bitcoin - CybAI news

04 Dec

Celsius Founder Alex Mashinsky Pleads Guilty To Fraud

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIbitcoin, crime, cryptocurrency, fraud, ftx trial

Alex Mashinsky, former CEO of bankrupt crypto lender Celsius, has pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud, which together carry a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.In the wake of the company’s collapse, the US Department of Justice charged Mashinsky with seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and market manipulation. Having originally pleaded not guilty, he was set to face a criminal trial in the Southern District of New York in January.However, at a court hearing Tuesday, Mashinsky instead pleaded guilty to one count of commodities fraud and one count of securities fraud. Mashinsky has admitted to lying to Celsius…

29 Nov

Weapons-grade Metaprotocols on METASHREW

stp2y0 CommentsNewsassemblyscript, bitcoin, coding, community, development, engineering, inclusive, ordinals, rust, software

For those who have attempted to extend Bitcoin via the metaprotocol layer, or even just write software to index metaprotocols such as ordinals or BRC-20, you may be aware of the scope of the problem. Most traditional metaprotocols we've seen are easy enough to understand a schema for, as far as the rules to process a single block to update the state of an index. For ordinals, parsing a block to track the owner of an inscription by a given sequence number, may require program flow such as: Process each transaction, and if there is a witness stack with an…

16 Nov

Bitfinex Hacker Gets 5 Years for $10 Billion Bitcoin Heist

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, cybersecurity, hacking, hacks, north korea, security, security roundup

In perhaps the most adorable hacker story of the year, a trio of technologists in India found an innovative way to circumvent Apple’s location restrictions on AirPod Pro 2s so they could enable the earbuds’ hearing aid feature for their grandmas. The hack involved a homemade Faraday cage, a microwave, and a lot of trial and error.On the other end of the tech-advancements spectrum, the US military is currently testing an AI-enabled machine gun that is capable of auto-targeting swarms of drones. The Bullfrog, built by Allen Control Systems, is one of several advanced weapons technologies in the works to…

14 Nov

Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Is Waiting for Trump to Keep His Word—and Set Him Free

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsbitcoin, cryptocurrency, donald trump, national affairs, silk road

At sentencing, the judge was also permitted to take under consideration the murder-for-hire allegations, despite them never having been charged at trial. “Until the Supreme Court rules otherwise, relevant but uncharged crimes of this sort can be and are regularly considered by judges,” says Richman.Ulbricht has never fully acknowledged the harm inflicted by the Silk Road’s vast sales of drugs that included heroin and other opiates, and he still shows little remorse for his actions in his public posts to Twitter, argues Jared Der-Yeghiayan, a former Homeland Security Investigations agent who infiltrated the Silk Road undercover as part of the…

06 Nov

As Trump Takes a Victory Lap, the Crypto Faithful Kiss the Ring

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsbitcoin, cryptocurrency, donald trump, elections, national affairs, politics

On the campaign trail, Trump went out of his way to court their favor. In July, speaking to thousands of bitcoiners at a conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Trump duly sang from the bitcoin hymn sheet, promising to cement the US as the foremost bitcoin mining powerhouse, establish a national “bitcoin stockpile,” and appoint a bitcoin advisory council if reelected. Trump claimed he would turn the US into the “crypto capital of the planet.”In October, Trump went as far as to launch his own crypto platform, World Liberty Financial, which his family has marketed as a way to “make finance great…

01 Nov

Profiteers Are Exploiting US Election Conspiracies and Hate to Make Millions

stp2y0 CommentsRAG models2024 election, bitcoin, conspiracy theories, disinformation, donald trump, elections, facebook, politics, social media

The messages, potentially misleading US citizens or stoking hate towards various groups, will have been seen by many times more people than actually made a purchase.Those running the network of Facebook pages in Nigeria may simply believe that US-focused clickbait is the best way to boost the number of people who see their scams. In contrast, the ecommerce operations identified by TBIJ give every impression that they are proudly American.Yet analysis of their listed physical addresses and online presence suggests that the businesses are at least partly run from Vietnam, the Philippines, Pakistan, India, and Croatia (with Facebook page admins…

24 Oct

Meet ZachXBT, the Masked Vigilante Tracking Down Billions in Crypto Scams and Thefts

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsbitcoin, blockchain, crime, cryptocurrency, fbi

As ZachXBT has pursued that career as a crypto vigilante, he has also kept his mask firmly in place. Online, he appears only as his avatar, a kind of platypus cartoon figure in a detective's trench coat or sometimes a hoodie. To avoid retaliation from his many enemies in the world of crypto criminals and con artists, he has never publicly shown his face nor revealed his real name or exact age and would only speak to WIRED on the condition that I not try to dig up those identifying details.On some of their early conference calls, McGill says, ZachXBT…

23 Oct

Nigeria Drops Charges Against Tigran Gambaryan, Jailed Binance Exec and Former IRS Agent

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsbitcoin, blockchain, crime, cryptocurrency, nigeria

For eight months, the criminal investigator who pioneered cryptocurrency tracing as a law enforcement technique has, in a bizarre twist of fate, been detained and then jailed in Nigeria facing charges of money laundering and tax evasion. Now, he may finally be coming home.On Wednesday in Abuja, a court ruled that criminal charges against Gambaryan, a Binance executive who previously served as an IRS criminal investigator for a decade, will be dropped on medical grounds as pressure from the US government has grown to secure Gambaryan's release.Gambaryan was detained in February and later jailed after being invited to the country…

22 Oct

Peter Todd Was ‘Unmasked’ As Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Now He’s In Hiding

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsbitcoin, crime, cryptocurrency

In the week before the documentary was released, online betting markets had Len Sassaman, a cryptographer who moved in similar online circles to Satoshi, as the most likely candidate to be revealed as the Bitcoin creator. Sassaman took his own life in 2011 at the age of 31, shortly after Satoshi disappeared.The case for Sassaman was first outlined in 2021 by Evan Hatch, founder of crypto gaming platform Worlds. Whenever speculation about Sassaman bubbles periodically to the surface, the spotlight is thrown on his widow, software developer Meredith Patterson, who believes the theory is unfounded.“People used to be really fucking…

21 Oct

In the Kentucky Mountains, a Bitcoin Mining Dream Becomes the Stuff of Nightmares

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsbitcoin, crime, cryptocurrency

In both cases, Biofuel claims, the firms shipped equipment from China to its hosting facility in Eastern Kentucky, then walked away with the bitcoin produced, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid energy bills and hosting fees.Biofuel reached a settlement with Touzi in early 2022 for $60,000, but despite having handed back the mining equipment, it claims not to have received the sum it is owed under the agreement.In the still-unresolved spat with VCV, Biofuel received permission from the Martin County Circuit Court in Kentucky to sell off the mining equipment, claims Whites, to recoup a portion of…