In this entertaining excerpt from Zeke Faux’s forthcoming book, we get a glimpse of the crypto Bahamas conference before Sam Bankman-Fried’s fall. Pretty fun stuff! Seems like Michael Lewis was all-in on SBF, among other nuggets here.
[Intelligencer]
I was going to ask if companies like Prada really gain much by storing certificates of authenticity (a concept that far predates the blockchain!) on a distributed ledger system rather than some basic, un-sexy centralized database. Then I learned there’s a much funnier issue here: you can’t even check the database yourself!
After several rounds of questioning, Aura Consortium’s and Prada’s press teams said I couldn’t yet certify the bag myself, but Prada Group could access the information through an NFC chip inserted in the item.
Oh, and as usual, nobody seems to know what “owning” something through a blockchain legally means.
Stake, an online cryptocurrency betting platform, allegedly lost about $40 million in unauthorized withdrawals from several of its hot wallets. Stake says that “user funds are safe,” which, you know. Hope so! It’d be terrible to lose your money to hackers before you had a chance to lose it by gambling with crypto.
[Web3 is Going Just Great]