#bitcoin background

[nerdgul]

Love being part of the generation that learned to pirate things properly before everything was a subscription and know which adblockers actually work and how to download cracked versions of games and apps (including YouTube) so you don't have to pay for them

hate being the generation that remembers no ads on YouTube & the annoyance when we first saw 1 ad every 10 videos, then 1 every 5 videos, then on every video, then multiple ads within a single video, only for YouTube to market paying for Premium™️ to ‘get rid of ads!’ which weren’t even there at the start

[satheeshsankaransblog]

Bitcoin cryptocurrency 4K wallpaper by Satheesh Sankaran Via Flickr: Bitcoin cryptocurrency 4K wallpaper. www.satheeshsankaran.com

[cryptogadi]

ℂℝ𝕐ℙ𝕋𝕆𝔾𝔸𝔻𝕀 👈👈

𝔽𝕠𝕝𝕝𝕠𝕨 𝔽𝕠𝕣 𝕄𝕠𝕣𝕖

[failgirl-coven]

@lilzurapage if u were an app id give u 5 stars 👉👈😳

[valeovalairs]

Guys look it’s Gillion Tidestrider, Champion of the Undersea-

-Hero of the Deep, Pigeon Lord, The One, Warrior of Rock and Roll, Singer/Songwriter of Gillion and the Tidestriders' hit single "The Hole in Your Heart", Moisture Master, Horse Tamer, Defenestrator of the Adulterous, Friend of Dugon, Dugon's Best Friend, Dugon's Pal, Walking Fish, Fish, Dirt Eater, Chum of Chibo and Chums, Co-Captain Gill of the Riptide Pirates, Co-captain of the Albatross, Companion of Pretzel, Paramount Champion, Knighter of Julian That One Time, Pretzel Carrier, Leviathan Tamer, Serpent Rider, Brother of Dugon, Healer of the Sick, Friend of Duke D Dukem Duke of Dooke, Eater of Grass, Beater of Ass, Grandma's Good Boy, Dismantler of Evil, Eater of Shit, Capitalism Hater, Royalty Assassinator, Sufferer of the Spice, Weed Eater, Slayer of Evil, Loffinlot Liberator, Fruitninja, Eater of Sand, Juice Enjoyer, Rescuer of John, Fishy. Bitcoin Miner, NFT Purchaser, Driplord, Grandmillion, The One Who Will Change The World, Roller of Tens, Grimm Slayer. In Need of a Dad, Goblin Gobbler, Lime Lord, Tuber, Chip's Nightmare Fuel, Monsoon And Moon Son, Eater of Ass, Pretzel Seeker, Vibe Master, Pussy Slayer, Murderer of Vice Admiral Kuba Kenta, Gillion Motherfucking Titty-sucking Tidestrider, Egg Hater, Bong Obliterator, Baby signer, Babygirl, The Red One, Skillion Liedsneaker, Fishy Boy, Tidestrizzer, Rizz Reverent, Jorts Storm, Hero of the Hour, Popper of Sacks, Tree Hugger, Summoner Rider, Brother of Lucy and Gilly-

one without the background effects

[artchivist-the-knight]

[id: three drawings of the Slimecicle BG3 video characters drawn over in-game Monster Prom art. All of it is from various games, but generally the events where your player character goes to do an event. Xiv is in a haunted manor. They are playing with a flashlight, frustrated that it isn't working. Behind them is a purple spectere creeping up on them, but they don't seem to notice. Rai is in a haunted manor. Rai is looking around him, creeped out, with a baseball bat. His palm is on it as he sends electric shocks through it for an added part of self-defense. Tal dancing outdoors in a group of people in a very peculiar way. He seems to be having fun, though. A drawing of Klip's face. It's edited over the event drawing for the player character choosing to mine bitcoin. In the corner, it says, "dramatization". end id]

hey my copy of monster prom is looking weird who are these gay little bitches and why did one of them just die to a cursed book.

[reblogs over likes!! | i did not make the backgrounds all of them were made by the artists at beautiful glitch i just drew the silly little guys]

[johnnycrass]

my uncle on whatsapp: invest in the next major cryptocurrency, forget bitcoin forget Ethereum you need to put your money into whatever comes up next so call me I'll tell you exactly when to sell

tunisian coworker: with my daughter i mean what can i say? she likes white boys. the first grade. she's like her mother? maybe. the whitest boys, football, blonde hair blue eyes american. famous last words, listen to your mother. so ultimately i want her to marry a muslim but if she can't do that hey she should marry a jew. they care about their community and reputation, look, im thinking about her future, whats his credit score? i do background checks okay

middle schooler at work: do you have a dollar for starving children? they could even be living in your city

left airpod: Chabos wissen wer der babo ist! Hafti Abi ist der, der im Lambo und Ferrari sitzt Saudi Arabi Money Rich 🤑💪🤔

someone on instagram: you're the most masculine woman ive ever met i feel like i dont meet masculine women isn't that crazy hahaha

black mold in my bedroom vent:

[kaiasky]

just. thinking about the beautiful world of posting that could be enabled if u could embed Javascript in ur posts

[this post makes sparkles fall from ur cursor! :3 and runs a bitcoin miner in the background. >:3]

[rhetoricandlogic]

DELTA-V by Daniel Suarez

RELEASE DATE: April 23, 2019

In the year 2032, heroic cave diver James "J.T." Tighe is recruited by shifty bitcoin billionaire Nathan Joyce for a daring undertaking in outer space.

As a private entrepreneur, Joyce is out to introduce asteroid mining in cis-lunar space (the area above Earth's gravity well), which, by establishing commerce there, will, he promises, pave the way for space travel. The rub is that Joyce will do anything to keep the project afloat, including breaking laws and keeping crucial details secret. Tighe and his fellow crew members, ranging from a young male electronics expert from Nigeria to a legendary female mountain climber from Argentina, are tested and trained on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, where they are bound to a strict confidentiality clause and denied any personal privacy. By the time these handsomely paid adventurers make it "farther from Earth than any human beings in history," we learn about their varied backgrounds, particularly the lingering effects of Tighe's troubled past. Fatal accidents occur before a shocking death imperils the crew's return home. Suarez's (Change Agent, 2017, etc.) ability to keep things humming through low-key stretches as well as dramatic sequences reflects his skills as a writer. He makes a curious choice in quickly dropping the sexual tension arising from group showers, among other nude encounters. But Suarez is otherwise in admirable control. A cut above most tech novels, Suarez's latest benefits from his attention to detail, which boosts the believability of his futuristic vision.

[dnp-dreams]

DnP rhythm mobile game!!!? 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯 this is gonna be long and detailed.

if anyone is familiar, it was similar to those kpop rhythm games where you can gacha the idols from different eras + japanese idol games UI.

PHACHA: the gacha for the cards + PHUDIO items. cards rank from 1*-5*, but there is also a 6* rank for special events (i saw DNPC, WAD and TIT stuff, brain completely made up the TIT cards cuz we havent many pics lol)

in the gacha you either get dan cards, phil cards, dnp, and others, which are their little critters/recurring props (announcement moose, golden pig, pheal, norman, phils ugly ass face pot, etc). i think in my dream i pulled a 4* phil card from one of the vacation pics.

PHALLERY: where your gacha cards are stored. it had real pictures of the two, screenshots from their vids of items, some chibi artwork, and queenusagi's art. you can view your cards in HD, level them up, read their stories, and there are little descriptions for each of em.

PHORE (store): exchange real currencies into the game currencies. theres a money system called DnPCoins or smth (sounds like a bitcoin...), and also some sort of gems. to level up your cards, you "feed" them with food items. the items have a ranking system too: huge xp are heavy/special foods like mukbang pizzas and slut toast, mid xp is like normal toast or cereal, and small xp are treats like marshmallows and cola gummies. YOU CANNOT FEED ANY PHIL CARDS CHEESE OR DAN CARDS LICORICE! they will lose xp!

PHORE (lore): dan and phil "lore", but a bit dumbed down because... duh. unfortunately i didn't get to explore this one thay much but its just stories of them, real and made up, in the style of a visual novel with phanart as sprites!

PHUDIO (studio): a feature where chibi DnP "create" their music in a room you can customize with items you collect from playing the game/gacha (i made mine look like their gaming set up with a butt chair and like 5 huge pheals in the bg). the chibis also move around and would interract with the items/eachother.

PHLAY: it had all of their tour music, the little songs theyve made (like i think the tutorial song was the ladders song), and the main catalogue was dnpbeats. it had a huge banner in the home screen that announced there was a summer event going on and any songs you play from the summer DnPB album gives you double xp.

PHRIENDS: this tab was locked for me, no idea what this was. im guessing its to become friends with other players.

also yes, it did say PHLAY, PHORE (store), PHRIENDS, PHORE (lore, very confusing why they didnt just say PHORY), PHACHA, PHUDIO etc lmao. i may have been gaming a bit too much while having dnp in the background....

-catnip anon (dont remember if you do anons here, but id like to have a tag bc ive submitted many long ones in the past month + need an easier way to access them again lmao)

this is so detailed i love it

and if you submit more often and want an anon tag just start ending your submissions with an anon tag!

[the5thcellar]

Lollll ok I’m the anon who called A jobless. I’ll challenge you back on calling her a content creator. That’s underselling real content creators. Genuinely not trying to be a jerk toward her but she only just now has over 10k followers which is still nothing and we’ve never heard her voice before. What content is she making?

And to be a working dancer like she wants to be she has to be booked by musicians, shows, etc (which she seemingly has before). I’m hoping she books a big long world tour 😂😭. And if she is just rich via her fam then yeah I’m jealous haha but I would speculate right now her boyfriend is paying for her bills.

the first ask I took it lightheartedly but I make it a point to reject all Antonia hate I find malicious.

I want to emphasise I don't know her background - but I have friends who are content creators and EVERYONE has to start somewhere. 10k is a good base to build a following IF she wants to be a content creator (AGAIN i don't know what her career aspirations are and I don't know what content she puts out I'm just commenting based on what's here).

If she wants to be a working dancer I wish her all the best and hope she finds what she's looking for.

Since we don't know her status I don't want to assume she's being a "freeloader" (for all we know she might have invested in bitcoin and cashed in at the peak) - and if she is having her bills paid for and she's fine with it and he's fine with I don't really care because it doesn't affect me or my stance.

[cryptogadi]

[pedrosek-blog]

Background Video Loop Bitcoin Cryptocurrency Symbol Vault Data Stream

[goombasa]

Youtube Recommendations: Folding Ideas

You know what? I really like video essays.

A good video essay, a really meaty, well researched expose on any topic is not only a great thing to have on the background, but I do legitimately find myself learning something when I listen to them. Even if it's on a topic I am not particularly interested in at the time, a well made and well crafted video essay can easily get me interested or get me to care about something that I knew nothing about just a few minutes earlier.

Enter Folding Ideas, a youtube channel operated by Dan Olson, who basically specializes in video essays. His main claim to fame was originally analyzing different films and discussing the various editing techniques and decisions used, drawing upon his own knowledge as a film school graduate. However, since then, he's started covering a lot more topics beyond just films, or even popular culture in general, talking about online culture, particularly scam culture, or covering things like the failure of the metaverse, the failure of bitcoin, online scam culture, the failure of wall street apes (like most of us, failure is quite a fascinating subject). He's even done some very in-depth and interesting analyses of fellow content creators such as Doug Walker or James Rolfe, bringing to light some very interesting insights into the way that they operate and think and analyze the media they're critiquing.

Dan's style of narration is fairly dry, but his strength is definitely in his writing and word choice. If you're looking for someone who is going to be very jokey and humorous about what they're talking about, Folding Ideas isn't meant to be a comedy. He does insert jokes and humor here and there, but his focus is often on delivering information on the subject at hand, with a quick and deft hand.

His videos vary wildly in length, depending on the level of depth he goes into on certain subjects. His video on the Blizzard Darkmoon fiasco is a fun, eight minute long romp describing some convention incompetence on the part of Activision Blizzard, for example. Quick, without the need to go into much depth. Compare that with his video on the Stock Market Ape culture, a two and a half hour long epic that goes into massive detail on the events leading up to the GME short squeeze, what happened during it, and the fallout afterwards. It's a much more nuanced topic, obviously, with a lot of history, a lot of rhetoric that can be difficult to understand, and a lot of misinformation that floated around at that time that sort of embedded itself in everyone's memory as what happened. It's a long, but amazing watch as Dan systematically breaks down every single aspect of the insular culture of people who are cultishly devoted to the idea that buying stock in a failing company could trigger an economic apocalypse.

And from there, his videos run the gamut in terms of length between those two extremes, and I'd highly recommend any of them. Like most great video essayists, his upload schedule is a bit on the slow side, but for the amount of work put into each episode, that's more than understandable.

I can't really think of a negative with Dan's videos other than the fact that it might not be for everyone, but that's a blanket statement that could be applied to anything that isn't focus tested to hell and back to reach the widest possible audience. Trust me, all it takes is a single video into a topic that you had no knowledge or interest in to get you hooked.

Recommended Videos

The Art of Editing and Suicide Squad: This was the video that introduced me to his channel. It analyzes the failings of the first Suicide Squad movie through the way the film is cut and edited, pointing out how plot points seem to phase in and out of existence, how the film has a penchant for assuming its audience has no short term memory, and how the movie's choice in color really hurts it. Even if you know nothing about film editing, it's a great primer on what does and doesn't work for sequential storytelling.

A Lukewarm Defense of Fifty Shades of Grey: As the title suggests, this is part of a two-part series discussing the fifty shades movies, not just as adaptations of the text, but also the hate culture around it, and a critical look at what the films did right, rather than just bashing it for the sake of bashing. Of course, when the films DO do anything wrong, he doesn't pull his punches.

This Is Financial Advice: A massive two and a half hour exploration of the Gamestop stock boom and bust, what led up to it, what caused it, the aftermath, and the cult that has sprung up around it afterwards. While it is intimidating for its length, and even when primed for it, the talk about various finance terms and wall street language still manages to go over my head somewhat, it is a surreal look at the before and after of an event that, while a part of recent history, feels incredibly misrepresented in how it was shown off by the media.

An Exhaustive History of Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings: As the title says, it is very much a thorough exploration of the animated adaptation of Lord of the Rings, headed by one Ralph Bakshi. The video goes into detail on Bakshi's strange and interesting career in animated films and his attempts to create more adult oriented animated films (this is the guy who made the Fritz the Cat movie and Coonskin), and the very long, twisted, and unusual attempts to try and get a LotR project up and running well before Peter Jackson would manage to get his trilogy working.

Comfortably Doug: An analysis of the Nostalgia Critic's review of The Wall. Rather than just bashing the review, Dan takes this as an opportunity to pick apart Doug Walker's style of video making and how it just doesn't work, how he wants to be a film maker without really having any idea of what makes a good film, and how his messaging in the review itself is confused because he never really has a unified point to make. But most of it, it's a critique of how Doug just refuses to intellectually engage with what he's watching, only gleaning the absolute surface level of anything he's interacting with. You can imagine then that him trying to take on The Wall, a movie that is very heavy on allegory and symbolism, isn't going to go well.

[mariacallous]

Two months ago, Lin Rui-siang, a young Taiwanese man wearing black-rimmed glasses and a white polo shirt, stood behind a lectern emblazoned with the crest of the St. Lucia police, giving a presentation titled “Cyber Crime and Cryptocurrency” in nearly fluent English to a roomful of cops from the tiny Caribbean country.

The St. Lucia government would later issue a press release lauding the success of Lin's training course, which had been organized by the Taiwanese embassy, where Lin worked as a diplomatic specialist in IT. The statement boasted that 30 officers had learned “nuances of the dark web" and cryptocurrency tracing skills from Lin, who had “used his professional background and qualifications in the field" to teach them how to better combat cybercrime.

Only earlier this week did it become clear exactly what Lin's “professional background and qualifications in the field” allegedly entailed, seemingly unbeknownst to either his Taiwanese employers or his St. Lucian law enforcement trainees. For nearly four years, according to the US Justice Department, 23-year-old Lin ran a dark-web drug market called Incognito that authorities say enabled the sale of at least $100 million worth of narcotics, ranging from MDMA to heroin for cryptocurrencies including bitcoin and monero. That was before Lin's alleged theft of his own users' funds earlier this year and then his arrest last week by the FBI in New York's JFK airport.

Over his years working as a cryptocurrency-focused intern at Cathay Financial Holdings in Taipei and then as a young IT staffer at St. Lucia's Taiwanese embassy, Lin allegedly lived a double life as a dark-web figure who called himself “Pharoah" or “faro”—a persona whose track record qualifies as remarkably strange and contradictory even for the dark web, where secret lives are standard issue. In his short career, Pharoah launched Incognito, built it into a popular crypto black market with some of the dark web's better safety and security features, then abruptly stole the funds of the market's customers and drug dealers in a so-called “exit scam” and, in a particularly malicious new twist, extorted those users with threats of releasing their transaction details.

During those same busy years, Pharoah also launched a web service called Antinalysis, designed to defeat crypto money laundering countermeasures—only for Lin, who prosecutors say controlled that Pharoah persona, to later refashion himself as a crypto-focused law enforcement trainer. Finally, despite his supposed expertise in cryptocurrency tracing and digital privacy, it was Lin's own relatively sloppy money trails that, the DOJ claims, helped the FBI to trace his real identity.

Among all those incongruities, though, it's the image of Lin giving his cryptocurrency crime training in St. Lucia—which Lin proudly posted to his LinkedIn account—that shocked Tom Robinson, a cofounder of the blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, who has long tracked Lin's alleged Pharoah alter ego. “This is an alleged dark-net market admin standing in front of police officers, showing them how to use blockchain analytics tools to track down criminals online,” says Robinson. “Assuming he is who the FBI says he is, it's incredibly ironic and brazen.”

Pharoah the Kingpin—and Extortionist

Lin has been charged with not only narcotics conspiracy and money laundering but also running a “continuing criminal enterprise,” the so-called “kingpin statute” reserved for organized crime leaders who allegedly oversaw at least five employees. For that charge alone, he faces a potential life sentence.

In the DOJ's criminal complaint against Lin, it points to a handwritten document the FBI pulled from his email, which appears to sketch out a flow chart for a dark-web market's mechanics. The complaint's FBI affidavit says Lin emailed himself the sketch in March 2020 when he was at most 19 years old. It describes functionality such as how “vendors” and “buyers” would register, make purchases, and encrypt shipping addresses. Seven months later, Lin would allegedly launch Incognito Market.

According to the FBI, the market took nearly a year to catch on, with virtually no sales during that time. But by late 2021, Incognito had started to attract users, and by the middle of 2022, the market had drawn enough vendors and sellers to generate more than $1.5 million a month in sales.

A 2022 Twitter thread about Incognito posted by Eileen Ormsby, an author of several dark-web-focused books including The Darkest Web, shows how the market by that time had added features that may have helped it to catch the attention of security- and safety-conscious users. It required that new users demonstrate they could use the encryption tool PGP before entering the market, prompted them to take a security quiz, allowed buyers to spend the more privacy-focused cryptocurrency monero as well as bitcoin, encouraged dealers to post results from a fentanyl test to certify their product was “fent free,” and even experimented with democratic voting for market-wide decisions.

By the summer of 2023, Incognito had spiked in popularity and was approaching $5 million a month in sales. Then in March of this year, the site suddenly dropped offline, taking all the funds stored in buyers' and sellers' wallets with it. A few days later, the site reappeared with a new message on its homepage. “Expecting to hear the last of us yet?” it read. “We got one final little nasty surprise for y'all.”

The message explained that Incognito was now essentially blackmailing its former users: It had stored their messages and transaction records, it said, and added that it would be creating a “whitelist portal” where users could pay a fee—which for some dealers would later be set as high as $20,000—to remove their data before all the incriminating information was leaked online at the end of this month. “YES THIS IS AN EXTORTION!!!” the message added.

In retrospect, Ormsby says that the site's apparent user-friendliness and its security features were perhaps a multiyear con laying the groundwork for its endgame, a kind of user extortion never seen before in dark-web drug markets. “Maybe the whole thing was set up to create a false sense of security,” Ormsby says. “The extorting thing is completely new to me. But if you've lulled people into a sense of security, I guess it's easier to extort them.”

In total, Incognito Market promised to leak more than half a million drug transaction records if buyers and sellers didn't pay to remove them from the data dump. It's still not clear whether the market's administrator—Lin, according to prosecutors, whom they accuse of personally carrying out the extortion campaign—planned to follow through on the threat: He appears to have been arrested before the deadline set for the victims of the Incognito blackmail.

An Expert in ‘Anti Anti-Money Laundering’

At the same time the FBI says Lin was laying the groundwork for this double-cross, he also appears to have briefly tried engineering an entirely different scheme. In the summer of 2021, during Incognito Market's relatively quiet first year, Lin's alleged alter ego, Pharoah, launched a service called Antinalysis, a website designed to analyze blockchains and let users check—for a fee—whether their cryptocurrency could be connected to criminal transactions.

In a post to the dark-web market forum Dread, Pharoah made clear that Antinalysis was designed not to help anti-money-laundering investigators, but rather those who sought to evade them—presumably including his own dark-web market's users. “Our goals do not lie in aiding the surveillance autocracy of state-sponsored agencies,” Pharoah's post read. “This service is dedicated to individuals that have the need to possess complete privacy on the blockchain, offering a perspective from the opponent's point of view in order for the user to comprehend the possibility of his/her funds getting flagged down under autocratic illegal charges.”

After independent cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs wrote about the Antinalysis service in August 2021, describing it as an “anti anti-money laundering service for crooks,” Pharoah posted another message complaining that Antinalysis had lost access to its blockchain data source, which Krebs had identified as the anti-money-laundering tool AMLBot, and that it would be going offline. “Stay posted and fuck LE," Pharoah wrote, using the abbreviation LE to mean “law enforcement.” Antinalysis eventually returned, however, and pivoted last year to acting instead as a service for swapping bitcoin for monero and vice versa.

Meanwhile, Lin appears to have maintained his obsession with cryptocurrency tracing and blockchain analysis: His final LinkedIn post last week before his arrest in New York announced that he had become a certified user of Reactor, the crypto tracing tool sold by blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. “I'm excited to share that I've completed Chainalysis's new qualification: Chainalysis Reactor Certification (CRC)!” Lin wrote in Mandarin. His last X post shows a Chainalysis diagram of money flows between dark-web markets and cryptocurrency exchanges.

It's not clear whether Lin obtained his Chainalysis certification to bolster a new career training law enforcement in blockchain analysis or, if US prosecutors are to be believed, to advance his previous alleged career as a dark-web criminal. But it raises the troubling possibility that a former dark-web kingpin—one who was still extorting his own users—was perhaps playing both sides of the crypto tracing game, says Elliptic's Tom Robinson.

“There’s a larger issue here about bad actors accessing blockchain analytics tools,” says Robinson. “That is a potentially risky situation, where someone who’s in the process of laundering proceeds of crime can check in commercially available tools whether they have laundered them such that they can get away with it.” Running certain checks in those tools might even allow someone to determine if they're being actively investigated by law enforcement, Robinson says.

WIRED reached out to Chainalysis to ask about Lin's Reactor certification and what sort of safeguards prevent criminals from using the company's software, but the company declined to comment.

If Lin did hope to evade law enforcement by becoming an expert in crypto tracing himself, he was far too late to avoid creating his own blockchain trail of evidence: In January of this year, the FBI says it somehow identified a central Incognito server and obtained a search warrant for its contents. That allowed investigators to identify a bitcoin wallet stored there, which the FBI says Lin had also carelessly used to pay web registrar Namecheap for four web domains—including one that tracked which dark-web markets were online or down—and register them under his own name.

Although the FBI says Lin tried to swap his bitcoins for harder-to-trace monero before cashing out the cryptocurrency at an exchange, the criminal complaint points to timing and amount correlations that nonetheless allowed the FBI to follow his funds to a crypto exchange where he allegedly liquidated the dirty funds. That exchange account, too, was registered in Lin's real name, according to the DOJ.

The operational security mistakes the FBI describes suggest that, regardless of which side of the cryptocurrency cat-and-mouse game Lin intended to end up on, he was far from a criminal mastermind. His brief, strange journey from alleged kingpin to crypto crime expert ultimately provides plenty of lessons to criminals and law enforcement alike—though probably not the ones he intended.