discover and connect with new musicians in ways that were previously impossible to achieve owing to dispersed fan groups that made it difficult to meet up in person. Fashion businesses will be able to preview collections, obtain feedback on new goods, and offer their commodities in a more personal way, as their regional retail footprint will no longer be a constraint.

In many respects, the internet has enabled each of us to "find our tribe," or a community of people who share our beliefs and interests. This fosters a sense of belonging and understanding, both of which are extremely good to one's sense of self. If all exposure to new ideas and ways of being is eliminated, it can lead to social cracks and deadly echo chambers. To preserve the future health of our societies, we will require serious creativity on how to solve for both connectivity and cross-pollination.

— Tara Fung, CEO of Gesso Labs and co-founder of Co:Create

A benefit to the general population

Since the commencement of the [coronavirus] epidemic, we've all been living in the first incarnation of the metaverse. The normalcy of being online, living on Zoom calls, and forming intimate connections with individuals we've never met before illustrates how rooted the "actual" metaverse will be in our daily lives. Because the metaverse will function as a utility, unlike what Facebook/Meta [FB] is promoting, it will be classified as a public benefit, similar to internet access.

As with utilizing the internet, there will be several advantages to be enjoyed, but there will also be risks to be considered. This emphasizes the necessity of having solutions easily available to assist users in protecting their privacy, enhancing security and resilience, and removing the hurdles of an outmoded username-password login approach for a secure and user-friendly experience.

— John Jefferies, Blocknative's chief marketing officer

Connected, modular, and collaborative

Neal Stephenson invented the word "metaverse" in his 1992 sci-fi novel "Snow Crash." The metaverse is portrayed in the book as an immersive replacement to the internet, similar to the Oculus-connected version we know today. It delves on anarcho-capitalist themes, such as individuals rejecting the dollar in favor of less regulated "electronic currencies," and nation-states being "decentralized" and replaced with private entities.

It was difficult not to think of Stephenson's dystopian ideas when Facebook renamed to Meta in October. Meta's embrace of the metaverse reveals its long-term goals: to create an immersive, high-fidelity extension of the current web – that is, a platform steered and maintained by a few large corporations, fueled by ad-funded content and gaming models, and underpinned by Facebook's existing social graph.

In contrast to Meta's centrally managed metaverse, builders from all over the world are collaborating to lay the groundwork for a new ecosystem: the hyperverse. The hyperverse, also known as Web 3, is a gradually decentralized web as well as a linked, composable, and collaborative internet. It's a nonlinear digital environment. It is supported by blockchain technology, which operates as a permanent and permissionless shared infrastructure layer, and contains multimedia, community, and financial protocols.

This movement symbolizes a redistribution of ownership across a network of interconnected technology, media, and protocols, reshaping online power relations. From music, video, storytelling, art, and games to tokenized incentive systems and programmable money, it has a wide range of uses.

To enable this transformation, new organizational models such as DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) are developing, realigning platform incentives toward producing community value. The objective is to reopen the internet via collaborative economics, which will be accomplished by combining traditional companies with DAOs, traditional incentives with tokenized models, and traditional technology with blockchain-enabled systems.

— Timshel, a key BitDAO contributor

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Despite the price drop, the crypto swarm dominates Davos' main boulevard

GAG Guy — Mon, 23 May 2022 16:28:00 +0000

Crypto industry executives have descended on the annual meeting of business leaders and politicians in the Swiss Alpine resort, hoping to spur speedier use of their largely unregulated technology.

The crypto community's prominence at Davos comes as cryptocurrencies lost $800 billion in market value earlier this month, despite being largely on the fringes of the main event.

Despite regulators' warnings that the nascent assets can be high risk, small traders have flocked to crypto in the hopes of quick gains. Luna, which was the eighth-largest digital coin until recently and was supported by institutional crypto investors, has lost virtually all of its value.

Jeremy Allaire, CEO and cofounder of Circle Internet Financial, whose USDC stablecoin is tethered to the US dollar, said of Luna's demise, "What surprised me was just how quickly it utterly crumbled into nothing."

"I've never seen anything like it," he told Reuters, "to see something that seemed like an obvious, high-growth competitive entity just utterly crash to zero in 72 hours."

However, the crypto businesses' intentions to show off their products and services have not been harmed by recent losses.

Securrency Inc, an Abu Dhabi-backed digital market infrastructure, attended Davos for the first time this year "to create relationships and network" and demonstrate how new technology and old finance can be combined, according to CEO Dan Doney.

Just beyond the security cordon for the main conference center, the business has set up its own agenda of panels on digital currency in the style of the World Economic Forum.

Tether, one of the world's major stablecoins, gave away free pizza slices on May 22 to commemorate Bitcoin Pizza Day, when Lazlo Hanyecz paid for two pizzas with 10,000 bitcoin, which was worth around $41 at the time.

Bitcoin, which was worth $30,332 on Monday, had dropped to its lowest point since December 2020 in May. In November, the world's largest cryptocurrency reached a new high of $69,000.

"We're used to it," said Cliff Sarkin, chief operating officer of CasperLabs, a blockchain technology provider for enterprises that is organizing speakers and events.

According to Sarkin, the coin linked to Casper's technology has also suffered a setback.

The World Economic Forum (WEF), which caters to the financial elite such as Citigroup (C.N) and Credit Suisse (CSGN.S), is hosting panels on cryptocurrency's carbon footprint and future, as well as one on decentralized finance.

"It's been rising outside and inside the gates," said Stan Stalnacker, chief strategy officer at social network Hub Culture, which also runs a digital currency.

For the course of the event, Stalnacker estimated that approximately half of the town's stores were occupied by blockchain or cryptocurrency companies.

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The truth about the myths that have been holding liquid staking back

GAG Guy — Sun, 22 May 2022 08:13:00 +0000

Since their conception, blockchains have relied on proof-of-work (PoW) validation. However, the PoW consensus became unsustainable due to its high energy consumption and requirement for fast, powerful hardware, which created high entry hurdles. That's why blockchains are embracing proof-of-stake consensus algorithms (PoS), in which individuals who want to earn rewards don't have to compete with other miners; instead, they may stake a portion of their crypto in exchange for a chance to be picked as a validator — and reap the benefits.

Everyone who owns crypto on PoS blockchains must want to take advantage of the opportunities staking provides, right? Actually, according to our report, while 56 percent of those polled had staked before, many of those who hadn't or wouldn't stake again had similar reservations: they don't want their assets locked up in staking when they could be put to better use elsewhere. As a result, liquid staking offers the best of both worlds. During lock-up, it allows investors to stake their assets while also allowing them to utilise them in other projects.

Despite the fact that this innovation can lessen staking barriers, there is still a lot of misunderstanding regarding what liquid staking is and what it can offer the crypto community. Here are some common misconceptions regarding liquid staking, as well as the facts about this new opportunity.

What is liquid staking?

The way blockchains work is changing thanks to staking. It improves blockchain validation's energy efficiency, gives hardware more flexibility, and speeds up transaction frequency. However, despite its advantages, one of the main drawbacks — and what keeps many people from staking — is the lock-up time. While assets are being staked, they are inaccessible to their owners, and they cannot do anything with them, such as invest in decentralized finance (DeFi). Many people are afraid to stake because of this sacrifice.

Liquid staking, on the other hand, solves this problem. Holders of staked assets can gain liquidity in the form of a derivative token that they can use in DeFi using liquid staking protocols, all while the staked assets continue to earn rewards. It's a method to get the best of both worlds while maximizing earning potential.

PoS is becoming increasingly popular. Over half of crypto's total market cap, $594 billion, is accounted for by PoS methods. As Ethereum transitions to PoS in the next months, the chances will only grow. However, staking accounts for only 24% of the overall market capitalization of staking platforms, indicating that many people have the ability to stake but do not.

Four misconceptions of liquid staking

Despite the benefits of liquid staking, there’s still confusion about how it functions. Here are four common misconceptions, and how you should be thinking about liquid staking instead.

Misconception 1: Only one player or protocol will exist. One of the misconceptions about liquid staking is that only one player will exist through which investors can gain liquidity. It may seem that way since it’s still so early in the liquid staking space, but in the future, multiple liquid staking protocols will coexist. There may also be no capping to the number of liquid staking protocols that can coexist, either. In fact, the more the number of protocols, the better it is for the network, as it can reduce instances of stake centralization and fears of a single point of failure.

Misconception 2: It’s only limited to liquidity. Liquid staking isn’t just a way to get liquidity. While liquid staking does help PoS networks acquire staked capital that secures the network, it is not just limited to that. It’s also a way to get composability because you can use your derivative in multiple places, which you can’t do with an exchange. The synthetic derivatives that are issued as part of liquid staking and used in supported DeFi protocols for generating more yield actually help in constructing monetary building blocks across the ecosystem.

Misconception 3: Liquid staking is solved at the protocol level. People think liquid staking will be solved at the protocol level itself. But liquid staking isn’t just about enabling functionality at a protocol level. It’s about coordinating with other protocols, bringing more use cases, more features and more usability. A liquid staking protocol is solely focused on developing the architecture that will facilitate the creation of synthetic derivatives and ensuring that there are DeFi protocols with which those derivatives can be integrated.

Misconception 4: Liquid staking defeats the purpose of staking overall. Some say liquid staking defeats the purpose of staking or locking up assets, but we’ve seen that’s not true. Liquid staking not only increases network security but also helps achieve a crucial objective of the PoS network, which is staking. If there is a solution that issues derivatives for staked capital within the network, then not only is the staked capital ensuring that the PoS network is secure, but it is also creating an enhanced experience for the user by enabling capital efficiency.

The future of PoS

Liquid staking not only solves an issue for crypto enthusiasts who want to stake by issuing tokens that can be used in DeFi while their assets are staked, but it also solves a problem for cryptocurrency exchanges. The blockchain becomes more safe as more people stake their assets, which is made easier by making liquid staking available. Investors will help staking to actually become an innovative new technique for blockchains to establish agreement by knowing the truth about popular myths.

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Nuclear Fusion Already Has a Fuel Shortage

GAG Guy — Fri, 20 May 2022 16:22:00 +0000

ITER, in the south of France, is nearing completion. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor will be the largest device of its kind ever built and the flag-bearer for nuclear fusion when it is fully operational in 2035.

Two types of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, will be smashed together inside a donut-shaped reaction chamber called a tokamak until they fuse in a roiling plasma hotter than the surface of the sun, releasing enough clean energy to power tens of thousands of homes—a limitless source of electricity straight from science fiction.

That is, at least, the plan. The issue, which is the elephant in a room full of potential elephants, is that by the time ITER is ready, there may not be enough fuel to run it.

For its experiments, ITER, like many of the most well-known experimental nuclear fusion reactors, relies on a constant supply of both deuterium and tritium. Although deuterium may be recovered from seawater, tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope, is extremely rare.

Tritium levels in the atmosphere peaked in the 1960s, before the prohibition on nuclear weapons testing, and according to the most recent estimations, there is currently less than 20 kg (44 pounds) of tritium on Earth. Our finest sources of tritium to power ITER and other experimental fusion reactors are slowly depleting as the project grinds on, years behind time and billions over budget.

Tritium for fusion experiments like ITER and the smaller JET tokamak in the UK currently comes from a very specialized sort of nuclear fission reactor known as a heavy-water moderated reactor. However, many of these reactors are nearing the end of their useful lives, with only approximately 30 remaining in operation around the world—20 in Canada, four in South Korea, and two in Romania, each producing roughly 100 grams of tritium each year. (India aims to construct more, but its tritium is unlikely to be made available to fusion researchers.)

However, this is not a long-term feasible solution—the entire goal of nuclear fusion is to provide a cleaner and safer alternative to traditional nuclear fission power. "It would be a farce to utilize dirty fission reactors to fuel 'clean' fusion reactors," says Ernesto Mazzucato, a retired physicist who, despite spending much of his working life investigating tokamaks, has been an outspoken critic of ITER and nuclear fusion in general.

The second issue with tritium is that it is unstable. It has a half-life of 12.3 years, which means that half of the tritium available now will have decayed into helium-3 by the time ITER is ready to commence deuterium-tritium operations (in around 12.3 years). After ITER is turned on, and several more deuterium-tritium (D-T) successors are planned, the situation will only get worse.

These two forces have aided in the transformation of tritium from an undesired byproduct of nuclear fission that had to be carefully disposed of into the most expensive substance on the planet, according to some estimates. It costs $30,000 each gram, and operational fusion reactors will require up to 200 kg per year. To make matters worse, nuclear weapons programs want tritium because it helps make bombs more powerful—despite the fact that military tend to generate it themselves since Canada, which produces the majority of the world's tritium, refuses to sell it for non-peaceful purposes.

Paul Rutherford, a researcher at Princeton's Plasma Physics Laboratory, predicted this problem in 1999 and described the "tritium window," a sweet spot where tritium supplies would peak before dropping when heavy-water-moderated reactors were turned off. We're at that sweet spot right now, but ITER isn't ready to take advantage of it because it's about a decade behind schedule. "Everything would have worked out great if ITER had been producing deuterium-tritium plasma like we planned around three years ago," says Scott Willms, ITER's fuel cycle division leader. "Right now, we're approaching the peak of this tritium window."

Scientists have known about this potential stumbling block for decades, and they've devised a clever solution: using nuclear fusion reactors to "breed" tritium, allowing them to replenish their own fuel while burning it. Breeder technology aims to work by wrapping a "blanket" of lithium-6 around the fusion reactor.

When a neutron leaves the reactor and collides with a lithium-6 molecule, tritium should be produced, which may then be recovered and returned to the process. According to Stuart White, a spokesperson for the UK Atomic Energy Authority, which hosts the JET fusion project, "Calculations suggest that a suitably designed breeding blanket would be capable of providing enough tritium for the power plant to be self-sufficient in fuel, with a little extra to start up new power plants."

Tritium breeding was supposed to be tested as part of ITER, but it was abruptly cancelled as prices rose from $6 billion to more than $25 billion. At ITER, Willms is in charge of smaller-scale tests. ITER will use suitcase-sized samples of variously presented lithium injected into "ports" around the tokamak instead of a whole blanket of lithium enclosing the fusion reaction: ceramic pebble beds, liquid lithium, and lead lithium.

Even Willms acknowledges that this technology is far from ready for deployment, and that a full-scale test of tritium breeding will have to wait until the next generation of reactors, which some feel is already too late. "After 2035, we'll have to build a new machine that will take another 20 or 30 years to test a critical task like how to manufacture tritium," Mazzucato says. "How will we be able to block and stop global warming using fusion reactors if we won't be ready until the end of this century?"

There are alternative ways to make tritium, such as actively injecting breeding material into nuclear fission reactors or shooting neutrons at helium-3 with a linear accelerator, but these methods are too expensive to be utilized in large amounts, thus they will likely remain a nuclear weapons reserve. In an ideal world, Willms argues, there would be a more ambitious program developing breeding technology alongside ITER, so that when ITER perfects the fusion reactor, there is still a fuel source to power it. He explains, "We don't want to build the car and then run out of gas."

The tritium problem is driving doubts about ITER and other D-T fusion projects. These two elements were chosen because they fuse at a low temperature, making them the easiest to work with in the early days of fusion. Everything else felt impossible at the time.

Some businesses are now looking into alternatives, using AI-controlled magnets to help contain the fusion reaction and breakthroughs in materials science. TAE Technologies, based in California, is working on a hydrogen-and-boron fusion reactor that it claims will be a cleaner and more practical alternative to D-T fusion.

By 2025, it hopes to achieve a net energy gain, in which a fusion reaction produces more energy than it consumes. Boron can be harvested by the metric ton from seawater, with the added bonus of not irradiating the equipment like D-T fusion does. It's a more commercially viable way to scalable fusion power, according to TAE Technologies CEO Michl Binderbauer.

Despite the possible supply concerns for ITER's core fuel, the mainstream fusion community remains optimistic. "Fusion is really tough," Willms argues, "and anything other than deuterium-tritium will be 100 times more difficult." "Perhaps we can talk about something else in a century."

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Elon Musk, according to experts, has no idea how math works

GAG Guy — Fri, 20 May 2022 15:57:00 +0000

According to CNBC, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and maybe the future owner of Twitter, has a scheme to figure out how many bogus accounts there are on the social media platform: ask users to count them individually. Experts argue this is a fool's errand.

Indeed, his proposal appeared to be so implausible on the surface that experts believe Musk is attempting to tease us.

Late last Friday, Musk made headlines once more when he said that the Twitter transaction is "on pause" for the time being, "waiting details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do fact comprise less than 5% of users."

Later, he did say that he is "still committed to acquisition."

Many viewed Musk's move as an attempt to back out of the $44 billion buyout.

Musk has already expressed his displeasure with spambots, threatening to put a stop to them once and for all when he takes over the company. On the platform, the billionaire has also promised to "authenticate all real persons."

"To find out," Musk said on Friday, "my team will take a random sample of 100 Twitter followers." "I welcome others to try the same experiment and see what they come up with...

He said, "Pick any account with a lot of followers." "Ignore the first 1000 people who follow you, then pick every tenth." Better ideas are welcome."

His grand project, it turns out, is methodologically simpleminded.

Many people, including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, were quick to point out that the billionaire's strategy isn't random and that the sample size is way too small.

"How will they know which one is real?" Moskovitz countered. "I also think 'doesn't trust the Twitter staff to help pull the sample' is a red flag in and of itself."

Others have pointed out that Musk's latest comments show that he has done shockingly little investigation to comprehend what he's ready to pay tens of billions of dollars for.

Which begs the question: is Musk, the world's biggest troll, playing a new game with us?

"Perhaps bots are less likely to follow this account to escape discovery," Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington professor who co-wrote a book on public data misunderstanding, told CNBC. "Perhaps they'll follow just to appear legitimate."

"However, I can't imagine Musk is doing anything other than teasing us with this dumb sampling scheme," he continued, echoing Moskovitz's stance.

After Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal attempted to clear the air in a lengthy discussion on Monday, the belief that Musk is merely playing with us gathered traction.

In short, the issue is significantly more convoluted than Musk portrays it, with Agrawal pointing out that "spam isn't merely 'binary' (human/nonhuman)." Furthermore, he stated that Twitter already suspends "nearly half a million spam accounts every day, frequently before any of you see them on Twitter."

"Our real internal estimations over the prior four quarters were all far under 5%," Agrawal wrote, adding that "it's impossible to tell which accounts are counted as [monetizable daily active users] on any given day."

Musk, for one, chose to provide almost no significant or helpful comments, a strategy he has grown notorious for over the years.

"Have you tried calling them directly?" Musk sarcastically responded to Agrawal's explanation of how Twitter detects whether an account is legitimate or false.

Then he added a poop emoji, which we take very seriously.

Overall, Musk appears to be uninterested in resolving Twitter's spam problem, which is a severe and pressing issue.

The billionaire CEO has once again demonstrated his lack of trust in Twitter's leadership. According to Agrawal, the company's executives even shared the whole estimation process with Musk personally, which he blatantly ignored.

At the end of the day, Musk's words show that we don't know much about his true objectives. It's a difficult negotiation that might get even messier — and it's costing Twitter a lot of money.

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Bored Apes, Ryder Ripps, and 'Owning' an NFT

GAG Guy — Fri, 20 May 2022 08:06:00 +0000

Ryder Ripps, a millennial-focused artist known for his satire, stunts, and design work, has started minting a non-fungible token (NFT) set spoofing the influential Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC).

Since Monday, Ripps has created about 550 tokens "by hand," he added. Each one includes a new siminan character from the imaginary planet of the Bored Apes. Ripps, in other words, is imitating the apes.

After receiving a Digital Millennium Copyright Act request, Foundation, an NFT platform, halted trading of some of the photos earlier this week. According to a letter published by Ripps, his work had infringed on the intellectual property of Yuga Labs, the parent company of the Bored Apes brand. Despite Ripps' intentions to fight the DMCA – as he has in the past to defend other artistic crimes of plagiarism - the photographs are once again causing controversy in the NFT business.

"I haven't (sic) slept," Ripps wrote in a private chat around 11:00 UTC yesterday.

“minting

"by hand

“hehe.”

This act is viewed as a work of "performance art" by buyers of the "RR/BAYC" tokens, which are an acronym of Ripps' name. By attaching a different non-fungible blockchain signature to Yuga Labs' copyrightable information, Ripps is putting it in a new context. He claims that while the pictures are similar, the meanings are not.

NFTs are a sort of blockchain-based technology that allows you to add a tradable item to another piece of digital data like a PDF, GIF, or MP3 file. Supporters believe they can be used to improve data provenance and give infinitely replicated files a distinct identity.

NFTs are increasingly being utilized for fundraising, sometimes in ways that appear to be in violation of existing securities rules. The sector, which is seen as a hub for innovation and artistic creativity, is also generating questions about copyright law and what it means to possess a digital asset.

In a move that may be described as decentralized brand building, the Bored Ape Yacht Club allows token holders to monetise their NFTs and related personalities. Ape owners have created theme restaurants, sold Ape products, and used fan art to enrich the club's lore.

See also: Neil Strauss's 'Tell-All' for the Bored Ape Yacht Club

It's unknown why or how Ripps' photographs were pulled down, a procedure that may have been automated, or re-posted on Foundation, which Ripps believes was a direct act by Yuga Labs.

"If they went out of their way to cancel that request, it sends a significant message," Ripps remarked over the phone. Yuga Labs' spokesperson did not respond to several requests for comment.

Ripps has largely been selling his phony apes for.1 ETH, which is currently worth roughly $200. After informing Ripps he appreciated the joke but couldn't afford the price, a Twitter user known as @VardCrypto was handed an RR/BAYC token.

"You don't see conceptual art in the NFT realm every day," Vard told CoinDesk. "I like how [Ripps] is proving that you can't replicate an NFT using the base URI [universal resource identifier, which is used to address online data]."

Ripps has made an artistic statement regarding NFTs before, as well as criticized successful "profile pic" efforts. These projects, often known as PFPs, refer to a non-traditional sector of largely cartoonish animal characters such as Lazy Lions, Pudgy Penguins, and MiLadies that consumers use as online avatars.

Ripps "punked the CryptoPunks," an early NFT art series of highly valuable collector's goods, by copying and pasting a punk file, minting his own token, and putting it as his profile picture on social media platforms such as Twitter, in July of last year. Except for the token tied to it, Ripps' version of Punk 3100 was identical to the CryptoPunk NFT initially produced by Larva Labs in 2017.

"They should be believers in the self-governing ideas of cryptocurrencies by engaging their so-called art with the Ethereum network." Ripps told CoinDesk at the time, "I question Larva Labs' intentions, comprehension of art, grasp of 'punk,' and understanding of cryptocurrency/NFT."

Ripps has also tried to bring attention to alleged racist stereotypes in the Bored Ape Yacht Club during the last year. He runs a website called Gordon Goner, named after one of Yuga Labs' once-pseudonymous creators, that details the series' "dog whistles" and "Nazi imagery."

"If you've ever been on 4chan," Ripps remarked, referring to some of the arcane references or "inner jokes" he claims to have discovered. "That's amazing how far they went with it."

Ripps' assertions have been refuted by Yuga Labs, and some of his claims have been labeled shallow, false, or coincidental by others.

"I got [a RR/BAYC] because I've been following his work for years, and his satire is my favorite and most poignant." "I would never consider any form of Yuga Labs purchase," krystall.eth, an NFT collector, told CoinDesk.

While others are boycotting, the bored brand is just getting stronger. Justin Beiber, Jimmy Fallon, and Snoop Dogg are among the celebrities who have joined the "yacht club." A recent sale of virtual land linked to the BAYC "metaverse" raised more than $285 million, contributing to an increase in Ethereum transaction fees (which climb in response to demand), with the network's fourth-highest trading week coinciding with the sale. Yuga Labs just completed a $450 million investment round led by Andreessen Horowitz, a leading venture capital firm.

Yuga is being courted away from Ethereum by a film series, an APE token, and blockchain "business development teams."

After a disagreement with famous NFT influencer j1mmy.eth, Ripps' current BAYC project was born. Ripps created a replica of j1mmy's Bored Ape profile photo to refute allegations that owning a token grants you exclusive rights to an image.

"Well, it doesn't matter, it's not the same NFT!" an Ape would remark if you come at them for rocking their PFP. "To which you should respond, "exactly, you can't reproduce an NFT, hence it's an original work with fresh context/meaning," as the phunks did," Ripps added.

After a rejected copyright suit from Larva Labs, Ripps' early experiment with counterfeit CryptoPunks was permitted to continue trading on OpenSea, but some legal experts believe the merry prankster may be in legal trouble this time.

"The BAYC photos are a different story." "There's no doubt they're copyrightable, and RR's use of them is prima facie infringement," Brian Frye, a lawyer and conceptual artist known for his own anti-plagiarism pronouncements, told CoinDesk.

He explained, "The difficulty is that he's selling NFTs connected with the photos into the'same' market as [Yuga Labs]."

Brian Frye, an NFT artist, wants you to steal this article.

Ripps claims his actions fall within "fair use" of photographs, a legal copyright exception intended for educational purposes - such as a news organization putting a Bored Ape image in an article to demonstrate how they appear, according to Frye.

"However, utilizing a BAYC image to show an NFT for sale is the same thing the copyright owner is doing to commercialize the work," he stated.

In his body of work, Ripps has claimed that developing and selling NFTs is an act of art in and of itself, and that a broader notion of fair use would apply. Yuga was also unlikely to seek charges, according to Frye, because it would call attention to Ripps' race-related accusations or "make them look like tools."

Ripps' initiative has received mixed reviews on Twitter. "What's going on at [the] foundation?" inquired @DegenSpartan, an Egirl Capital partner. In response to the latest uproar, he labeled it a "free for all."

Although Ripps has a constitutional right to critique and remark on an influential project under the First Amendment, his effort could be seen as tarnishing the Bored Ape's brand and possibly causing confusion in the NFT markets, but this may not matter in the eyes of the law.

"Consumers are unimportant to Copyright. "The whole goal of copyright is to have customers pay more so that copyright owners benefit," Frye explained.

======

Let's commit to our communities using new forms of money

GAG Guy — Fri, 20 May 2022 07:52:00 +0000

A teacher requested me to write an essay about what I would do to solve a global problem when I was ten years old. I proclaimed that I wanted to outlaw money since it was the source of so much evil. That concept was crude, and what I'll express here could be as well, so I present it with complete humility. To improve this incredibly delicate, crucial, and social institution, much work remains to be done.

The issue is genuine. Everyone believes that the ways we measure, store, and exchange value are problematic at best and broken at worst, from Keynesians to bitcoiners. We are no closer to a perfect form of money than we are to an ideal language or administration, in my opinion. That is why it is so fascinating to live in an era of programmable money, when we can deconstruct the system and reconstruct it in ways that were previously unimaginable. The monetary innovation that has occurred in the first decade of blockchain technology has disappointed me. However, many options are only now becoming apparent.

The president of the RadicalxChange Foundation, Matt Prewitt, will speak on the "Big Ideas/" stage at CoinDesk's Consensus festival in Austin, Texas, from June 9 to 12. Find out more.

I'll provide a perspective on money as a communication technique in this essay. Then, unlike fiat or Bitcoin, I'll outline some paths toward creating a new and better sort of money — money for a more prosperous and complex society.

Money is language

Money is a kind of communication. People utilize it to communicate messages, just like language, democracy, legislation, and telephone networks.

Milton Friedman famously illustrated this argument with a pencil. He realized that no one really knows how to make a pencil. To get started, you'd need to cut down a tree. A saw made of good steel would be required for this. You'd have to start with iron ore for that. What about the pencil's paint, the rubber eraser, the finely ground graphite, the glue, and the metal bit that holds the eraser to the wood? And so on. This modest marvel is not the work of some polymathic craftsperson, but rather the price mechanism, which allows individuals all across the world to cooperate despite never meeting (and, Friedman significantly observes, possibly even hating each other).

Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, both Austrian School economists, saw the economy as an information system that used pricing to integrate massive data on what people subjectively wanted where, when, and how badly. I disagree with these thinkers on a number of points, but I agree with their view of the economy as an information processing system based on the pricing mechanism. When we connect with one another through the economy, we speak and understand the language of money.

Languages are imperfect

The economy's informative outputs, like those of any other complex information processor, must be compressed or decreased in comparison to what went in. This is related to the premise that entropy, or disorder, tends to rise with time, which is the cornerstone of current information theory as well as the unbreakable second law of thermodynamics.

Currencies circulating locally rather than globally could bend market participants’ plane of focus like a lens.

The idea of increasing disorder in information systems may appear esoteric, but it is straightforward. A sunset photograph always leaves something out. The message is never properly conveyed by words. A map contains significantly less information than the land it portrays. This is the whole idea of information processing: photos, words, and maps help us communicate things we couldn't otherwise. However, we must be very careful to recognize the limitations of our summaries and to recognize that actual growth comes from confronting and overcoming those limitations. This is why photographers search out better equipment, languages change, and mapmakers' job never ends.

Money, like all other forms of information, is subject to this fundamental law. It's not an issue of whether it muddles its messaging, but how it does so.

The information money carries

Through an aperture, cameras receive data and create an image. People's decisions to buy, sell, or hold objects provide information to markets, which is used to determine a price. But what factors influence price determinations? Do prices transmit less information than they could, or information that isn't required? If that's the case, we can compare it to signal distortion or noise. And, just as a lens aids in the acquisition of a sharper image in a camera, a different type of money may aid in the capture of better information in the economy.

When we buy, sell, or hold securities in the market, we are continuously weighing alternatives. Would I rather have $5,000 or a lovely antique table, for example? The decision is actually much more difficult than it appears because I must consider persons other than myself when making it. For example, I might be in desperate need of $5,000 yet despise the table.

However, if I believe that someone in the marketplace is willing to pay $7,500 for the table, my stated choice will change. With a $2,500 profit in mind, I'll tell the market that I prefer the table to $5,000, despite the fact that this is completely false. I'd rather have $7,500 than $5,000.

This technique appears efficient if we want prices to inform us what the worldwide top bidder will pay. However, it appears to be noisy and wasteful from another angle. After all, in a market, everyone knows more about themselves than they do about others. So you'd think we'd want markets to collect the unique information that each actor has to offer: How much do you want the table? Instead, the global market requires us to speculate on what the world's wealthiest table enthusiast might pay and factor that into our buying, selling, or holding decisions.

To put it another way, the global market forces us to think and communicate about things we have no special knowledge of. This is a substantial cognitive load when applied to many economic decisions. It also drowns out other price signal information. Markets do not find out what everyone believes about the value of things, even if everyone participates in them. They're simply interested in hearing what the highest bidders have to say.

A reason Austrians like gold

My argument for gold follows in the footsteps of certain Austrian School economists (and now bitcoin). According to the Austrians, these difficult-to-mint currencies reduce people's cognitive burdens by making saving straightforward. Instead of socking money away and planning for our own futures, the threat of inflation with easy-to-mint money forces everyone to invest rather than save: we all have to "play the markets," guessing what the global highest bidders will pay for tech stocks, euros, and beachfront real estate next year. This is a difficulty with labor division. It suggests that those who are outstanding at something, like music, must spend less time generating fantastic music and more time spending money in an incompetent manner merely to keep their money.

But (and this is where I depart from Salzburg) markets forcing everyone to consider what other people will want next year isn't necessarily a negative thing. It may be argued that this is a benefit rather than a bug: injecting distributed intellect into the problem of money allocation across society is worth the mental capacity it requires.

The Austrians, on the other hand, are pointing to a true issue, because it is wasteful for individuals to have to evaluate complex topics about which they have no special knowledge. Regrettably, the fiat-dominated global market constantly requires us to do so. Moving to a world where everyone merely hoards hard money, on the other hand, would return the pendulum to the opposite extreme of individualism, inattention to others' capital needs, and compounding power concentration.

The real issue is a size disparity between an individual and the global (or other extremely huge) market environment in which they must set their rates. Because of the disparity in scale between people' narrow interests and the immensity of the market, the information they send to markets is noisy - similar to a microphone signal with too much gain or a photograph taken with too long an exposure.

However, if markets incentivize us to price goods in local rather than global terms, the situation could be very different. Then, while deciding whether to purchase, sell, or hold, we'd consider simply what ourselves and our communities require, rather than the needs of the entire global market. Because our communities are near by, this would not waste as much energy. We actually know quite a bit about them.

The promise of alternative currencies

This explains the appeal of local currencies (despite their drawbacks, which I'll discuss shortly). Currencies that circulate locally rather than worldwide could bend the plane of focus of market players like a lens, collecting less noise data. Rather than attempting to estimate what an expert Manhattan dealer could pay for an antique table, a participant in a truly local economy would simply examine the table's value to themselves and those they know.

This shift in people's attention could lead to more healthy and self-sustaining economic communities. Global trade networks aren't going away, but significant local or community currencies could potentially build additional layers, contributing to a more richly textured global economy in accordance with the subsidiarity concept (the idea that decisions are best made nearest the people they impact).

Existing and emerging technologies will let us experiment more rapidly than ever before with currency governance.

Capturing locally relevant information in prices might encourage more local rather than global commerce. Instead of waiting for remote employment from the same few multinational agencies, brilliant professionals in Ohio or Nepal might work for more local enterprises, helping to bootstrap local economies.

It's also worth noting that "local currency" does not always have to do with location. Many intersecting currency networks could operate inside communities defined in a variety of ways.

It's difficult to say how much wealth this could generate, but it's evident that enhancing the informational quality of prices in this way could be huge. So why hasn't it happened yet? Many projects have done significant good, but none have fundamentally transformed the economy in the way I propose. Why hasn't the ease with which ERC-20 tokens can be produced resulted in a surge in community currencies?

Global currency and the trouble with 'exit'

Local currencies have always had a difficult time. People tend to wish to trade their money for a more universal type of money when they amass a substantial quantity. Even before they do it, they mentally translate: "How many dollars do I have in currency XYZ right now?"

This is understandable because we can spend our money wherever we want, not simply where we got it. We can feel richer as individuals by taking what we acquired in one society and transferring it to another where it can buy more. Yes, there are benefits to trade.

However, this is air leaving the balloon from the perspective of the first community, where the accumulation happened. Local currencies will only be able to support local economies if they can deter people from withdrawing money.

To put it another way, we need individuals to think in terms of local currencies rather than dollars or bitcoins in order for them to capture more information than the global economy. This may appear to be an additional cognitive strain, but recall that pricing everything in a local economy would be easier since you wouldn't have to consider strangers on the other side of the world's desire to pay.

The question is, how do you go about doing it? How could we create community-oriented currencies that people believe in rather than abandon?

Values, incentives and exit costs – why use local currencies?

The ability to express shared ideals is a powerful motivator for using community currency. Accepting the currency of a community would be a show of support. It would be a symbol of belonging if you spent it. And the resulting economy would reflect the community's particular ideals.

However, withdrawing cash from the system must come at a cost (either a direct cost or a visible opportunity cost) in order to retain this unique, local information – this representation of specific, shared values – against the winds of global economic forces. And, in order to be sustainable, that cost would have to be more than a speculative belief in rising prices. (Sorry, but HODLers aren't a genuine group.)

Existing and developing technology will allow us to experiment with currency administration more quickly than ever before. Making local and community financial systems semipermeable will be crucial. We want them to store energy, similar to efficient internal combustion engines, while also breathing and communicating intelligently with the outside environment, similar to biological membranes with transport proteins. Two incentive systems pointing in that direction are shown below.

First, the currency might be the only tender in which it is possible to interact with the community’s shared assets. This would create a unique reason to hold it. These assets could include:
Taxes on exit. In a previous article, I proposed a community departure tax system in which capital transfers to more socially distant places and/or from wealthier locations would be subject to a larger levy. In their latest work, E. Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin outline identity structures based on "soulbound" tokens as a design space for augmenting these taxes. More research is needed, but in general, we'd like to develop exit costs that are high enough that most individuals don't think twice about withdrawing their money from the community, but low enough that clearly beneficial external transactions can still take place. And these should only apply to unilateral capital removal decisions: the community should have complete control over external economic connections through delegated or democratic decision-making.

Conclusion

Money isn't flawless. It has evolved over time and is a technology that can be enhanced. It is failing us in the current period because it is too general. It diverts our attention away from the communities that generate our riches. The greatest opportunity that new technologies provide is for us to commit to our communities rather than "leave" them. This has the potential to make the globe both wealthier and more multicultural.

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The IRS may be missing out on $50 billion in unpaid crypto taxes each year, and a crackdown is in the works

GAG Guy — Thu, 19 May 2022 16:13:00 +0000

The Internal Revenue Service may be losing more than $50 billion each year as a result of crypto dealers failing to pay their taxes. And the agency is paying attention.

According to a recent Barclays report released last week, managing director Joseph Abate estimates that the tax gap from crypto trading — the difference between how much tax revenue the IRS collects and how much it is owed — might be as high as $50 billion per year.

Barclays calculated the current crypto tax gap by extrapolating data from the IRS in 2017 and estimating that it accounts for 10% of the overall national tax gap.

According to Barclays, the margin is likely substantially larger. This is due to the fact that "most of the DeFi activity occurring today did not exist four years ago." DeFi, which stands for decentralized finance, attempts to use bitcoin to replicate existing financial structures such as banks and exchanges. The Ethereum blockchain is used by the majority of them.

"While all transactions may be public on the blockchains," Abate argues, "if all counterparties are anonymous, it is difficult for the IRS to determine who owes taxes." "Without any supporting IRS data, we believe the $50 billion estimate for the crypto tax shortfall is likely too low."

This is not to argue that cryptocurrency traders should aim to avoid paying taxes on their profits. Instead, companies should be more diligent in reporting than ever before, since the IRS has strengthened its crackdown on would-be crypto tax evaders in recent years.

"The IRS has been leaning very hard, investing in both staff and process and form revisions," says Austin Woodward, CPA and CEO of bitcoin accounting platform TaxBit.

For the past two years, the first item on taxpayers' 1040 forms after filling out their contact information has been a question asking if "at any time during 2021, did [they] receive, sell, exchange, or otherwise dispose of any financial interest in any virtual currency," which taxpayers must answer under penalty of perjury.

"Now, there's intent behind this intentional neglect if you answer 'no' and don't record your crypto gains," Woodward tells CNBC Make It. Failure to report gains could lead to a long IRS audit and potential fines.

The best course of action for crypto traders is to be open and honest about their crypto purchases and transactions on their tax returns. Because the IRS conducts audits with a two-year lag, Woodward believes that traders who have previously failed to disclose gains may still be discovered.

He advises keeping precise records of your transactions in order to answer any queries the agency may have. If you need to make changes to a previous tax return, you can do it electronically with the IRS using this link.

"I believe the ideal strategy for any cryptocurrency user is to operate as if it is not at all anonymous," he argues. "Just because you think you're safe and clear a few months after filing your tax return, that's not the case." This item has the potential to last for many, many years."

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Binance's billionaire founder says he's 'poor again' after the Luna holdings: Once worth $1.6 billion, they have plummeted to barely $2,200

GAG Guy — Thu, 19 May 2022 08:46:00 +0000

The billionaire founder of crypto exchange Binance, Chanpeng Zhao, quipped on Tuesday that he was "broke again" after the exchange's assets in the bitcoin cryptocurrency dropped from $1.6 billion just a month ago to just $2,200 this week.

Zhao stated in a tweet on Monday that Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, possessed 15 million luna tokens. Binance obtained these tokens in exchange for a $3 million investment in the Terra network, on which Luna is based, made in 2018. According to Zhao, its luna tokens were "never traded or sold" as of Monday.

Zhao has been contacted for comment by Insider.

Binance's luna holdings were valued at $1.6 billion in early April, when the cryptocurrency reached its all-time high. However, due to the latest crash, its value has dropped to around $2,200 this week. As of Thursday, the currency was selling for around $0.0001468.

In the last two weeks, the value of Luna has plummeted precipitously.

Its demise began two weeks ago, when its sister coin, TerraUSD, lost its link to the US dollar. The valuations of the two tokens are linked. When the price of TerraUSD dropped, investors raced to sell their shares in a scenario comparable to a bank run. TerraUSD's decline, in turn, drove down the price of luna.

According to Insider, the two coins' free fall was expected to have wiped off more than $50 billion in paper value.

Zhao encouraged the Terra team on Monday to first refund its ordinary investors. "To lead by example on PROTECTING USERS, Binance will let this go and ask the Terra project team to compensate the retail users first, Binance last, if ever," he tweeted.

4/ Now the important part.

To lead by example on PROTECTING USERS, Binance will let this go and ask the Terra project team to compensate the retails users first, Binance last, if ever.

Binance (after a 5 min discussion) fully support this proposal. 👇https://t.co/QnMx8aZ09A
— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) May 16, 2022

Despite his comments, Zhao, 45, is not bankrupt. According to Bloomberg, he has a net worth of around $14.8 billion as of Thursday. According to Forbes, the majority of his fortune is likely derived from his estimated 70% share in Binance.

According to Forbes, Binance's market worth is six times that of its nearest competitor, Coinbase. According to MarketWatch, which cited a research issued by financial-services company Opimas, Binance earned approximately $14.6 billion in trading fees last year.

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Who is Do Kwon, the 'lunatic' who made a cryptocurrency worth $60 billion that fell apart in a day ?

GAG Guy — Thu, 19 May 2022 08:31:00 +0000

TerraUSD (UST), Kwon's stablecoin that is supposed to always be worth $1, fell to as low as 13 cents last week and as low as nine cents this week. As a result, Kwon's cryptocurrency, Luna, crashed, causing investors to lose a lot of money.

But who is Kwon, and how did he come to be in charge of a project that climbed quickly and then crashed even faster—to the point that some have compared him to Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos or Ken Lay of Enron?

Early years

Kwon was born in 1991 in South Korea. According to his LinkedIn page, he began attending Stanford University in 2010 and graduated with a computer science degree in 2015. According to New York Magazine's Intelligencer, Do Kwon worked at a Microsoft "business partner" and at Apple, according to a public website made by him.

According to CoinDesk, Do Kwon helped launch the failed stablecoin project Basis Cash in 2020 using the alias "Rick Sanchez" (from the animated show Rick and Morty). His algorithmic stablecoin, which failed, was similar to his earlier idea, UST. Basis Cash, like UST, was created to preserve a link to the US dollar through code rather than holding reserves in cash and other less risky assets. However, Basis Cash's developers abandoned it because it never attained a dollar value.

Capital raising

Terraform Labs was created in 2018 by Do Kwon and Daniel Shin, who later left the firm. Terraform began receiving investor interest almost immediately. Arrington Capital, Pantera Capital, and Galaxy Digital were among the investors who contributed $150 million to the firm.

According to VentureBeat, Terraform Labs received additional $32 million in August 2018 to develop a "new financial system on the blockchain." Binance, OKX, Huobi Group, and Upbit were among the company's high-profile sponsors, as were the investment arms of four of the world's six major cryptocurrency exchanges at the time: Binance, OKX, Huobi Group, and Upbit.

According to the New York Times, which cited PitchBook, investors Arrington Capital and Coinbase Ventures have invested more than $200 million in projects built on Luna's underlying technology between 2018 and 2021.

Following the collapse of UST and Luna, many of these investors suffered significant losses. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao revealed this week that his company's $3 million investment in Luna in 2018 grew to nearly $1.6 billion at the time of the crash in April, but was now worth less than $3,000. However, not all investors suffered losses as a result of the crash. According to the New York Times, Pantera Capital made $170 million off a $1.7 million investment after selling roughly 80% of its Luna assets over the past year.

Ascend to fame

Kwon earned Forbes' 30-under-30 list after successfully obtaining funds for his venture, partially because, as Forbes stated at the time, he had drawn "40 million users to work with the company at debut in January 2018." After years of trading for approximately $1, Luna, the sibling cryptocurrency created to help the UST stablecoin maintain its dollar peg, began to appreciate in value in January 2021. Luna had risen to $99 by the end of December 2021, and had reached a high of $119 in April, according to CoinMarketCap.

Concerns over how his algorithmic stablecoin will maintain its dollar peg led Kwon to announce that he would purchase $10 billion in Bitcoin to back UST.

Do you agree with Kwon's criticism?

Kwon, who exudes confidence, was particularly scathing of his competitors and detractors on social media.

Do Kwon chastised investors who were investing money into rival stablecoin projects in a December 2020 tweet, claiming that UST was the oldest and most frequently utilized stablecoin in existence.

In the tweet, he said, "Bow before the king."

Kwon was also known for calling UST and Luna critics "poor" and claiming that they would "remain poor" if they did not support him or his cryptocurrencies.

In response to tweets critical of decentralized finance from British economist Frances Coppola in July, Kwon said, "I don't dispute the poor on Twitter, and unfortunately I don't have any change on me for her at the time."

"There's also fun in seeing enterprises collapse," Kwon cynically boasted just a week before Terra lost its peg to the US dollar.

Do Kwon: "95% are going to die [coins], but there's also entertainment in watching companies die too"

8 days ago. Ironic. pic.twitter.com/fEQMZIyd9a
— Pedr🌐 (@EncryptedPedro) May 11, 2022

Kwon remained unyielding even as his stablecoin began to falter, never publicly apologizing to investors and tweeting on May 11 that "Terra's return to form would be a sight to behold."

Terra's rescue idea

Do Kwon suggested on Wednesday that the Terra blockchain, which powers the cryptocurrencies UST and Luna, "fork" or break into two different blockchains to start over. If the plan is approved by Luna token holders, two Terra blockchains will exist at the same moment, but for distinct purposes.

Kwon intends to abandon the UST stablecoin in favor of Luna as the new chain's cryptocurrency. Kwon also suggested that supporters of the new network be given millions of Luna tokens.

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The Department of Commerce has posed 17 questions to aid in the development of a crypto framework

GAG Guy — Thu, 19 May 2022 08:13:00 +0000

The US Department of Commerce is seeking proposals on how to create a framework that will improve American economic competitiveness in digital assets such as cryptocurrency and stablecoins.

The Department of Commerce (DoC) plans to issue a request for comment through the International Trade Administration, which will include 17 questions. On May 19, the request will be published in the Federal Register.

The inquiries concern the Department of Commerce's efforts to build a framework for addressing impediments to American economic growth including digital assets, as requested by President Joe Biden's Executive Order.

The unpublished request for comment from the Department of Commerce.

The questions will cover a variety of subjects relating to crypto firms in the United States, such as opinions on how laws might improve competition and the present challenges that business owners face. It will also cover the mining of digital assets, most likely in regard to Bitcoin and Ethereum. One asks:

"What, if any, future role does digital asset mining play in the digital asset sector in the United States?" What can the US government and businesses do to promote competitive, environmentally friendly, and energy-efficient digital asset development?

According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, the United States is presently the leading Bitcoin mining country, producing 37.84 percent of the world's hash power as of January. According to this indicator, it shows that many companies believe in the future of digital asset mining.

Remember Biden's crypto executive order from two months ago?

Buried in it was homework for the Department of Commerce:

Make a plan for driving U.S. competitiveness and leadership in crypto.

Well... (🧵):https://t.co/zvAbUpG7M8 pic.twitter.com/ymzm1f9g13
— Adam Kovacevich (@adamkovac) May 10, 2022

Demand for sustainable energy sources and carbon neutrality is increasing among those miners. On May 10, investors such as Kevin O'Leary, who are pushing demand for sustainable mining, told Cointelegraph that the crypto business is "at an intriguing inflection point" in terms of environmental awareness.

Although the Federal Reserve Board stated in its Financial Stability Report on May 9 that it has no plans to launch a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), one of the DoC's inquiries will inquire about the CBDC's potential impact on business.

The Department of Commerce will also investigate whether digital assets can assist unbanked Americans in gaining access to financial instruments that they may require but cannot obtain through regular channels. Insiders in the crypto business have long argued that banking the unbanked is a natural match for the technology.

"How can the federal government and the digital assets industry work together to guarantee that underserved Americans benefit from greater commercial availability of digital assets?"

The Department of Commerce's thinking in developing the framework for an American digital asset company regulatory framework will be informed by the request for public comment. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo's March 9 statement in response to President Biden's Executive Order illustrates this early and open approach to the Department of Commerce's activities. She stated that her agency would engage with digital asset industry partners to "mitigate risks for the firms and individuals that rely on it" in order to strengthen "the resilience of the US financial system."

If the questions are released on May 19, as planned, comments will be welcomed until July 5 and should be addressed to digitalassets@trade.gov.

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