Pablo Escobar's Brother Says He Met an FBI Agent Posing As Satoshi Nakamoto (vice.com) 38
Jordan Pearson, writing for Motherboard: Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar's brother, Roberto Escobar, is launching a new cryptocurrency called "Dietbitcoin." It's a clone of Bitcoin of the kind that can take mere minutes to create, with no changes or improvements whatsoever. But Escobar is nonetheless hawking virtual coins for $2 USD each now, and $1,000 in later rounds of the crowd sale. Now here's the good shit. Along with Dietbitcoin's launch came a 280-page book, part memoir and part manifesto, titled "Pablo Escobar's Dietbitcoin: The True Story by Roberto Escobar." Roberto allegedly authored the book -- when I reached Escobar for an interview the company said he was not available, but CEO Olof Gustafsson told me over the phone that Roberto wrote it. In it, Roberto claims that he had a close encounter with a US government agent posing as the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. This encounter led Roberto to conclude that the US government created Bitcoin and will one day crash the market by selling all of Nakamoto's stashed bitcoins. The veracity of this tale is highly suspect; Roberto Escobar is a well-known eccentric who once claimed to have cured HIV with his knowledge of horses.
"Knowledge" of horses (Score:2, Funny)
By knowledge of horses are we referring to carnal knowledge?
This is on slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Why?
Re: (Score:2)
My take-aways.
1. Any crazy can make a crypto.
2. Crypto is the hot word right now in tech "journalism"
3. People whom invest in it are most likely dumb and it's like chasing after a penny stock.
4. It's good for getting your name out like if your company is dying and you need to get in the news somehow
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
or for selling a book
Re: (Score:2)
DIGITAL CURRENCY!
Conspiracy Theory! (Score:2)
Or is that what Satoshi Nakamoto WANTS everyone to think!
Lose pounds without changing your diet or anything (Score:3)
What is it with all these coin and blockchain schemes that seem to ignore the obvious.
They all seem to be annoyed that a mining epoch is so slow/compute expensive. SO they do something to remove that.
The fundamental bedrock of any blockchain or coin that allows distributed adversarial authentication is preventing the "double spend". There has to be no way to spend the same "coin" twice.
and for that there has to be a ledger that can't be re-written after a transaction (with high probability or inexpense)
Here's the unremovable fact that makes all this rubbish: SO far no one has invented a distributed trust scheme that, while having all the virtues of bit coin, does not involve Proof of Work (or Stake or Resources or something that ain't free).
that's the barrier to re-writing the ledger.
If I can marshal enough resources to re-write the ledge for less cost than I could gain from a double spend then no one should trust the ledger.
Now there is a difference between fast closures on the ledger entries and expensive to compute entries. Litecoin and the alt-coins has a faster closure rate than bitcoins ten minute equlibrium rate. But I'm pretty sure here they mean fast to be low expesne.
He cured HIV with his knowledge of horses? (Score:2)
I assume it's Horse Investment Disease - the ailment that afflicts people who bet on horse races, that makes them chronically poor. If you have in-depth knowledge of horses, it might just make you rich instead.
ah, I see (Score:3)
Um... editors please? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Bitcoin ties to crime will kill it ! (Score:2)
Bitcoin ties to crime will kill it !
Psyops campaign (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes indeed, none of it could be true, because people are unfailingly rational, smart, and civil...
Which is completely disproven by the existence of 4chan. If it can be done, someone will do it, if just for lulz.
quality writing (Score:1)
nothing says "this is a quality story" more that writing "Now here's the good shit" in the middle of it.
As we've already seen (Score:2)
They can bring down BTC by just having someone inject a few dozen images of child pornography into the chain. In fact, if they wanted to be truly malicious they could just get an informant to run a script with a well-funded wallet that would periodically dump new images into the chain to make "just beyond repair" in terms of legality.
Conspiracies within conspiracies (Score:2)
The veracity of this tale is highly suspect; Roberto Escobar is a well-known eccentric who once claimed to have cured HIV with his knowledge of horses.
Until the drug companies got to him!!! >:-(
I knew Satoshi Nakamoto (Score:2)