Friday, January 21, 2022

This is my first real Crash in any investment I’ve ever made.

Before getting involved in bitcoin, I’ve been a value/dividend stock investor for 4 years. I’ve always known what to do in the event of dips and crashes, but now with a good portion of my net worth in BTC I’m actually living it for the first time, and I must say. Really not concerned. This really does feel like the perfect time to double down, and I’m excited too. If anyone is scared of what’s going on with the price of Bitcoin as an “investment” just remember the longer you hold the less dangerous it becomes. If you’re holding it as a currency then why are you looking at prices in the first place??

Edit: I wrote crypto when I meant bitcoin. BTC is the one and only. Excuse that.

Kevin Goes Big on Bitcoin

This collection of stories takes place from 2013-2015, when crypto was catching on but still not really mainstream. The Kevin in this story was my boss, who ran a large mining pool, as well as a datacenter full of ASICs, and a small team of people.

Kevin started the pool by paying 15% above standard PPS payout as a way to entice people to join the pool, thinking it would ultimately attract enough miners to the pool to sway the network in our favor and make it work out. Even if you don't understand the specifics of Bitcoin, it's pretty obvious to anyone that you can't pay out 15% above normal returns in the long term. Somewhere something is missing. Ultimately the end of this was a bunch of pissed off miners owed money they would never get.
As if things weren't already doomed, we had an instance where the pool wallet was "hacked" and we lost some coins. Turns out if you don't put a password on a crypto wallet, it's not hard to access it's funds. But Kevin "didn't know about wallets." Mind you at this point actual millions had been invested in ASICs and data center space as well as employees, travel, etc. The logic being that since Kevin had some moderate success in email marketing, he would do great at Bitcoin mining and running a pool.
Kevin stored all his passwords for all the wallets, backend servers, etc. in a keeper on his phone. The phone however, did not have a password. Kevin took said phone on a trip to China. His plan was to just show up and find a chip maker that would make ASIC chips for us based on his specs. He somehow decided it would be a good idea to have a rep from one of the less reputable, more questionable ASIC makers to host him and take him around. When he got back, a few days later he told us all he had lost his phone. Did not bother to cut it off, change any passwords, etc. So once again, massive funds go missing from the pool wallet and it's not a hack because they have the friggin credentials.
We reached a point where the original ASICs were obsolete and needed to be replaced. There were several options. The cheapest option was one we'll call White Spear, because they were known to overheat and catch on fire. Not rumored, known. Vids of early units were everywhere. So in spite of the majority of the team advising against this, Kevin "couldn't resist a good deal." He also listened to the one member of the team also worthy of the title Kevin (Kevin2 had made travel arrangements for the entire team to have a booth at a conference and made arrangements for the conference booth himself. He somehow booked his own ticket for a week later and missed the event). In spite of that, Kevin still listened to Kevin2 on the subject of the ASICs.

As best as I can recall, they were powering up the 3rd unit when the first one caught on fire, and so forth. They stopped around 10 units, leaving the other 200+ on the shipping pallets. The company we had purchased them from stopped returning any calls, leaving us to negotiate with AmEx since we had used a Black Card to buy them.

The problem is that the vendor we purchased from never paid White Spear, so as far as White Spear was concerned they were considered stolen and we had them.

The best part is that the guy who stole the phone in China and took all the coins from us was from White Spear.

I get that you need to understand a bit about crypto for this to make sense. But if you do you can see why this little collection definitely belongs in Stories About Kevin.

"Let The Wild Rumpus Begin: (Approaching the End of) The First U.S. Bubble Extravaganza: Housing, Equities, Bonds, and Commodities" - Interesting article by "Jeremy Grantham", a british billionaire investor.

You can read it here.

Calls a crash is underway, names the following specific "bubbly anecdotes":

Quote from the article directly related to crypto:

As for speculative madness, there were already many fantastic bubble anecdotes from 2020, which I wrote about last year.6 Since then, the anecdotes have been even better. We’ve had:

The meme stock madness of GME and AMC – two companies in declining industries further decimated by Covid-19 – that managed to rally 120x and 38x, respectively, from their post-pandemic lows to their 2021 highs, driven by message board sentiment, taking GME briefly to 20% of the entire Russell 2000;
The dogecoin phase, in which a cryptocurrency conceived as a parody of the crypto craze went up nearly 300x, to a market cap of $90 billion because Elon Musk kept joking about it; and
La pièce de résistance: after Hertz (one of 2020’s meme stock stars) saw a quick stock surge from announcing it would purchase a fleet of Teslas, Avis rather plaintively said something like, “Hey dudes, we might buy electric cars too,” and tripled in a day!
But – as fits the final “narrowing market” phase of a great bubble – most of these events are now well in the past, and the last six months have seen a growing numbness to the euphoria (see Exhibit 5). GME, AMC, dogecoin, and more than one-third of all NASDAQ stocks are now all down more than 50% from their highs. Bitcoin is down over 40%, and my own unfortunate Quantumscape, which 13 months ago was worth more than GM (1929 had many extreme speculations but nothing on this scale), is down from its December 2020 peak by 83%. Ouch!

Central Bank Digital Coin (CBDC) Conundrum: A governmental power grab that risks unintentionally driving hyperbitcoinization

With the U.S. Federal Reserve’s publication of it’s CBDC whitepaper the other day, this is a good time to discuss the growing demand and impending implementation of CBDCs. In this article, I will highlight the key characteristics and qualities of a CBDC according to the Fed as well as describe how the Fed’s version of a CBDC may unintentionally drive hyperbitcoinization. Hyperbitcoinization is described as “the process of rapid and irreversible adoption of bitcoin as the primary global monetary reserve” (source 2 below).

Note: the Fed is exploring options of issuing a CBDC, and its main objective is to obtain information from the public with regards to benefits, risks, policy consideration, and design.

According to the white paper, the key characteristics of a CBDC are as follows:

Benefit the Economy (Provide benefits to households, businesses, and the overall economy that exceed any costs and risks)
Competitive to Alternatives (Yield such benefits more effectively than alternative methods)
Complement Current Money (Complement, rather than replace, current forms of money and methods for providing financial services)
Protect Privacy (Protect consumer privacy)
Minimize Criminal Activity (Protect against criminal activity); and
Support from Users (Have broad support from key stakeholders)

The CBDC will best serve the United States by exhibiting the following qualities:

Privacy-Protected (balance consumer privacy rights & transparency to prevent criminal activity)
Intermediated (remove some of Fed’s power / responsibility by enabling private sector to manage & facilitate payments)
Transferable (easily transfer to consumers of different intermediaries)
Identity-Verified (verify identity similarly to existing banks)

Next, we will look at the key characteristics and qualities above and correlate them to hyperbitcoinization scenarios. According to Fulgar Ventures & Alexandre Bussutil in their two part ‘Roads to Hyperbitcoinization’ series, hyperbitcoinization may occur due to a top-down scenario (think macro: central bank / government), bottom-up scenario (think individuals or companies), or a combination of both scenarios.

The triggering events of the top down scenarios include:

Central Bank

Inflation devalues currencies Fed CBDC will continue down this road
CBDCs restrict shadow economy (this includes any income not reported like mowing a neighbor’s lawn) Fed CBDC may continue down this road assuming CBDC replaces cash, which does not seem to be the case (yet)
CBDCs infringe of freedom & privacy rights Fed CBDC will enable transaction surveillance

Government

Countries accumulate Bitcoin and generate FOMO Not applicable
Countries trade in Bitcoin to avoid sanctions Not applicable
Countries accept Bitcoin as legal tender Not applicable
Bitcoin adoption increases in the U.S but hashrate is controlled by developing countries Not applicable

Summary: 2 to 3 of 7 scenarios may be amplified by the adoption of a Fed CBDC

Private Sphere

Businesses Hoard Bitcoins Fed CBDC may lead to more businesses hoarding Bitcoin if they see risk in government removing a % of business reserves as a form of taxes
Private Coin (e.g. Meta) Fed CBDC may empower consumers to venture into and be more comfortable with the cryptocurrency space
Bitcoin Provides Better Alternative Fed CBDC would not compete with Bitcoin for multiple use cases
Companies Accept Bitcoins Fed CBDC may lead to more businesses accepting Bitcoin in order to reduce government transaction monitoring
Increase in Bitcoin Financial Products Not applicable

Bitcoin Community

Community promotes using Bitcoin as an alternative to CBDC Fed CBDC would amplify the need for a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin (anti censorship & borderless)

Summary: 5 out of 6 scenarios may be amplified by the adoption of a Fed CBDC

To conclude, 7 to 8 of 13 hyperbitcoinization scenarios may play out sooner than expected with the adoption of a Fed CBDC. Hyperbitcoinization may be amplified even further if less democratic countries adopt CBDCs first.

Sources

There is no better way to understand, Bitcoin, than to read Satoshi Nakomoto's - White Paper

Bitcoin white paper in copy/paste format.

Note some of the example code is in foreign characters,

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System Satoshi Nakamoto satoshin@gmx.com www.bitcoin.org

Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers. The network itself requires minimal structure. Messages are broadcast on a best effort basis, and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the longest proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone.

[1] Introduction

Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party. What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes.

[2] Transactions

We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures. Each owner transfers the coin to the next by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of the coin. A payee can verify the signatures to verify the chain of ownership.

Transaction Owner 1's Public Key Hash Owner 0's Signature Owner 1's Private Key Transaction Owner 2's Public Key Hash Owner 1's Signature Owner 2's Private Key Transaction Owner 3's Public Key Hash Owner 2's Signature Owner 3's Private Key

The problem of course is the payee can't verify that one of the owners did not double-spend the coin. A common solution is to introduce a trusted central authority, or mint, that checks every transaction for double spending. After each transaction, the coin must be returned to the mint to issue a new coin, and only coins issued directly from the mint are trusted not to be double-spent. The problem with this solution is that the fate of the entire money system depends on the company running the mint, with every transaction having to go through them, just like a bank. We need a way for the payee to know that the previous owners did not sign any earlier transactions. For our purposes, the earliest transaction is the one that counts, so we don't care about later attempts to double-spend. The only way to confirm the absence of a transaction is to be aware of all transactions. In the mint based model, the mint was aware of all transactions and decided which arrived first. To accomplish this without a trusted party, transactions must be publicly announced, and we need a system for participants to agree on a single history of the order in which they were received. The payee needs proof that at the time of each transaction, the majority of nodes agreed it was the first received.

[3] Timestamp Server

The solution we propose begins with a timestamp server. A timestamp server works by taking a hash of a block of items to be timestamped and widely publishing the hash, such as in a newspaper or Usenet post [2-5]. The timestamp proves that the data must have existed at the time, obviously, in order to get into the hash. Each timestamp includes the previous timestamp in its hash, forming a chain, with each additional timestamp reinforcing the ones before it. Hash Hash Block Item Item Sign Sign Verify Verify Block ... Item Item ...

[4] Proof-of-Work

To implement a distributed timestamp server on a peer-to-peer basis, we will need to use a proofof-work system similar to Adam Back's Hashcash [6], rather than newspaper or Usenet posts. The proof-of-work involves scanning for a value that when hashed, such as with SHA-256, the hash begins with a number of zero bits. The average work required is exponential in the number of zero bits required and can be verified by executing a single hash. For our timestamp network, we implement the proof-of-work by incrementing a nonce in the block until a value is found that gives the block's hash the required zero bits. Once the CPU effort has been expended to make it satisfy the proof-of-work, the block cannot be changed without redoing the work. As later blocks are chained after it, the work to change the block would include redoing all the blocks after it. Block Prev Hash Tx Block Nonce Tx ... Prev Hash Nonce Tx Tx ... The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it. If a majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow the fastest and outpace any competing chains. To modify a past block, an attacker would have to redo the proof-of-work of the block and all blocks after it and then catch up with and surpass the work of the honest nodes. We will show later that the probability of a slower attacker catching up diminishes exponentially as subsequent blocks are added. To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they're generated too fast, the difficulty increases.

[5] Network

The steps to run the network are as follows: 1) New transactions are broadcast to all nodes. 2) Each node collects new transactions into a block. 3) Each node works on finding a difficult proof-of-work for its block. 4) When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes. 5) Nodes accept the block only if all transactions in it are valid and not already spent. 6) Nodes express their acceptance of the block by working on creating the next block in the chain, using the hash of the accepted block as the previous hash. Nodes always consider the longest chain to be the correct one and will keep working on extending it. If two nodes broadcast different versions of the next block simultaneously, some nodes may receive one or the other first. In that case, they work on the first one they received, but save the other branch in case it becomes longer. The tie will be broken when the next proofof-work is found and one branch becomes longer; the nodes that were working on the other branch will then switch to the longer one. 3

New transaction broadcasts do not necessarily need to reach all nodes. As long as they reach many nodes, they will get into a block before long. Block broadcasts are also tolerant of dropped messages. If a node does not receive a block, it will request it when it receives the next block and realizes it missed one.

[6] Incentive

By convention, the first transaction in a block is a special transaction that starts a new coin owned by the creator of the block. This adds an incentive for nodes to support the network, and provides a way to initially distribute coins into circulation, since there is no central authority to issue them. The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended. The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free. The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.

[8] Reclaiming Disk Space

Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash, transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's hash. Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do not need to be stored. Block Block Header (Block Hash) Prev Hash Nonce Root Hash Hash01 Hash0 Hash1 Hash23 Hash2 Tx0 Tx1 Tx2 Hash3 Tx3 Transactions Hashed in a Merkle Tree Block Block Header (Block Hash) Prev Hash Nonce Root Hash Hash01 Hash23 Hash2 Hash3 Tx3 After Pruning Tx0-2 from the Block A block header with no transactions would be about 80 bytes. If we suppose blocks are generated every 10 minutes, 80 bytes * 6 * 24 * 365 = 4.2MB per year. With computer systems typically selling with 2GB of RAM as of 2008, and Moore's Law predicting current growth of 1.2GB per year, storage should not be a problem even if the block headers must be kept in memory.

[8] Simplified Payment Verification

It is possible to verify payments without running a full network node. A user only needs to keep a copy of the block headers of the longest proof-of-work chain, which he can get by querying network nodes until he's convinced he has the longest chain, and obtain the Merkle branch linking the transaction to the block it's timestamped in. He can't check the transaction for himself, but by linking it to a place in the chain, he can see that a network node has accepted it, and blocks added after it further confirm the network has accepted it. Longest Proof-of-Work Chain Block Header Prev Hash Nonce Merkle Root Block Header Prev Hash Merkle Root Hash01 Hash2 Block Header Nonce Prev Hash Nonce Merkle Root Hash23 Merkle Branch for Tx3 Hash3 Tx3 As such, the verification is reliable as long as honest nodes control the network, but is more vulnerable if the network is overpowered by an attacker. While network nodes can verify transactions for themselves, the simplified method can be fooled by an attacker's fabricated transactions for as long as the attacker can continue to overpower the network. One strategy to protect against this would be to accept alerts from network nodes when they detect an invalid block, prompting the user's software to download the full block and alerted transactions to confirm the inconsistency. Businesses that receive frequent payments will probably still want to run their own nodes for more independent security and quicker verification.

[9] Combining and Splitting Value

Although it would be possible to handle coins individually, it would be unwieldy to make a separate transaction for every cent in a transfer. To allow value to be split and combined, transactions contain multiple inputs and outputs. Normally there will be either a single input from a larger previous transaction or multiple inputs combining smaller amounts, and at most two outputs: one for the payment, and one returning the change, if any, back to the sender. Transaction In In Out ... ... It should be noted that fan-out, where a transaction depends on several transactions, and those transactions depend on many more, is not a problem here. There is never the need to extract a complete standalone copy of a transaction's history.

[10] Privacy

The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending an amount to someone else, but without information linking the transaction to anyone. This is similar to the level of information released by stock exchanges, where the time and size of individual trades, the "tape", is made public, but without telling who the parties were. Traditional Privacy Model Identities New Privacy Model Identities Transactions Trusted Third Party Transactions Public Counterparty Public As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner.

[11] Calculations

We consider the scenario of an attacker trying to generate an alternate chain faster than the honest chain. Even if this is accomplished, it does not throw the system open to arbitrary changes, such as creating value out of thin air or taking money that never belonged to the attacker. Nodes are not going to accept an invalid transaction as payment, and honest nodes will never accept a block containing them. An attacker can only try to change one of his own transactions to take back money he recently spent. The race between the honest chain and an attacker chain can be characterized as a Binomial Random Walk. The success event is the honest chain being extended by one block, increasing its lead by +1, and the failure event is the attacker's chain being extended by one block, reducing the gap by -1. The probability of an attacker catching up from a given deficit is analogous to a Gambler's Ruin problem. Suppose a gambler with unlimited credit starts at a deficit and plays potentially an infinite number of trials to try to reach breakeven. We can calculate the probability he ever reaches breakeven, or that an attacker ever catches up with the honest chain, as follows p = probability an honest node finds the next block q = probability the attacker finds the next block qz = probability the attacker will ever catch up from z blocks behind qz = { 1 if p≤q q/ pz if pq }

Given our assumption that p > q, the probability drops exponentially as the number of blocks the attacker has to catch up with increases. With the odds against him, if he doesn't make a lucky lunge forward early on, his chances become vanishingly small as he falls further behind. We now consider how long the recipient of a new transaction needs to wait before being sufficiently certain the sender can't change the transaction. We assume the sender is an attacker who wants to make the recipient believe he paid him for a while, then switch it to pay back to himself after some time has passed. The receiver will be alerted when that happens, but the sender hopes it will be too late. The receiver generates a new key pair and gives the public key to the sender shortly before signing. This prevents the sender from preparing a chain of blocks ahead of time by working on it continuously until he is lucky enough to get far enough ahead, then executing the transaction at that moment. Once the transaction is sent, the dishonest sender starts working in secret on a parallel chain containing an alternate version of his transaction. The recipient waits until the transaction has been added to a block and z blocks have been linked after it. He doesn't know the exact amount of progress the attacker has made, but assuming the honest blocks took the average expected time per block, the attacker's potential progress will be a Poisson distribution with expected value: =z q p To get the probability the attacker could still catch up now, we multiply the Poisson density for each amount of progress he could have made by the probability he could catch up from that point: ∞ ke− ∑ k=0 k! ⋅ {q/ pz−k if k≤z 1 if kz } Rearranging to avoid summing the infinite tail of the distribution... 1−∑ k=0 zke− k! 1−q/ pz−k Converting to C code...

include <math.h> double AttackerSuccessProbability(double q, int z) { double p = 1.0 - q;

double lambda = z * (q / p); double sum = 1.0; int i, k; for (k = 0; k <= z; k++) { double poisson = exp(-lambda); for (i = 1; i <= k; i++) poisson *= lambda / i; sum -= poisson * (1 - pow(q / p, z - k)); } return sum; }

Running some results, we can see the probability drop off exponentially with z.

q=0.1 z=0 P=1.0000000 z=1 P=0.2045873 z=2 P=0.0509779 z=3 P=0.0131722 z=4 P=0.0034552 z=5 P=0.0009137 z=6 P=0.0002428 z=7 P=0.0000647 z=8 P=0.0000173 z=9 P=0.0000046 z=10 P=0.

q=0.3 z=0 P=1.0000000 z=5 P=0.1773523 z=10 P=0.0416605 z=15 P=0.0101008 z=20 P=0.0024804 z=25 P=0.0006132 z=30 P=0.0001522 z=35 P=0.0000379 z=40 P=0.0000095 z=45 P=0.0000024 z=50 P=0.0000006

Solving for P less than 0.1%...

P < 0.001 q=0.10 z=5 q=0.15 z=8 q=0.20 z=11 q=0.25 z=15 q=0.30 z=24 q=0.35 z=41 q=0.40 z=89 q=0.45 z=340

Conclusion We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. We started with the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures, which provides strong control of ownership, but is incomplete without a way to prevent double-spending. To solve this, we proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes control a majority of CPU power. The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.

References

[1] W. Dai, "b-money," http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt, 1998.

[2] H. Massias, X.S. Avila, and J.-J. Quisquater, "Design of a secure timestamping service with minimal trust requirements," In 20th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, May 1999.

[3] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "How to time-stamp a digital document," In Journal of Cryptology, vol 3, no 2, pages 99-111, 1991. [4] D. Bayer, S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Improving the efficiency and reliability of digital time-stamping," In Sequences II: Methods in Communication, Security and Computer Science, pages 329-334, 1993.

[5] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Secure names for bit-strings," In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pages 28-35, April 1997.

[6] A. Back, "Hashcash - a denial of service counter-measure," http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf, 2002.

[7] R.C. Merkle, "Protocols for public key cryptosystems," In Proc. 1980 Symposium on Security and Privacy, IEEE Computer Society, pages 122-133, April 1980.

[8] W. Feller, "An introduction to probability theory and its applications," 1957.

Mike G Deal exposed - Part 2: Excuses and Hope

Before reading Part 2, see Part 1: Lies

Now that we've unequivocally established that Mike G is a pathological liar who preys on unsuspecting victims, let's look at the reasons why the deal didn't close throughout the years, as well as why pledgers were always encouraged to take just one more hit of hopium.

This post summarizes the information provided on the various conference calls leading up to early November 2021, as well as from subsequent daily updates. It can be seen as a general outline of the overarching story.

Disclaimer: For the purpose of clarity and succinctness, the quotes have been clustered by date and some parts may have been paraphrased and/or condensed. All sources are available as evidence.

-------------------------

1 - March 7, 2020 | Call

REASONS WHY IT DID NOT CLOSE

We needed to boost the reserve, something to do with the end of Feb being a leap year.

Because of the market downturn, the buyers needed to recollateralized some of their positions.

Last summer, the deal was ready to close, but when the shipment of inventory had left from China to Hong Kong, the strike broke out over there.

Before that, one of the vendors had overproduced products that we used to import, but since we didn't need it, he threatened to destroy his whole inventory unless we bought everything at full retail price.

We are the little guy, all the issues were international scene stuff, not us.