The UK Government Is Turning You Against Your Own Best Interests
UK Government: Turning You Against Your Own Best Interests
The UK Government is launching a giant publicity attack against end-to-end encryption, designed to sway public opinion away from privacy. According to Rolling Stone Magazine, the decision comes in response to Facebook’s decision to end-to-end encrypt its popular Messenger app. As always, the government is using children as a tool to push their agenda. A Home Office spokesperson said in a prepared statement:
“We have engaged M&C Saatchi to bring together the many organisations who share our concerns about the impact end-to-end encryption would have on our ability to keep children safe.”
M&C Saatchi is a powerhouse advertising agency, and the campaign they’ve put together is shockingly manipulative. Starting in a few days, the first push will be designed to look like a grassroots movement of concerned children’s charities coming together organically, and the intention is to divert attention away from any government involvement.
“For the day of launch we will publish a press notice announcing that the UK’s biggest children’s charity and stakeholders have come together to urge social media companies to put children’s safety first”.
There will be orchestrated press releases across the media. They will have pop-up, performance-art installations in high traffic areas where adult and child actors sit “in a glass box with the adult looking ‘knowingly’ at the child as the glass fades to black”.
Tugging on heartstrings of fear is a normal method of pushing an agenda.
The campaign is intentionally designed to prey upon the un-informed: one slide in the leaked campaign details mentions how the majority of the public don’t even know what end-to-end encryption is, so they will be “easily swayed”.
Making the communications of citizens less secure is the opposite of protecting them, yet the government will be using these citizens’ own taxpayer money to convince them against their best interests. The scary thing is that many will indeed be convinced.
Sometimes when an “organic, grass-roots” movement pops up, it can be useful to think about whose agenda it’s serving.
Hexagons Are The New Checkmark!
Twitter has released an official verification mechanism to make your NFT into your profile picture. You link an Ethereum wallet to your account, and then you can choose which NFT associated with that account you want to use. It is being advertised as a deterrent from those who would right-click and steal your unique NFT to use as their own: you will receive a new hexagonal profile box (instead of the usual circle) to prove your NFT’s verified status (blue check marks are SO 2021 anyway!).
Self-proclaimed bitcoin maxi, Jack Dorsey, stepped down as CEO 2 months ago, and many have reported that the integration of ethereum-based assets shows how much the platform has already changed in his absence. Actually, NFT integration was already on the works while Jack was still at the helm. The crypto twitter-verse is divided by the whole thing, and the lines seem to be drawn roughly based on whether someone is an ethereum lover or hater. There are also more general concerns about the prudence of linking your digital assets to a public profile.
It’s worth noting that Twitter is fetching data from OpenSea rather than the blockchain itself to populate these images. This means that, regardless of whether your NFT is indeed in your possession and the data on the blockchain, if OpenSea decides to not display that NFT for whatever reason (which happens reasonably frequently), or if they go down, your profile picture too will disappear.
NFT integration is currently only available for users with a paid Twitter Blue account ($2.99 per month), which also offers such fancy perks as an “undo” button, along with other features to spice up your profile.
Russia Gives Crypto the COLD Shoulder
The Bank of Russia has suggested new laws and regulations that would effectively ban crypto-related activities in the former Soviet Union. Led by director of the Bank of Russia's Financial Stability Department, Elizaveta Danilova, the report entitled “Cryptocurrencies: trends, risks, measures” was presented during an online press conference. The report labeled cryptocurrencies as “volatile and widely used in illegal activities such as fraud”. It continued to say that by “offering an outlet for people to take their money out of the national economy, they risk undermining it and making the regulator's job of maintaining optimal monetary policies harder”.
It makes sense why a government like Russia’s would be fearful of currencies that lie outside their control — just as it makes sense why people in such countries might want to take control of their money away from these governments in the first place. The battle for monetary sovereignty deepens in the cryptocurrency era.
This is not the first time Russia has tried to put the hammer down on crypto. There was a bill drafted in May 2020 that aimed to effectively ban crypto (a different version of the bill passed in July of that year instead, requiring all crypto assets to be declared as taxable property). Now it seems that the Bank of Russia is trying to work its way back to some kind of ban. “The ‘optimal solution’ would be to ban crypto mining in Russia,” Danilova said in the report. She confirmed that a digital ruble, a CBDC, “is currently in the works” and that it will “satisfy the need of Russians for fast and cheap digital payment options”.
Once released, Russia would join the ranks of China and Nigeria — both of which have come under global scrutiny for using their currency for surveillance and as a way to deter private p2p payments amongst citizens.
Sergey Mendeleev, executive director of crypto investment platform InDeFi, said:
“The ban would mark the end for big crypto businesses, especially mining farms. … I'm sure it will be more like the Chinese variant, with no options or loopholes".
For now, The Bank’s report has merely “suggested” these changes, but the writing might be on the wall.
Achievement Unlocked - Buy a Video Game Company!
Microsoft Corp. officially announced plans to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion in an all-cash transaction, which will make them the third-largest video game company in the world. The aim is to accelerate growth across their many gaming platforms such as PC and Mobile, as well as stake their claim early in the metaverse.
With their acquisition, Microsoft will now own such popular game franchises as “World of Warcraft”, “Starcraft”, “Call of Duty”, and “Diablo”, as well as a global network of studios with employees numbering almost 10,000. Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, said:
“Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms. … When we think about our vision for what a metaverse can be, we believe there won’t be a single centralized metaverse… we need to support many metaverse platforms”.
Bobby Kotick will continue to serve as CEO of Activision Blizzard until the deal closes, and then Activision Blizzard business will report to Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming. Spencer said in his official blog post:
“Around the world, there is no more exciting venue for fun and connection than video games. And there has never been a better time to play than right now. As we extend the joy and community of gaming to everyone, we look forward to welcoming all of our friends at Activision Blizzard to Microsoft Gaming.”
Meanwhile this week, PlayStation creator, Ken Kutaragi, called the metaverse “isolating” and VR headsets “annoying”. He said in an interview with Bloomberg:
“Being in the real world is very important, but the metaverse is about making quasi-real in the virtual world, and I can’t see the point of doing it. … You would rather be a polished avatar instead of your real self? That’s essentially no different from anonymous message board sites.”
Microsoft is betting that people WOULD prefer to be a polished avatar version of themself — and Ken might be surprised to learn how popular anonymous message boards actually are. But we’ll see whose bet on the future pans out.
EU Market Regulator Wants to Ban PoW Mining
Erik Thedéen, the vice chair of the European Securities and Market Authority (ESMA), has spoken against proof-of-work crypto mining, citing its high energy consumption. In an interview with the Financial Times, he said, "The solution is to ban proof-of-work," and suggested a pivot towards a more sustainable “proof-of-stake” alternative.
Proof-of-work mining is where computers are essentially competing to guess random numbers, and if they’re the first to guess the right ones then they win a block reward and the ability to write a block. Because it’s a competition, the more powerful your machine, the more chance you have of winning the block reward. As such, these operations are often cited as consuming massive amounts of energy, and they usually take place in enormous mining facilities.
Proof-of-stake, which Thedéen is recommending, instead works by users winning the right to write the block in a game of chance, weighted by how much of that cryptocurrency they have invested (staked). Due to this you could even say that proof-of-stake has no inherent energy costs.
Ethereum currently has plans to migrate to proof-of-stake later this year, and plans are in the works to explore this for zcash also. It is unlikely that the bitcoin community will ever consider this shift for the bitcoin network.
A very small percentage of proof-of-work mining is currently based in the EU: Current PoW mining leaders are the US, Kazakhstan, and Russia. However, a ban on mining would be a huge blow to the rights of those in the EU to get access to financial privacy via the generation of money outside of the system.
By Will Sandoval, NBTV Associate Producer, and Naomi Brockwell.