Category: bitcoin

The NFT sale appears to be a combination of a publicity move and a fundraising effort. Winamp is sourcing the derivative art NFTs by asking artists to submit Winamp-based works between now and April 15th, then giving selected artists 20 percent of the proceeds from each sale of their image as an NFT. Nineteen of the pieces will sell in editions of 100 copies, and the remaining one will have 97; they’ll all sell for 0.08 Ethereum — around $210 at current exchange rates. The artists will get 10 percent of any royalties on later sales, where the seller will set their own price.

Winamp’s head of business development Thierry Ascarez tells The Verge that buyers will get a blockchain token linked to an image of either the original skin seen above or one of its derivatives, which is a common setup for NFTs. Buyers will have the right to “copy, reproduce, and display” the image, but they won’t own the copyright. Likewise, selected artists will agree to transfer all intellectual property for their work to Winamp, according to a page of terms and conditions (PDF).

But what’s interesting is why the reporter had to ask in the first place:
In a GitHub Linux kernel repository, it appeared Torvalds had changed a single line in the Linux Kernel. The change: ‘Name = I am Satoshi….’ Torvalds himself has been suspected of being Nakamoto several times over the years. But no one who knows him well, and I consider myself one of those, have ever thought he was the Bitcoin mastermind. It’s just so, so not Linus.

So, while many people were discussing the “evidence,” I decided just to ask Linus. Here’s what he had to say.
“I’m afraid that is just a jokester taking advantage of how GitHub works — it shares git objects between different repositories, so you can use the SHA1 ‘name’ of an object to specify something you did in your own tree, and then use my repository as the web name, and make it look like your object is in my tree….” Torvalds went on, “So the “torvalds/linux” part of that URL is basically just empty noise, designed to fool people into thinking it’s in my tree. You could replace it with [another] GitHub repository name — the actual relevant part is just the SHA1 hash part….”

“So no,” Torvalds concluded, “I’m sadly not the owner of a huge stash of original bitcoins.”

And, there you have it, folks. Nakamoto’s real identity remains a secret.

Late last year Vaughan-Nichols also reported on what happened when Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin suggested Torvalds sell an NFT of the 1991 email that first announced Linux to the world .
“An amused and appalled Torvalds replied, “I’m staying out of the whole craziness with crypto and NFTs. Those people are cuckoo!”

This decision set off a firestorm, with some projects complaining that this was an out-of-the-blue roadblock for them as they still needed to mint NFTs but suddenly couldn’t. Shortly after, OpenSea reversed course and announced that it would remove the limit, as well as provided some reasoning for the limit in the first place: The free minting tool is being used almost exclusively for the purposes of fraud or spam. “Every decision we make, we make with our creators in mind. We originally built our shared storefront contract to make it easy for creators to onboard into the space,” OpenSea said in a tweet thread. “However, we’ve recently seen misuse of this feature increase exponentially. Over 80% of the items created with this tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam.”

“We propose you negotiate directly with us before taking any further action. The exploit and loss of funds have a profound effect on thousands of real people. If the maximum bounty offer is not what you are looking for, we are open to have a conversation. Let’s figure out a situation,” the Qubit Finance Team wrote. The company later explained in a blog post that their Qubit protocol “was subject to an exploit to our QBridge deposit function.” […] Blockchain security company CertiK released a detailed explanation of how the attack occurred and has been tracking the stolen funds as the hackers move them to different accounts. “For the non-technical readers, essentially what the attacker did is take advantage of a logical error in Qubit Finance’s code that allowed them to input malicious data and withdraw tokens on Binance Smart Chain when none were deposited on Ethereum,” CertiK explained.

Alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) led the way lower on Friday given their higher risk profile relative to bitcoin. Ether, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, was down about 13% over the past 24 hours, compared with a 14% drop in AVAX and a 16% drop in FTM over the same period. Despite the losses, some analysts still foresee a short-term bounce. “We expect BTC to find a bid around the $35K mark, close to 50% from the top. In the short term, we can bounce to challenge the $45K-$50K zone, but the overall outlook remains bearish as liquidity remains tight,” Pankaj Balani, CEO of Delta Exchange, a crypto derivatives trading platform, wrote in an email to CoinDesk.

The announcement went on to describe the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund as a “nonprofit entity that aims to minimize legal headaches that discourage software developers from actively developing Bitcoin and related projects.” “The main purpose of this Fund is to defend developers from lawsuits regarding their activities in the Bitcoin ecosystem, including finding and retaining defense counsel, developing litigation strategy, and paying legal bills,” it stated. Initially, the fund will include volunteers and part-time lawyers for developers to “take advantage of if they so wish,” although, the email also states that “the board of the Fund will be responsible for determining which lawsuits and defendants it will help defend.” According to the email, the fund’s first project will be to take over the existing defense of Ramona Ang’s “Tulip Trading Lawsuit” against developers for alleged misconduct over access to a Bitcoin (BTC) fortune.

Buyers will be able to pay for NFTs from the market using either credit cards or Ethereum — AP says the MetaMask will be the first wallet supported but that there are plans to add support for others. There will be virtual queues to buy NFTs as they’re released by AP, with “Pulitzer Drops” containing more limited-edition NFTs happening every two weeks — the FAQ says these particular images will “have increased scarcity to preserve their status.” Buyers will be able to resell those NFTs on the site’s secondary market. AP says that the proceeds from the NFTs’ sale will be used to fund its journalistic endeavors. It’ll also get revenue whenever they’re resold on its marketplace — the FAQ says there’s a 10 percent fee associated with reselling, and Xooa spokesperson Lauren Easton told The Verge in an email that the two companies would share that fee. Easton also told us that the “photographers will share in all revenue collected,” but didn’t specify what their cut would be. The NFT marketplace is set to open on January 31st, but you can get on a waitlist now to get “priority access” and a higher waitlist ranking if you refer others to sign up.