Tech Byte™

‎🚨 Grayscale and parent company Digital Currency Group, which owns 633,000 BTC, seem to be in big trouble: - The discount of GBTC to Grayscale Bitcoin Trust net asset value hits a record 42.7%. - It is reported that the Digital Currency Group must begin to liquidate part of the fund in 633,000 BTC in order to restore the situation. Grayscale declined to provide proof of reserves, citing "security concerns" and also indicated that all funds are held by Coinbase. - Removed page with team members on Digital Currency Group website (archived). - Grayscale's problems began during the collapse of Luna and Three Arrows Capital, and FTX finished them off (the relationship of Grayscale and DCG with other companies in the picture below). All Grayscale coins belong to them, not to clients. The role of the company was to provide 1 share of GBTC with storage of 1 BTC. Source:Daniil

Fresh FTX app update available, don't update. get far away from it. most likely has a purpose to steal your private keys.

will you buy?

origins. Even cryptocurrencies with stronger privacy assurances, however, aren’t automatically safe from government seizures. Some of the $3.6 billion recovered in March, for instance, was in the form of monero, a cryptocurrency designed to obfuscate the trails of funds within its blockchain by mixing up the payments of multiple users. Using techniques that still aren’t clear, the IRS was able to recover the monero funds anyway. Zhong is scheduled to be sentenced on February 22, 2023. Source: Arstechnica Source URL: https://arstechnica.com/information-tech...silk-road/

Federal prosecutors have recovered $3.36 billion in bitcoin that was stolen a decade ago from Silk Road, the dark web bazaar responsible for distributing massive quantities of illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services to people worldwide. Last November, federal agents executing a search warrant on a then-defendant’s Gainesville, Georgia, house seized a little more than 50,491 bitcoin that was stashed in an underground floor safe and on a “single-board computer” that was submerged under blankets in a popcorn tin stored in a bathroom closet, the Justice Department said on Monday. During the same search, agents recovered $661,900 in cash, 25 Casascius coins (physical bitcoin) with an approximate value of 174 bitcoin, 11.1160005300044 additional bitcoin, and four one-ounce silver-colored bars, three one-ounce gold-colored bars, four 10-ounce silver-colored bars, and one gold-colored coin. A $3.3 billion mystery At the time, the haul was the biggest cryptocurrency seizure in US Justice Department history and today remains the department’s second-largest financial seizure ever, behind a $3.6 billion seizure prosecutors made earlier this year from a married couple charged with money laundering. The $3.36 billion belonged to James Zhong, 32, of Gainesville and Athens, Georgia. On Friday, Zhong pled guilty to one count of wire fraud, an offense that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. “James Zhong committed wire fraud over a decade ago when he stole approximately 50,000 bitcoin from Silk Road,” Damian Williams, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in Monday’s release. “For almost 10 years, the whereabouts of this massive chunk of missing bitcoin had ballooned into an over $3.3 billion mystery. Thanks to state-of-the-art cryptocurrency tracing and good old-fashioned police work, law enforcement located and recovered this impressive cache of crime proceeds.” Prosecutors said Zhong executed a sophisticated scheme to defraud Silk Road of what was about $650,000 worth of bitcoin, based on the value of the cryptocurrency when the fraud took place in September 2012. To execute the plan, prosecutors said Zhong created about nine Silk Road accounts and funded them with an initial deposit of 200 to 2,000 bitcoin. Zhong then triggered 140 transactions in rapid succession to trick the Silk Road withdrawal-processing system into releasing about 50,000 bitcoin into the accounts. “As an example, on September 19, 2012, Zhong deposited 500 bitcoin into a Silk Road wallet,” prosecutors said. “Less than five seconds after making the initial deposit, Zhong executed five withdrawals of 500 bitcoin in rapid succession—i.e., within the same second—resulting in a net gain of 2,000 bitcoin.” One of Zhong’s other fraud accounts made a single deposit and more than 50 withdrawals before the account ceased its activity. Within a few days of the transactions, Zhong moved the bitcoin out of Silk Road and consolidated them into two high-value amounts. When bitcoin performed a hard fork coin split in August 2017, Zhong’s 50,000 bitcoin windfall received a matching number of bitcoin cash coins. Zhong used an overseas exchange to convert the bitcoin cash to about 3,500 bitcoin, bringing his total take to roughly 53,500 bitcoin. Starting earlier this year, Zhong started voluntarily surrendering a little more than 1,004 bitcoin to federal authorities. Silk Road operated from 2011 to 2013 and was used to trade illicit goods around the world. The platform’s founder, Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to life in prison in 2015. IRS Criminal Investigation Special Agent in Charge Tyler Hatcher said that once Zhong completed the heist, “he attempted to hide his spoils through a series of complex transactions which he hoped would be enhanced as he hid behind the mystery of the ‘darknet.’” In reality, the bitcoin blockchain provides a history of every single transaction, which forensic investigators can use to trace stolen coins even when they pass through tumblers and other tools designed to obscure their

Gonna be a volatile/fun/crazy week. Stay calm and trade wisely.

"10 tips for bear markets 1. Plan ahead 2. Don't rush 3. Be patient with entries 4. Know your timeframe 5. Have an exit strategy 6. Tighten position size 7. Adjust for volatility 8. Zoom out for historical context 9. Cash is a position 10. Avoid panic, FUD, and FOMO" Saifuddin Khan

"Did Justin Sun buy Huobi exchange? TRON (TRX) hits 4 billion network transactions upon rumors of Justin Sun buying Huobi"

Worest wallet drain

"A court in South Korea has issued an arrest warrant for Do Kwon, the founder of Terraform Labs, escalating its probe into the crypto ecosystem whose two tokens lost $40 billion in value in a span of days earlier this year. LUNA, the new token of the revived ecosystem, dropped as high as 48.4% to $2.23 apiece on the news, which was earlier reported by local media Yonhap, before recovering slightly. The South Korean court has issued arrest warrants for six people, the news outlet reported, adding that the prosecutors believe the individuals have violated the nation’s capital market rules. Terraform Labs’ so-called stablecoin UST and cryptocurrency LUNA, dramatically imploded in May after investors lost faith in the efficacy of its fundamentals. Major crypto exchanges including Binance and Coinbase delisted the token and discontinued several of its trading pairs. (Many exchanges have since revived limited support for the old token.) Kwon said in an interview to Coinage last month that South Korean prosecutors hadn’t been in contact with him and he hasn’t been charged with anything — even though law enforcement is barring his employees from leaving the country. “It’s kind of hard to make that decision, because we’ve never been in touch with the investigators. They’ve never charged us with anything.” Kwon said in the video interview. South Korean prosecutors raided the home of Terraform Labs co-founder Daniel Shin in July as part of a probe into allegations of illegal activity behind Terra’s collapse. Authorities had also said that Kwon needs to notify them when he returns to the country."