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Zero Knowledge

An occasional humor column from our roving correspondent Ben Munster.

CollectionLast updated Dec 24, 2022
Dec 24

Crypto Is Down Bad, But VCs Keep Pouring Money In

Given the contagion and chaos we have witnessed since Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX had a sudden multibillion-dollar coronary, you may be tempted to conclude the entire crypto industry is headed for the great Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in the sky, and that nobody in their right mind could possibly still have faith in it.  And yet, even in the frigid cold of Crypto Winter, venture capital continues to pour in for certain lucky builders.  Analysts at Pitchbook report that crypto VC in...

NewsOpinion
8 min read
Ben Munster
Dec 16
Image: Shutterstock

Trump's NFT Rollout Went Exactly as You'd Expect

On Thursday, former U.S. President Donald Trump released a 45,000-piece series of $99-apiece NFTs following long-awaited hints that a “major announcement” would be forthcoming.  Many people had assumed the announcement would relate to Trump’s recently declared 2024 presidential campaign, but here we are.  The NFT "trading cards" feature digital renderings of Trump in a variety of kitschy getups, including cowboy dusters and astronaut suits, which Trump described as “scenes pertaining to my life...

NewsOpinion
4 min read
Ben Munster
Nov 25
DeFi has been the center of regulatory attention of late. Image: Shutterstock.

Is It Wrong for DeFi Projects to Track Data?

As if there weren’t enough misery in the crypto markets at the moment, DeFi enthusiasts are now in an uproar over revelations that Uniswap, the popular decentralized exchange (DEX), tracks public user data. True, the exchange doesn’t track personal, private data like names or IP addresses, but according to newly-uploaded terms and conditions documents, pretty much anything publicly viewable online is aggregated and harvested. And it's not alone; earlier this week, Metamask, the popular Ethereum...

NewsOpinion
6 min read
Ben Munster
Nov 11

How to Get Money Out of FTX (But Only If You’re Filthy Rich)

In the wake of the complete collapse of the crypto exchange FTX, along with its founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s multi-billion dollar fortune, it appears further financial chicanery is afoot.  Withdrawals and internal balance transfers in the non-American iterations of the exchange have been frozen since the exchange’s collapse earlier this week, leaving billions of dollars in customer funds stranded and irretrievable. On Thursday, however, FTX announced it had resumed limited withdrawals for clien...

NewsOpinion
5 min read
Ben Munster
Oct 22
Bitcoin in a bubble. Image: Shutterstock

Here's Another New Book for Bitcoin Skeptics

I expected a fairly lazy and hysterical recounting of the many ills of crypto when I began reading Popping the Crypto Bubble. The ambitious crypto-skeptical book was co-authored earlier this year by financial fraud writer Darren Tseng, fintech consultant Jan Akalin, and software engineer Stephen Diehl—notably, the organizers of September’s historical “no-coiner” conference.  Diehl is the most notorious of this trio. He regales his 58,000-strong Twitter audience with a daily deluge of epigrammat...

NewsOpinion
6 min read
Ben Munster
Sep 28
Image: Shutterstock

What You Can Do With Your Old Ethereum Mining Rigs

Picture this: You are an Ethereum miner, and for almost ten years your nine-to-five has been the same: wake to the sound of industrial wheezing in your backyard, scarf down a quick breakfast of heavily contaminated Cinnamon Crunch, take an asthmatic jog ‘round the polluted freshwater lake, then head back to the garage where the machines are kept, and where you tend to their inscrutable whims—lest they decline to compensate you with precious ETH. Having carried on like this for years, you have b...

NewsOpinion
4 min read
Ben Munster
Sep 23
Ethereum has merged. Image: Shutterstock

Was the Ethereum Merge a Mistake?

“What do you think of the merge?” I recently innocently asked William “Wills” de Vogelaere, co-founder of Spankchain and probably half a dozen other protocols in the grisly underworld of Ethereum. I was, of course, referring to the long-awaited software upgrade which booted Ethereum’s miners and replaced them with a cohort of environmentally friendly stakeholders on September 15.  “You mean Ethereum’s delusion?” de Vogelaere rejoined bitterly.  “Oho!” I thought. This could get juicy. It turned...

NewsOpinion
7 min read
Ben Munster
Sep 8
The Crypto Policy Symposium. Image: Ben Munster/Decrypt

Inside the World's First No-Coiner Conference

Stephen Diehl was giving an ebullient toast at the world’s first conference for crypto skeptics, which he co-hosted this week. “We want to thank the sponsors, and of course the illuminati,” he said, to an almost frenzied hysteria from the gallery. “We couldn’t have done it without them!”  It was the final evening of the two-day Crypto Policy Symposium in London and a group of crypto skeptics had gathered in a club in Marylebone to drink free Prosecco and conspicuously not sell each other crypto...

NewsOpinion
8 min read
Ben Munster
Aug 3
Image: Shutterstock

Meet Crypto Twitter’s Latest Meme: ‘Let’s Form Group!’

As with every great meme that has graced this benighted civilization, it began with an elegant and moving story, captured in all its fleeting delicacy by a Forbes “contributor.” The story appeared under the headline, “Tiffany & Co Releases Those CryptoPunk Pendants And They Are Expensive, Here’s All The Intel.” There followed a rollicking article about the co-president of Tiffany and Co., Alexandre Arnault, boosting the market value of a series of CryptoPunk-themed pendants by way of a “guerril...

NewsCoins
5 min read
Ben Munster
Jul 24
"I always trusted code more than people anyway." Image: Shutterstock

Inside the Crypto-Bot Ghost Towns of Telegram

Wave aside the cobwebs of the Telegram group “BitGo Cryptocurrency Exchange” and you’ll find a ghost town, populated by bots. Once, BitGo Cryptocurrency Exchange (an unauthorized channel aimed to lure customers of the genuine and legit crypto exchange named Bitgo, which didn’t respond to a chance for comment) played host to a vital membership of real-life humans, glorious in their aliveness. Members discussed trading strategies, unwittingly sent large sums of money to fake addresses, demanded u...

NewsOpinion
7 min read
Ben Munster
Jul 17
Bitcoin maximalist mascot Max Keiser at Bitcoin Miami 2021.

Where Does Bitcoin Maximalism Go From Here?

You may have recently seen some of the unhealthy internecine drama engulfing the Bitcoiner “community,” notably around who is—and who is most certainly not—a “maximalist.” A Bitcoin maximalist, in the broadest definition possible, is a person heavily invested in Bitcoin who believes Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that matters and all other cryptocurrencies are, if not scams, distractions from this one worthy, earth-shattering project.  The purpose of that project remains a subject of intens...

NewsOpinion
8 min read
Ben Munster
Jul 10

The Next Big Thing in NFTs: Selling Them for Peanuts

Would you buy an NFT for $1,000? How about for $10? With the recent staggering losses in the crypto market, speculators have fled the once-frothy NFT market, taking what was left of their money with them. Floor prices for top collections have crashed to earth. Now some people in the industry producing original digital art—as opposed to collectible PFP (profile picture) collections like Bored Apes and CryptoPunks—are attempting to create a grassroots, sustainable business model that has a low ba...

NewsOpinion
5 min read
Ben Munster
Mar 19

Are Web3 ‘Communities’ Vapid or Authentic?

The crypto world, we are told, is brimming with “communities.”  There are Bitcoiners, Ethereans, the Dogecoin army, LINK marines. There are communities around NFTs, like Bored Apes, CrypToadz and JPEGS of rocks. There are communities around complex financial instruments like Compound, Aave, and the algorithmic stablecoin Terra. There is even, somehow, a “community” around Tether, presumably for fans of the stablecoin and its dubious dollar reserves.  At first blush, it is hard to square these “...

NewsOpinion
7 min read
Ben Munster
Mar 3
Dogecoin in Ukraine. Image: Shutterstock

Meet the Dogecoin Enthusiasts Sending DOGE to Ukraine

On Monday morning, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine rolling ominously onward, Avery, a 40-something crypto enthusiast living in Colorado, knew just what the war effort needed. He went to his loft and hooked up two Antminer L3 mining rigs to a Ukrainian public address, and began to send to the country a steady stream of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.  “I'm going to send around 40 DOGE a day,” he told me, calculating it would come to around $50 a month. “I'm turning my earnings to them until fu...

NewsOpinion
4 min read
Ben Munster
Mar 2
Crypto exchanges are being pressured to shut out Russian users. Image: Pigsels

Crypto's Ukraine Dilemma

Is supporting the Ukrainian resistance worth jettisoning one of crypto's most sacred principles: financial sovereignty? That question arose yesterday, when Ukraine’s deputy prime minister beseeched several major crypto exchanges—among them Binance and Coinbase—to unilaterally ban all Russian users from the platform and freeze their holdings.  Though many non-crypto businesses and banks had already voluntarily severed ties with Russia’s citizens, the crypto companies appeared to be having none o...

NewsCoins
6 min read
Ben Munster
Feb 26

What Would Karl Marx Think About Crypto?

Last year, in an article titled “The Left Should Talk About Cryptocurrency,” the left-wing culture writer Hussein Kesvani argued that Web3 and Ethereum-adjacent cryptocurrencies would “inevitably” change the world—for good or ill. As such, he said, it was up to leftists to reclaim the technology from libertarians and anarcho-capitalists appropriating socialist terms and ideals. Such appropriators include crypto influencer Li Jin, who, despite being a venture capitalist, claims to be a student o...

NewsOpinion
9 min read
Ben Munster
Feb 5

The Simp Sons: IreneDAO Turns Irene Zhao’s ‘Simp’ Superfans Into Investors

In early January, a sticker pack depicting photos of Irene Zhao, a prolific Singaporean web3 entrepreneur and Instagram model, began circulating on Twitter. The stickers featured Zhao in various evocative postures and levels of dress, each superimposed with catty, memey slogans like “Damp it” and “Excuse me!?” The stickers were catnip for the crypto masses.  Intern started a sticker pack as a meme for our Telegram community, today we realised the pack already reached 900 installs in 4 days. 🤔...

NewsNFTs
6 min read
Ben Munster
Jan 29

Building Web4: A Thread About How We Are Going to Make It! 🧵

gm, frens!  You know what we’re all about here at DAOarrhea. We’re about building a future where users have ownership over their data; where incentives are tokenized; where tokens are communitized; where the daily grind is a loss leader for changing fucking lives.  But we want to do more. A thread ⬇️🧵 (1/246) Today we at DAOarrhea have a very special announcement about the future of the open Web 👾, the future of assetized tokenomics 💵, and the future of autonomous simpalgorithms 🤓. We call...

NewsOpinion
4 min read
Ben Munster
Jan 17
The photo at the heart of the "50 ETH Doge" case, submitted by "Ricky." (Believe it or not, this is a cat.)

Blockchain Courts and Cats That Look Like Dogs: How DAOs Wrestle With the Law

In July 2018, a blockchain project called Kleros organized a competition, “Doges on Trial,” that asked participants to submit images of those cute little shiba inu pups known as “doges” for a kind of curated meme library.  Kleros asked for shiba inu photographs, but also encouraged participants to challenge dubious submissions through its blockchain voting software; anyone who managed to slip a cat through the net would be rewarded 50 ETH, worth $25,000 at the time. The idea was to test the lim...

Deep DivesLong Reads
10 min read
Ben Munster
Dec 9
Craig Wright claims to have invented Bitcoin under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Image: Decrypt

Craig Wright Didn’t 'Win' Anything

It takes time to build a press operation so effective that you can chalk up a $100 million legal fine as a victory—but Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist who claims to be the inventor of Bitcoin, managed to pull it off. On Tuesday, Wright, 51, was compelled to pay $100 million to a business venture called W&K Info Defense that he set up with the late developer Dave Kleiman.  In early 2018, Kleiman’s brother Ira sued Wright in a Miami court, a few years after Wright debuted the clai...

NewsOpinion
5 min read
Ben Munster
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