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If you're not sure what kind of discussion belongs in this thread, here are some example posts. News, TA, and sentiment analysis are great, too.
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Everything is good... Trezor splits are straight forward. I did them last week. The method is easy, the explanation and disclaimers are hard. I'll switch to the simplest procedure I can muster..
Done!
Now the explanations are what trip people up. But ultimately I just did those 4 steps. Here are some explinations
You want to make sure you get the right EC release. This requires learning gpg and checking signatures. Basic security stuff, but can make some people glaze over. I've seen stats on the number of .exe downloads compared to the number of .sig downloads, and basically 90% of the people don't check.
https://trezor.io/coins/ and ensure that Cryptonite gives you the "green shield"You might also want to make two separate data directories with EC with two separate wallet files for BCH and BSV. A bit of extra work, but saves you from constantly having to switch forks. Just select the "Follow this" option once and it will stick.
You might also want to learn some of the Electrum (parent of Electron) config syntax. You can use this knowledge to put in BSV and BCH hosts to ensure you have both chains visible in the app.
As of today (Dec 7) Trezor makes BCH/BSV transactions that look the same. This isn't a problem if you send the funds to yourself (as I advise) but can be a problem if you send funds to an exchange. These are called "Replays" and it is why everyone is asking for "Replay Protection". There are tools that will ad a new BCH op-code to the BCH transaction so that the BCH and BSV transactions are less "replayable". You can implement a round-about form of reply protection by simply ensuring you understand how adresses work. This is why you should ensure that the addresses used in [2] and [4] are different and never used again on either chain. If you split the coins in [2] and [4] and ensure you never use the addresses [2] and [4] ever again, you are safe to send them to the exchange (step 5).
Technically the EC software doesn't know what BSV is. It just sees two BCH chains. When EC sees this it labels the two forks off of some hash or MRK tree. The hashes are known and published and unchanging so BCH is always "426..." and the BSV fork is always "1d9...". This is VERY important!
Did I mention that you should ensure that the "to" addresses for steps [2] and [4] are different, are your own, and NEVER get reused as another "to" address? If you EVER reuse these addresses you will break the replay protection provided in these 4 steps.
Part of the reason people don’t want to use Bitcoin is that they don’t know enough about it. Well, our mission here at CoinSutra is to get everyone on the same page with regard to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. 1. The first Bitcoin purchase was for pizza. Did you know why May 22 is celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza Day?
Initially, when bitcoins were mined they were virtually worthless as it cost literally cents to buy a BTC.
But it was until 22 May 2010, when someone purchased something with bitcoins.
Seven years ago on this day, someone bought Piazzas with bitcoins and this purchase was a big deal because no retailer was accepting bitcoins at that time for goods and services.
On 22 May 2010, two Papa John’s Pizzas were exchanged by Laszlo Hanyecz for 10,000 BTC. This was the first official documented purchase of goods using bitcoins.
At that time, the worth of 10,000 BTC was $41.
At the time of writing this article, the worth of 10,000 BTC is around $25.8 million.
Yes, that’s correct! The inventor of Bitcoin is still unknown.
Since the inception of Bitcoin in 2009, there have been several speculations about who the father of Bitcoin is.
The Bitcoin whitepaper was made open to the public under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. The identity of “Satoshi” is still a mystery yet to be solved.
Amidst this confusion, there are some people like Craig Wright, an Australian entrepreneur, who in May 2016 claimed to be the inventor of Bitcoin. However, this guy, later on, turned out to be just another scammer.
He with his partner tried to pump a forked version of Bitcoin called Bitcoin cash and made a lot of innocent users lose their hard earned money. None the less, he bought a Limbo with all the scam money.
Some even suggest that Samsung, Toshiba, Nakamichi, and Motorola together created Bitcoin.
“Satoshi Nakamoto”: Samsung and Toshiba —- Satoshi Nakamichi and Motorola —- Nakamoto This anonymity has led to comments like“Bitcoin is a Ponzi Scheme,“ yet this buzz has not stopped BTC from growing.
Because the purpose of Bitcoin is to be a decentralized method of exchanging money, this anonymity is very healthy for the platform.
When making Bitcoin transactions, your name/identity is not used in any form. Only your public address is available.
But…
The Bitcoin blockchain is a permanent ledger which is transparent. If anyone knows your Bitcoin public address, they can see how many bitcoins you hold and what transactions you have made.
It’s how the FBI was able to bust the owner of Silk Road.
If users of Bitcoin want to hide their public address or IP, it can be done by using services like Bitmixer.io or a VPN.
That said, this just makes it difficult to trace; difficult, but not impossible.
James Howells, an IT guy, lost 7,500 bitcoins in November 2013. While he was cleaning his desk at home, he threw away his hard disk containing the private keys of bitcoins which he had mined in 2010.
The realization dawned on him when he read the news of a Norweigan man who made a fortune by buying BTC at a low price.
He searched and searched, but could not find his hard disk.
At present, the worth of 7,500 BTC is approximately $19.4 million.
Without the private key, the funds are lost forever no one can use them.
Until this point in time, it is estimated that around 25% of all bitcoins have been forever lost.
But unlike traditional paper money, you can’t touch, feel, or print bitcoin.
Bitcoins are mined on the blockchain network, and they come into existence when miners successfully mine Bitcoin blocks.
At present, the mining power of Bitcoin’s network is 300 times more powerful than the world’s top 5 supercomputers combined.
Bitcoin’s supply is finite.
There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins.
At present, 16.3 million have already been mined and are being traded. The last bitcoin will be mined in 2140. After that, no new bitcoins can be mined.
But the real question should be:
What can’t you buy with bitcoins? Here are just a few of the goods and services offered:
Coffee at Starbucks Funeral items in the US Space travel with Virgin Galatic Order food with Bitcoin E-commerce with Purse.io Book a flight for BTC Buy a Tesla Car To find out more places where you can spend your bitcoins, see CoinSutra’s guide on “Where Do I Spend Bitcoin?“.
Year Price at the Start of Year Price at the end of Year Growth in % 2010 $0.0015 $0.31 20566% 2011 $0.31 $6.18 1893.5% 2012 $6.18 $13.44 117.5% 2013 $13.44 $751 5487.8% 2015 $285 $435.7 52.8% 2016 $435.7 $952.5 118.5% 2017 $952.5 $2586 (To date) 171.57% Yes, I deliberately missed one year: 2014. In that year, Bitcoin prices plummeted, incurring a 62% loss to investors.
That happened mostly because of the MtGox hack in 2014. After that, the price dropped from $751 to $285.
The fear of a blockchain hack engulfed investors, but it was not the blockchain which was compromised. MtGox had several fatal and exploitable flaws.
But every other year, the price of Bitcoin has steadily increased.
However, the fundamental design is such that it can’t be banned, only regulated. As long as you have an internet connection and a Bitcoin wallet, you can engage in Bitcoin.
Nevertheless, many countries have tried to ban it, like Bangladesh, Bolivia, Thailand, and Vietnam (among many others). But there are some countries like Australia, Russia, Japan, and Venezuela which have made Bitcoin an official legal tender and are regulating it.
However, some countries like India and even the USA are unclear of their official policy regarding cryptocurrencies.
Try as they might, Bitcoin can’t be pushed away just because it threatens the financial power structure. This is the real beauty of Bitcoin.
Facts You Need To Know About Bitcoin Bitcoin is considered by many as the most revolutionary breakthrough of the 21st century after the internet.
Numerous cryptocurrencies have come and left after Bitcoin. Some called themselves “rivals of Bitcoin” while some complemented Bitcoin.
This is proof that Bitcoin and the blockchain are here to stay.
If you know more exciting facts about Bitcoin that I have missed in this article, then do let me know in the comments!!!
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For years, years, I wondered – ‘why me’ – you know, you know, kiddo – ‘why me’ – but there is no ‘why me’. What? As if there were, you know, ‘chosens’, there’s no ‘chosens’ – there’s no all–seeing, all–knowing powerful nothing. It happened. That’s it. I fell for it. I took its bait – hook, line, sinker. Didn’t I do it to myself? Wasn’t I the sucker? There’s no ‘why me’ – and once I realized that, that there was no, that there was no, no any kind of justice what so ever, until I acted, that gave my existence purpose. And now I’m gonna fulfill that purpose. I don’t want you getting involved. You’re deep enough as it is. Don’t be the sucker!
– Bobby Mortaren; famous last words
I raced from the house to the hotel, at Walsenburg, where I struggled to make sense of everything that transpired. I poured myself over notes and records that I had brought along. Only my laptop’s glow illuminated the room. Every so often lights through I-25 swept across the bed. Every so often breezes stirred trees around the perimeter. Soon midnight passed. The world darkened, relaxing as it were into slumber.
A knock rattled the door - and I could have shrieked if it weren’t for what remained of my nerves. All of a sudden, I felt so icy, so cold, that I stood, frozen, uncertain of how to proceed. Who was it? It couldn’t be good. Not the FBI. Not the Thules. Ache, already?
I balked at chucking my laptop - whoever they were at the door, they’d find it, they’d find it.
It’s the 21st century; evidence doesn’t vanish without a trace.
As my heart pounded my chest, I reached that door and cracked it a notch. I braced for the kick certain to follow. It didn’t come. The hotel’s courtyard / lot spread, deserted except for my rented Wrangler. There wasn’t anyone - anyone who may have been my visitor.
Yet - by my feet - at the edge of the threshold - my visitor had left a box.
I poked at it with my pole and turned it over and over. It wasn’t postmarked. It wasn’t addressed. It had been delivered by hand and, suspecting what it was, I yanked it inside. Leaning onto and drooping against the door, I tore its lid. The box contained two floppies, a CD, and a stack paper. It was Blue Beelzebub - all of it, every part of it. As well as instructions: a How-To-Guide for destroying your future, fetched onto my doorstep, white-glove-style to boot, as promised. It may as well have been a bomb.
###
How did Blue Beelzebub mutate into my obsession?
Worse - did I expect to find its truth remarked into code from 1996? 1996! There wasn’t a lot to the internet way, way back when. But crime was crime no matter its era. Was it crime? And did the game start this way or that way then evolve into crime? Was it crime from its start?
The programmer of Blue Beelzebub, a hacker by the avatar ‘ZuZu’, claimed to be legit. Their MO had been to create games not scams. Or so it appeared until Blue Beelzebub entered the story. If it were a product of malware, why had ZuZu devoted so much of their effort into its creation? Why had they boasted of the game’s nitty gritty details during its gestation? Why all of that trouble, if only a fraction of it would have been appreciated by those who played it? Even LVN, when they weren’t laundering bitcoin, expressed what may be described as passion for that game.
Was it a game?
By 1996 standards, its demos parlayed atrocious graphics and threadbare mechanics. The way it affected the player’s rig ensured nobody would be eager to replay it. The game passed every scan available yet it twisted the OS and hijacked the PC to serve as a node, a link into a yet-unknown and yet-unnamed network for purposes every bit as mysterious as the game itself.
As I contemplated the reality of the situation, I settled onto the notion that that game may have been a gimmick to cover truly malevolent intentions. That had been the crux of LVN’s KickStarter and GoFundMe rackets - they always proposed plausible if lofty projects as if they were real, actual products people buy. However, case after case demonstrated that their pretense unraveled after scrutiny. Could it be, as far back as 1996, the creator(s) of Blue Beelzebub conceived of such a deception? FPS (of the type Blue Beelzebub reported to be) were the rage through the 90s. If so then their MO resembled that of a typical bait-and-switch scheme - bait them with a game, switch them with a virus. Then? What? Profit?
###
In the summer of 2017, Czech authorities in conjunction with the EU, arrested LVN at their apartment south of Plzen. They seized the hacker’s laptop, PC, as well as their twenty thousand CD library. LVN was a hacker-for-fire; evidence presented at their arraignment demonstrated to the court that they had been paid by Russian and other Eastern European actors to pilfer bitcoin wallets. In addition to theft, the court entertained charges connected to a NiceHash heist of 64 million euros earlier that year.
It was the breach of NiceHash’s security that brought my skills to the EU’s attention. For a few weeks, between March and May, I played my part to aid the investigation and the conviction of its mastermind. We discovered that the breach had been directed from inside NiceHash. We split the work: ‘brick and mortar’ detectives ran interviews and stakeouts while my fellow ‘white-hats’ and I toiled at the forensics. To meet our end of the bargain, we created a model of that cyber-attack, in order to construct and deconstruct its operation. As we realized how the crime had been executed, we identified the party responsible for it and built the authorities a solid chain-of-evidence - a chain-of-evidence that identified LVN as the perpetrator.
LVN masterminded not just that NiceHash heist but a dozen scams at sites like KickStarter and GoFundMe. LVN traded exclusively through bitcoin. Their MO was to sow fake projects then to reap real funds submitted by backers - by backers who aimed to launder money via its exchange into bitcoin. Projects were advertised to those who sought the service; they were fraudulent through and through yet they appeared real enough to fool the maintainers of those sites and the public at large who may have been tricked by the scams.
Under the supervision of the investigation at large, I pledged my dollars to a few of LVN’s projects, to see what the response would be. Soon, LVN and I exchanged emails. They wanted to speak face-to-face. In front of the experts, I played to type and gained access to a roster of services from that hacker-for-hire. As a result of the communication, the investigation brought into play anti trafficking & exploiting agencies from around the world and accelerated their goal to convict LVN.
One of the projects LVN advertised didn’t fit into the mold in so far as it felt like a genuine hobby of theirs. LVN sought investors to fund their (re)development of a game, Blue Beelzebub. The project listed at KickStarter - removed but saved to my laptop - included a lightbox of images and demos as well as snippets of code. It discussed such esoterics as: updates to its physics engine and its video & audio renderer; upgrades to its arsenal and its gallery of foes; changing its play - expanding its levels and ditching its linearity.
The details impressed me as they perplexed me. Why? I kept asking. What’s the idea? What’s the racket? Why create a game using twenty year old technology? I understood its esoterics perfectly for I came of age during the 90s. So much of what went into Blue Beelzebub felt familiar as it was familiar. An FPS - first person shooter - propelled by a fork of that fabled, 2.5D DOOM engine. Little wonder that its caps parlayed the look and feel of classic 90s PC games!
Maybe it was yet another scam? Or - maybe - it was a hobby of a gamer / programmer? Could it be that LVN recalled those early DOS games and wanted to re-create the era? But that wasn’t everything. And as I mused & Googled I started to ask myself if there wasn’t more about Blue Beelzebub beyond the haze of my nostalgia. I failed to connect the dots although that did not shake the deja vu - somehow, someway, I recognized that game.
###
Escape published my article about LVN’s conviction. Against the advice of my editor, I stalked its commentary, to see what, if anything, the story drew out of the woodwork. Its aside re: Blue Beelzebub attracted attention. I wasn’t surprised, to be honest, as I had inserted it into the text to draw reaction. And my rouse worked! But I wasn’t the only one who felt deja vu about the game.
A commentator, who asked for anonymity, posted a link to 4CHAN about Blue Beelzebub. LVN had advertized the KickStarter for the game at a group devoted to indie developers. LVN never advertized their work at 4CHAN out of fear of exposure. So that thread where they didn’t ask for money confirmed my sense that it wasn’t, necessarily, a scam.
As I scanned that thread, however, I realized what a rabbit-hole the business would be. After LVN’s post, anonymous replies went to and fro as they typically do. Then the tenor of the thread devolved into a war amongst those who were for vs. those who were against what LVN proposed to do with the game. It was a question about credit. At last - somebody revealed a truth I duly suspected of - that Blue Beelzebub wasn’t the work of LVN - that the game as it existed predated LVN by twenty years or so.
The idea for Blue Beelzebub had floated about USENET c. 1995. The majority of the conversations extracted from the archives suggested that the game was vaporware. Its supporters countered that either a P/C or a DEMO existed and that a play-through had been uploaded to (early) YouTube. Everyone who added their opinion - pro & con - agreed that it was “inspired by Satan”, “took its cues from Crowley’s ‘Thelema’“, and that it included clips “replete with ever more corrupt” gore and snuff. A self-described player, whose rig they claimed had been “totaled” by the game, stated bluntly that it contained a “Chinese Sandwich”.
Undeterred by the confusion, I kept at my search, ramming through the archives, pushing my way further back in time, from 1997 to 1995. USENET had been mirrored prior to its collapse yet its content was not indexed completely; a robust query of its posts required force and patience.... In spite of the odds, my effort worked, my persistence located the roots of Blue Beelzebub.
It was a posted dated June 15, 1995 written by the game’s originator, a hacker by the name of ZuZu. According to their missive, they claimed to have produced “a proof of concept demo” for their “latest and greatest” game, Blue Beelzebub, and that it was “a legit game catering to those who worship and admire Lucifer and everything that stands for”. ZuZu listed, point by point, the substance of their creation. I wasn’t surprised to see, splattered across that post, the verbiage LVN usurped for their own advert.
Except - they weren’t seeking funding. According to their missive, the game had been bankrolled “by entities of a foreign sort, who don’t want to be credited”. Rather, they were seeking “experts” willing to alpha & beta test the product.
Blue Beelzebub and by extension ZuZu went rouge between 1997 and 2005.
Then - October 31, 2005 - ZuZu submitted their last, known public statement. Broadcasted through their usual, over-the-top flamboyance, they wished for their “fans to learn and spread the word” that they “secured an exclusive”. They had convinced a devote of indie horror / FPS games to review Blue Beelzebub. The player they had snagged was famous for their day and their name I recognized as I read it.
Bobby Mortaren - an internet pioneer par excellence. Mixing reviews and play-throughs together, his format had been lauded as visionary and just as imitated. Tweaked a bit by-the-by it continued to find use. His name, though, hadn’t been spoken of for a decade. Games had changed. Tastes had changed. He could have shifted into yet another venture so far as I knew.
Mortaren posted his works to YouTube - to YouTube prior to its merger with Alphabet. As I considered the changes that transpired across the years, I wasn’t surprised to discover that all of my links to his works were dead. Eerily, though, it was impossible to locate his reviews directly via YouTube. So I tried Google and Bing. No result. Ditto with DuckDuckGo. Ditto with Wiki, SlideShare, BoardReader. Out of desperation I surfed into the remnants of Alta Vista - maybe its database saved the information? No. No. Futile - all of it.
YouTube’s size was greater than USENET’s size. My task’s extent was altogether a colossal order of magnitude. If that which I pursued had not been deleted, then, it would be found ad finem omnia. So to dig further I opted for a quick & dirty hack - a bot. A bot scripted to sift and sort all YouTube’s content that matched keywords Mortaren and Blue Beelzebub. I ran it and waited for days then for weeks then for months.
###
My extensive search corroborated the fact that Mortaren left the internet c. 2006. Assuming they may have continued via pseudonym, I enquired into the matter with colleagues who devoted themselves to games and / or to reviews. Only a few recognized their name; nobody was cognizant of their voice.
An editor from ToplessRobot directed my attention to a defunct fansite’s messageboard where somebody asked why Mortaren vanished without a trace. To my shock, the reply was that Mortaren had been arrested by the FBI c. 2006. I could not fathom why. Nevertheless, if the revelation were correct, then, the resolution to the matter was tantalizingly viable. Arrests - and trials - were public.
The LVN / EU case brought my forensic skills to the notice of the DOJ and the Treasury / Secret Service. The FBI, like its European counterparts, wanted to understand everything about bitcoin and how it might (might) be possible to trace transactions to individuals.
As part of my freelance work, I already met and debriefed FBI agents re: the Czech hacker. Eventually ‘large’ talk gave way to ‘small’ talk amongst us. It was at that juncture that I broached the subject of Blue Beelzebub - namely, that LVN hatched a scheme to defraud investors (via bitcoin) ostensibly by promising to develop an update to that game.
“They got exposed by players who recognized the game’s ill-repute,” I stated. “Apparently, the game’s infamy started after its reviewer, a fellow by the name of - er - Robby Mortaren? Bobby Mortaren? Well - they got arrested by the FBI.”
Neither the game nor the reviewer elicited a reply - immediately, anyhow.
A (censored) document, summarizing a DOJ investigation, worked its way into my mailbox. Mortaren had been under FBI surveillance from November 2005 to May 2006. Why wasn’t stated; just that the FBI obtained search warrants for computers & electronics. A federal judge issued an arrest warrant May 30, 2006; however, the DOJ withdrew the charges after Mortaren agreed to an immunity deal. Mortaren turned star witness at a trial that involved organized crime as well as rackets, cults, ritualized human & civil rights abuses and elements that suggested Satanism. The perpetrator(s) that the DOJ wanted to convict fled either to South America OR Eastern Europe / Central Asia. The trial evaporated; neither the charges nor the perpetrator(s) were detailed.
Mortaren’s immunity deal with the DOJ wasn’t negotiable or retractable and included a complete internet ban.
The document listed a PO BOX as Mortaren’s permanent address.
To Mr. B. Mortaren:
Sir, I apologize. Blue Beelzebub. Were it not for the fact that you may be the only person left to recall that game, I would not have stretched my resources so thin to find you. If you are not able to assist my research, is anyone?
I was part of an EU investigation re: bitcoin, theft & fraud, as well as trafficking & exploiting vagrants. Through that investigation I came into contact with a hacker; they claimed to be working on Blue Beelzebub; they sought funds to upgrade it. While disturbing to say the least, that game did not strike me as part of the hacker’s MO. So I pried further into the matter and discovered, to my astonishment, that Blue Beelzebub dated to the mid 90s and that you reviewed & posted the demo at YouTube.
I am curious about that game. I cannot get it out of my head. Who was the programmer? Who was the developer? Where did they get the money? What were their goals? What was the game about, if the game was about anything?
A DOJ document summarizing your immunity from prosecution was brought to my attention. I suspected, as I matched the timeframe of the FBI’s surveillance and arrest, to the demo, that these matters are related. I was not able to find a link, due to the fact that all records, transcripts, etc., were sealed by request of the FBI.
If, for any reason what so ever, we cannot communicate about this matter, would it be possible to contact a surrogate or anybody with the information I seek?
With All Due Respect
JK
###
Due to limits that existed at YouTube’s debut, videos posted from 2005 to 2010 were capped to 10 minutes. Both image and sound playback quality were kept low to spare bandwidth. A lack of (accessible) software and hardware to edit video forced vloggers to improvise. Mortaren had always used a webcam and mic from the 90s to shot their videos ‘live’, i.e., without edits.
YouTube retained the majority of Mortaren’s content; however, after a check of the dates and the poster’s IDs, I determined that Mortaren’s videos had been reposted c. 2006 by another user.
If the titles / numbers were correct then there were seven parts to the demo Mortaren recorded for Blue Beelzebub. Of seven, six remained. Specifically, the 5ifth - which must have been filmed as evidenced by the discontinuity between 4ourth and 6ixth - defied my ability to trace.
The reposter stated that “the 5ifth wasn’t part of the review package”. Yet, as I perused copies of replies they had saved, commentary that referenced material that doesn’t appear anywhere else, I strongly suspected that a 5ifth had been posted for a while and, for whatever reason, Mortaren removed it prior to 2006.
1irst - details facts re: the game: the developer, the programmer, the system requirements, etc.
“If your rig’s able to run DOOM, Blue Beelzebub works,” they state then add: “although, prepare yourselves, kiddos, the game takes a very, very long time to install”.
Passingly, he adds that a fan of his had ditched the game after they experienced “a catastrophic system failure” that they blamed “on either a bug or a virus or both”.
The executable and its auxiliary files pass every virus and malware checker Mortaren throws at it.
2econd & 3hird - demonstrates the game play or what passes for it.
Mortaren prefers to record his reviews live so that his fans experience the game exactly as he does. His videos contain hints / cheats if they are discovered as he plays. He describes Blue Beelzebub as a DOOM-GUY-ESQUE player who moves through an enshadowed monochromatic maze.
“There’s no backwards, I, I, I don’t believe it! Did they forget to give us backwards? There’s forwards and left, right. Kiddos, you gotta do a circle to go backwards.” He continues to berate the game, adding: “Yeah, there’s only forwards. And you know, I gotta say it, the programmer may think they’re the money’s nuts for it.... But it’s so weird that going forwards causes the view to bob up and down or side to side. What’re they trying to do? Are they trying to replicate a player’s gait? Takes me right out of the game. Let me tell y’all why. Like I said, the programmer’s got to be thinking they’re the monkey’s nuts but it’s that bizarro attention to detail that’s so jarring as I consider the lack of detail given to the graphics. Guys. Guys. Guys. You gotta think about what you present.”
Mortaren piles his criticism of the graphics and the sounds, comparing both unfavorably to DOOM. Especially frustrating is the invariance of the black & white textures throughout the maze. He praises the response of the maze to the player as he notes, while attempting to draw the maze, that its passages shift at random. Then more and more criticisms were strewn at the game, including its lack of weaponry, its lack of powerups / extras, its lack of anything.
“A game can’t be about going through the maze, guys, there’s got to be a point - something to do!” Finally, he voices the suspicion that he had been duped by ZuZu.
4ourth - the demo gets interesting.
Mortaren finds an area of the maze where the textures differ. The video’s pixilation - perhaps due to the webcam - perhaps due to the way the reposter preserved it - masks the bulk of the alteration. I detect a change of shade, though, from black & white to blue.
“Well it can’t be for nothing that the wall is blue. Jeez!” As he cracks the joke, to his shock (an explicative slips), the sounds became those of “eerie, drone-like notes fading into reverb” and the monitor displays a still-shot. Mortaren zooms into the image; I recognize it as coming from the shock-site, ROTTEN.
After that alteration, every blue-hued texture Mortaren faces produces other images, increasingly nihilistic and graphic, usually of the dead or the dying, often of celebrities, suicides, accidents, wrecks.
5ifth - ?
6ixth - the segment starts at an awkward jump.
It must have been split from the 5ifth video and while Mortaren does not state why, explicitly, the tone of the voice suggests that something serious transpired.
“Sorry, kiddos, I turned the webcam away - a first - I guess this ZuZu accomplished something.”
When he returns the webcam to the monitor, it is apparent that in addition to tone the substance of the game itself altered.
The player stands at the center of a room Mortaren describes as “a vault with a hole at its floor”. The 2.5D renderer prevents the player from gazing inside the hole. But by directing the player to walk the hole’s circumference it is possible to catch bits of its contents. A sharp, blue light shoots out of the hole; the way it cast light at the ceiling suggests there might have been “water”, as if the hole were a well of sorts.
What shocks Mortaren is that the room fills with children. The renderings of faces make each of the children unique. However: “the ghastliness of the imagery resembles how faces voxilate like with Delta Force games”. Further, he notes, after a pause that echoes my own consternation and trepidation, “I’ve seen these kids. Yeah, I’ve seen these kids from those, those photographs the game stopped everything to show us. Jeez!”
The children stand statue-like as the player walks about them. They serve as obstacles that block movement, otherwise, inert, unresponsive, “not that the player interacts with the kids as there’s no other keys available except A, W, D”.
The video continues, then, Mortaren shrieks.
The playback jostles as if it were about to stop. When everything resettles, he speaks, calmly and evenly, that “there’s a kid that’s different ... animated. You gotta see it, kiddos, I can’t say if it’s awful because it’s awful or if it’s awful because it’s awful....” The webcam zooms into the monitor; the child rendering appears to show it breathing, haphazardly, with their mouth agape. And then, then the child moves and the player like the viewer alike slip an explicative. “I take it back, everything, this is truly and utterly awful.”
7eventh - the coda feels like the set’s longest but is the shortest.
“Right now I’m running. I don’t have a weapon, jeez! I’m running as fast as this keyboard allows but my health is shrinking.” Mortaren stops and rotates the player to face backwards. The animated child is behind and striking the player using a technique that resembles “Hanna-Barbera laziness - or who knows - who knows, kiddos, it could be part of the style”. Just as it is with DOOM, as the player’s health decreases, the view gets redder and the avatar gets bloodier. Mortaren aims into the maze; there is no exit, there is no weapon, no upgrade to assist, all that exists is the floor where the player drops, dead.
The 7eventh adds a post-script recorded after the demo. It shows Mortaren’s PC, open and split to pieces. “The game installed a virus,” he declared then described its symptoms.
“Immediately upon my player’s death, the PC rebooted. After the BIOS, instead of going into DOS, it starts a telnet session and tries to connect via IP. Of course it doesn’t get a reply since my PC uses dial-up. So it freezes, pinging and pinging a server somewhere that it cannot reach.”
Mortaren concludes by theorizing that if Blue Beelzebub were a virus, it must have been designed to target high-end systems with LAN / Ethernet ports.
I jot the IP and attempt to connect to it. Strangely, it will not load yet it will not issue an error of any kind. Chrome, FireFox, Edge, etc., freeze. WHOIS is not able to resolve the owner. Nevertheless, it yields the location of the server, a site approximately 50 miles north east of Trinidad, Colorado.
I reject the result; users of tracers already know that they rely on ISP databases to match IP / location - and how often are those databases updated? - and how often are those updates distributed? The decade that passed between today and the video, and between the video and the creation, assures that there must have been a drift re: the location of the IP.
###
I will not reveal the particulars of when, where, and how I received the call.
“The coordinates.” Into my ear spoke a voice that my investigation made familiar. “Check the coordinates.”
“Coordinates?”
“Blue Beelzebub.”
“Yes,” I replied and Mortaren implied we’d meet.
Mortaren had traced my whereabouts through the blogosphere. He wanted to talk about the game yet feared the government “and or others” eavesdropping. I admitted off-handedly that as I sunk into my work with the DOJ, my paranoia tipped.
“What’s the deal with the game, anyway?”
“What do you want on your Chinese Sandwich?”
My impression settled onto a mixture of intrigue and trepidation. The matter felt so cryptic as to defy credulity. Coordinates? Blue Beelzebub. Chinese Sandwich? Nevertheless, even as we talked (brief as the conversation was) I put together that by coordinates + Blue Beelzebub Mortaren referred to the IP the game telnet’ed.
The following post by MattAbrams is being replicated because some comments within the post(but not the post itself) have been silently removed.
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From https://forums.prohashing.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&p=23082#p23082:
---------------------------------------------
The current downturn in the cryptocurrency markets itself isn't very surprising. There have been many bubbles before, and there will be at least one more bubble after this. What surprises me about this cycle is how quickly the market has collapsed. Whereas previous cycles fell slowly after the long middle period where prices stalled, this time the bottom fell out in the course of a week. This post will review the consequences of the new market reality.
Bitcoins are holding up well
Perhaps the biggest shock of this cycle is how the price of bitcoins has held up so well compared to that of other coins. In June 2017, when we were deciding whether this pool could be a profitable business and how many people we should hire if it could be. We determined that the average case where the coins would settle was bitcoins at $1574, ETH at $110, and LTC at $30. ETH and LTC have already surpassed the average case decline we had projected, while BTC is holding above twice the projected bottom.
The reason for BTC holding up so well isn't obvious. Almost every other coin is superior to BTC in some way. For example, LTC and BCH are much cheaper to send money with, ETH is used for contracts, and Monero has anonymity.
I don't think that bitcoins will hold up for much longer. I think that the capitulation to $980 is still ahead, and the price after capitulation will be $1500 or so. The BTC network still hasn't reckoned with the lack of a realistic plan to increase its block size. At some point, the lightning network is going to be shown as a technical marvel that works well when people are running nodes, but that it's too difficult for ordinary users and that money transmission regulations will not permit most businesses to run nodes. The Core developers are still pressing on with their effort despite the money transmission regulations.
Right now, growth is being driven by people willing to experiment. Eventually, the lightning network will run out of hobbyists to adopt it and its growth will cease, because normal businesses like us won't touch it due to the legal risks. At that point, people will realize that there is no "Plan B" for Bitcoin, and perhaps that will cause capitulation and force the Core to reevaluate their path forward.
We should reevaluate how coins are valued
Another change in this crash from the previous crashes is the complete lack of news to explain it. During the $32 -> $2 downturn, it was quite possible that nobody would ever adopt cryptocurrencies. During the $266 -> $69 downturn, many believed that Mt. Gox's unreliability and instability would lead to the death of the industry. During the $1160 -> $160 bubble, China banned bitcoins every week. But during the past two weeks, there has been no news of any importance.
In particular, ETH prices are absurd. I really don't understand how people think that ETH is priced anything close to its real value. Gas prices continue to rise and people think it's worth 6% of what it was a year ago? If I were paid in dollars, I would be changing them to ETH as fast as I could right now.
Since these prices don't make sense with what many people and I think are the fundamentals, then we need to reevaluate our views on how coins are valued. It's quite possible that the idea that things like transaction capacity and features [i]don't actually matter[/i].
There was one news article that caught my attention a while back. It proposed that, during 2017, a lot of the buyers into coins came from "ordinary people" who knew very little about cryptocurrencies. These people talked about coins at parties and bought what their friends bought. Someone like me, who spends most of his time at home writing code for this business, who is not married, and who has fewer friends than the average person, would not have been exposed to enough instances to make a connection if it were true that someone talked about bitcoins at every social event. I'd also venture that many of the people discussing bubbles in Internet forums also engage in less socializing than the average person, so reading theories about what happened from them leads to inaccurate conclusions.
During the next bubble, I'm going to more strongly consider social issues rather than technical issues and see whether that increases the accuracy of my predictions.
IPOs of mining manufacturers were too slow
One way to predict that this would not be a quick recovery into another bubble like the first 2013 collapse was to look at the IPOs from the mining manufacturers. Businesses don't issue IPOs when they have plenty of money - why would you give up potential profits to get money now if you don't need it? Instead, executives at the companies were really smart and saw that the writing was on the wall. Their problem was that they moved too slowly to sell their stakes. I don't think that the IPOs will be able to raise sufficient capital at this point and they will probably be cancelled. Bitmain or one of the other big mining manufacturers will likely go out of business.
Mining manufacturing is an interesting business because there is zero demand for your product during times like these. The industry basically resets every few years with new companies. The bitcoin difficulty just fell 15% during the last period, and the market is flooded with the miners that were just shut down. Why would anyone buy a new miner when all these old miners are being given away at any cost?
It doesn't make sense that anyone would ever invest in these IPOs or in the rumored Coinbase IPO. All of these stocks are 100% dependent on the cryptocurrency market recovering. If cryptocurrencies settle at these prices indefinitely, Coinbase will be unable to support its operations and will collapse, so you'll lose a lot more money than if you invested in coins (which have no chance of ever being completely worthless anymore.) If cryptocurrencies increase in value, they will go up by 100-1000x and Coinbase's stock will go up by 5x or 10x. In both cases, buying an IPO in the cryptocurrency world never makes as much sense as buying the coins themselves. Either buy coins or buy stocks in some unrelated industry to diversify.
"Manipulation" is a buzzword people use to explain things they don't like
Whenever prices fall, people start complaining about "manipulation." They experienced a huge drop, so the people selling must have been "manipulating" the market to cause them to lose money. The latest theory is that Bitfinex is not being honest with its Tether reserves. Bitfinex clearly violated the law by serving US customers and not shutting down when it was insolvent, but there isn't any evidence that Tether is going to fail due to fraud.
Note that Tether may fail due to banks discontinuing Tether's accounts, but that is different than fraud where a misrepresentation is being made.
I don't believe that the cryptocurrency markets are "manipulated" like most people think. There are some scams, especially those where people create ICOs and don't deliver a product. I doubt that the SEC will bring any charges against Bitfinex, and most of these complaints about "manipulation" are simply people complaining because they lost money.
Businesses will start to fail
Now I can get to the consequence that I think is the most important to understand in predicting how the next cycle plays out.
One of the reasons that the next bubble is a while away is because there have not yet been a lot of businesses that have failed. One of the unfortunate aspects of cryptocurrency, and one that significantly delays its development, is how the bubble cycle causes good ideas to fail. For example, the ETCDEV team, which contributed to Ethereum Classic development, recently folded due to bankruptcy. While I don't hold much love for people who are willing to overlook something as heinous as the DAO theft, the ETCDEV team did seem like it would be a significant contributor to developing ETC, and that won't happen now.
In fact, it's more likely that honest, ethical businesses will fail during this coming down cycle than scammers and fraudsters. It doesn't cost much to be a scammer - you just register some fake accounts and announce a new project, then disappear with all the money. Operating an honest business is expensive. It will cost us $15,000 just to comply with the 1099-MISC regulations next month. That's why, as prices fall, we should expect disreputable people to start to again outnumber law-abiding citizens in this industry. We can already see that happening as people with criminal records like Craig Wright, Roger Ver, and Charlie Shrem are dominating the conversation more and more.
As prices fall, businesses will need to make a decision. Many of them will decide to "pivot" - which essentially means that the company is shutting down and is creating a new firm in a different industry. This was common in 2015. Remember that the level at which a company should quit w...
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Crypto suffered massive losses this year, if I want to keep holding certain coins, can I trade into bitcoin then immediately trade back into the coin I want to hold, to get the benefits of a taxable event (to write off against my gains), but still hold my coins?
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Bug reports, suggestions etc are welcome. If you have issues with this release, post a top-level comment and myself or one of the mods will answer, typically in <24 hours.
Prep > Tempclean > De-bloat > Disinfect > Repair > Patch > Optimize > Wrap-up | Manual tools
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(significant changes in bold; full changelog on Github)
v10.7.3 (2018-12-07)
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From https://forums.prohashing.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&p=23082#p23082:
---------------------------------------------
The current downturn in the cryptocurrency markets itself isn't very surprising. There have been many bubbles before, and there will be at least one more bubble after this. What surprises me about this cycle is how quickly the market has collapsed. Whereas previous cycles fell slowly after the long middle period where prices stalled, this time the bottom fell out in the course of a week. This post will review the consequences of the new market reality.
Bitcoins are holding up well
Perhaps the biggest shock of this cycle is how the price of bitcoins has held up so well compared to that of other coins. In June 2017, when we were deciding whether this pool could be a profitable business and how many people we should hire if it could be. We determined that the average case where the coins would settle was bitcoins at $1574, ETH at $110, and LTC at $30. ETH and LTC have already surpassed the average case decline we had projected, while BTC is holding above twice the projected bottom.
The reason for BTC holding up so well isn't obvious. Almost every other coin is superior to BTC in some way. For example, LTC and BCH are much cheaper to send money with, ETH is used for contracts, and Monero has anonymity.
I don't think that bitcoins will hold up for much longer. I think that the capitulation to $980 is still ahead, and the price after capitulation will be $1500 or so. The BTC network still hasn't reckoned with the lack of a realistic plan to increase its block size. At some point, the lightning network is going to be shown as a technical marvel that works well when people are running nodes, but that it's too difficult for ordinary users and that money transmission regulations will not permit most businesses to run nodes. The Core developers are still pressing on with their effort despite the money transmission regulations.
Right now, growth is being driven by people willing to experiment. Eventually, the lightning network will run out of hobbyists to adopt it and its growth will cease, because normal businesses like us won't touch it due to the legal risks. At that point, people will realize that there is no "Plan B" for Bitcoin, and perhaps that will cause capitulation and force the Core to reevaluate their path forward.
We should reevaluate how coins are valued
Another change in this crash from the previous crashes is the complete lack of news to explain it. During the $32 -> $2 downturn, it was quite possible that nobody would ever adopt cryptocurrencies. During the $266 -> $69 downturn, many believed that Mt. Gox's unreliability and instability would lead to the death of the industry. During the $1160 -> $160 bubble, China banned bitcoins every week. But during the past two weeks, there has been no news of any importance.
In particular, ETH prices are absurd. I really don't understand how people think that ETH is priced anything close to its real value. Gas prices continue to rise and people think it's worth 6% of what it was a year ago? If I were paid in dollars, I would be changing them to ETH as fast as I could right now.
Since these prices don't make sense with what many people and I think are the fundamentals, then we need to reevaluate our views on how coins are valued. It's quite possible that the idea that things like transaction capacity and features [i]don't actually matter[/i].
There was one news article that caught my attention a while back. It proposed that, during 2017, a lot of the buyers into coins came from "ordinary people" who knew very little about cryptocurrencies. These people talked about coins at parties and bought what their friends bought. Someone like me, who spends most of his time at home writing code for this business, who is not married, and who has fewer friends than the average person, would not have been exposed to enough instances to make a connection if it were true that someone talked about bitcoins at every social event. I'd also venture that many of the people discussing bubbles in Internet forums also engage in less socializing than the average person, so reading theories about what happened from them leads to inaccurate conclusions.
During the next bubble, I'm going to more strongly consider social issues rather than technical issues and see whether that increases the accuracy of my predictions.
IPOs of mining manufacturers were too slow
One way to predict that this would not be a quick recovery into another bubble like the first 2013 collapse was to look at the IPOs from the mining manufacturers. Businesses don't issue IPOs when they have plenty of money - why would you give up potential profits to get money now if you don't need it? Instead, executives at the companies were really smart and saw that the writing was on the wall. Their problem was that they moved too slowly to sell their stakes. I don't think that the IPOs will be able to raise sufficient capital at this point and they will probably be cancelled. Bitmain or one of the other big mining manufacturers will likely go out of business.
Mining manufacturing is an interesting business because there is zero demand for your product during times like these. The industry basically resets every few years with new companies. The bitcoin difficulty just fell 15% during the last period, and the market is flooded with the miners that were just shut down. Why would anyone buy a new miner when all these old miners are being given away at any cost?
It doesn't make sense that anyone would ever invest in these IPOs or in the rumored Coinbase IPO. All of these stocks are 100% dependent on the cryptocurrency market recovering. If cryptocurrencies settle at these prices indefinitely, Coinbase will be unable to support its operations and will collapse, so you'll lose a lot more money than if you invested in coins (which have no chance of ever being completely worthless anymore.) If cryptocurrencies increase in value, they will go up by 100-1000x and Coinbase's stock will go up by 5x or 10x. In both cases, buying an IPO in the cryptocurrency world never makes as much sense as buying the coins themselves. Either buy coins or buy stocks in some unrelated industry to diversify.
"Manipulation" is a buzzword people use to explain things they don't like
Whenever prices fall, people start complaining about "manipulation." They experienced a huge drop, so the people selling must have been "manipulating" the market to cause them to lose money. The latest theory is that Bitfinex is not being honest with its Tether reserves. Bitfinex clearly violated the law by serving US customers and not shutting down when it was insolvent, but there isn't any evidence that Tether is going to fail due to fraud.
Note that Tether may fail due to banks discontinuing Tether's accounts, but that is different than fraud where a misrepresentation is being made.
I don't believe that the cryptocurrency markets are "manipulated" like most people think. There are some scams, especially those where people create ICOs and don't deliver a product. I doubt that the SEC will bring any charges against Bitfinex, and most of these complaints about "manipulation" are simply people complaining because they lost money.
Businesses will start to fail
Now I can get to the consequence that I think is the most important to understand in predicting how the next cycle plays out.
One of the reasons that the next bubble is a while away is because there have not yet been a lot of businesses that have failed. One of the unfortunate aspects of cryptocurrency, and one that significantly delays its development, is how the bubble cycle causes good ideas to fail. For example, the ETCDEV team, which contributed to Ethereum Classic development, recently folded due to bankruptcy. While I don't hold much love for people who are willing to overlook something as heinous as the DAO theft, the ETCDEV team did seem like it would be a significant contributor to developing ETC, and that won't happen now.
In fact, it's more likely that honest, ethical businesses will fail during this coming down cycle than scammers and fraudsters. It doesn't cost much to be a scammer - you just register some fake accounts and announce a new project, then disappear with all the money. Operating an honest business is expensive. It will cost us $15,000 just to comply with the 1099-MISC regulations next month.
As prices fall, businesses will need to make a decision. Many of them will decide to "pivot" - which essentially means that the company is shutting down and is creating a new firm in a different industry. This was common in 2015. Remember that the level at which a company should quit working in cryptocurrencies is not determined by whether they are making money, but by whether they are making as much money as they could in another field. Most of the time, companies that "pivot" don't return to whatever they were doing before, because they either find the "pivot" field to be lucrative, in which case it makes sense to keep at it, or they go bankrupt in that field too and close down permanently.
They key issue with these "pivots" and outright bankruptcies is that talent leaves the industry and is permanently gone. It takes at least 6 months for a programmer to join a project and become familiar with a codebase, during which time that person's productivity is significantly reduced. The cost of training a new hire is often as much as that person's salary for an entire year, given that other people in the company need to slow down to train the new person. When people leave a company, they don't just come back if times get better. They get new jobs, with new responsibilities, and that knowledge is lost.
Suppose that there is a company that has created an amazing Ethereum-based marketplace that will eventually gain millions of simultaneous customers. The marketplace reaches completion, but in the downturn the company is forced to shut down until the market turns around again, because all their customers are gone. Even if the owner of the company retains the software and is available and willing to restart when the next bubble begins, years have passed and new employees are needed. It will take 6 months to get all the employees hired, another 3 to get them minimally trained, another 1 to upgrade all the development environments, packages, and tools that became obsolete during the stoppage to get everything up to current standards, and another 2 to redo the website design to do the same thing with different colors and designs because the Internet for some reason changed its mind on what makes "attractive" webpages again.
If the downturn lasts two years, then this project could have been out [i]three years earlier[/i] if it weren't for the bubbles. Not only that, but the project's suspension itself contributed to the long duration of the bubble cycle. There would have been more activity in cryptocurrencies if this system had been available.
This effect is why I believe that as prices decline, the length of the upcoming downturn will increase significantly. Over the next weeks and months, we're going to start to hear of promising projects fail, and that's going to reduce the value of coins, cascading into other projects' feasibility, and creating a ripple effect of "pivots" and bankruptcies.
This is why I think that the first 2013 bubble had a much different outcome than the second 2013 bubble. In the first 2013 bubble, prices never collapsed after the long period of stability, and businesses were able to keep moving forward during that time. During the second 2013 bubble, prices collapsed after that period of stability that ended in August 2014, and one can look back at news articles form the day listing failures and "pivots" that occurred in the subsequent months.
If it weren't for bubbles, the industry would be years ahead of where it is now. The smartphone, for example, rose from unknown to market saturation in 10 years. After 10 years, where are cryptocurrencies, which also arose in 2008? About 6 or 7 years behind where they could be, because every bubble requires a reset with new companies, given that most of the work from the previous bubble is wasted.
There will be a next bubble
Finally, there will definitely be a next bubble - of that, I'm 100% certain. If you're not sure of that, then consider a scenario where you live in a world that already uses cryptocurrencies for all transactions. One day, a government decides that it's going to create its own currency, which it will be able to inflate at will, and which will take hundreds of times longer to conduct transactions with.
Do you think people would use that currency?