Daily Archives: September 27, 2022

Note from the editor: We here at The Tartan take our journalism very seriously. As such, we would like to sincerely apologize for an inaccurate assertion we made in our last issue of Pillbox. In our reporting on the multi-enfabulator, we erroneously claimed that the panametric fan consisted of hydrocoptic marzelvanes. The enfabulator project team asked us to clarify that vanes are an obsolete technology; the new panametric assembly actually uses a marzel-type fitting with a low slip coefficient to house a reductive chafe-membrane. We deeply apologize for any confusion this has caused. The junior staff writer responsible for the mistake has been locked in the Wasp Room until further notice.

Last week the CMU Crypto Cats, a cryptocurrency-based student organization, made an announcement saying they had finalized development on an original cryptocurrency that they call AndyCoin.

The most novel aspect of this currency is the design of its "blockchain." For those unfamiliar, blockchains (also known as "Distributed Ledger Technology") are the means by which a cryptocurrency operates. Simply put, they are a ledger of every transaction that occurs with the associated cryptocurrency. The blockchain gets stored on hundreds, if not thousands of different computers, meaning that the official tally of who has how many coins is distributed among many different people this is how they keep the record decentralized. Anytime somebody wishes to transfer cryptocurrency, their request must be approved by every computer on the network before a new transaction is appended to the end of the blockchain. As long as all the versions of the blockchain agree, people can freely trade crypto without the need for a central authority.

In their announcement, the Crypto Cats explain their work. "With data obfuscation, procedural obtuseness, and consumer-end price volatility as our primary goal, work has been proceeding on developing a novel blockchain protocol that would maximize speculative financial contributions while also inflating the apparent individual commodity value. The value of AndyCoin in conventional fiat currency is realized through an innovative process that converts asset bundles from recent investors into payout for earlier contributors." They also explain their motivation, claiming, "we wanted to spread the gospel of Web3 and crypto to the students of Carnegie Mellon University, and what better way than to create a CMU-centered cryptocurrency?" According to their announcement, their end goal is to phase out flex-cash and replace it entirely with AndyCoins. "Students will soon be able to buy into this exciting new currency, and those who adopt early may even make a small profit once we see widespread acceptance."

The only new principle involved is that instead of the blockchain relying on proof-of-stake verification, the chain operates on a micro-bid-oriented matrix-scape wherein any front-end certifications are initially sent downstream to the public DAO server (provided that the bid tokens are still functionally fungible at the moment of a transaction). After a user sends a transaction request, a new appendage is made to the ledger after its vector multiples are consummated. The user is then sent an aggregated metadata packet which gets reoriented into a unique 64-bit hash ledger, allowing their crypto wallet to receive the appropriate funds. Spontaneous executions within the liminal void space are of course a concern, however the wire-stack permits integration of a null-key by verified DAO accounts to mitigate the effects of this. Furthermore, Linux-based aggregation dummies are entirely forbidden to minimize the need for null-admin interventions. A lymphatically-driven class arbitrator will also be semantically employed to prevent a consensus fork in the chain, thus encouraging token stability.

When asked what inspired this revolutionary new procedure, the team leader cited the principle of "minimally distal bar sequences'' pioneered by Herbert Simon. This principle, developed by legendary Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Herbert Simon (the namesake of Newell-Simon Hall), demonstrates that low-echelon bin operators will always arbitrate the nearest local bar sequence in a skew-framework. The Crypto Cats have ingeniously employed this principle in such a way that the blockchain can more efficiently integrate the proximal components of the distal command network.

The announcement has also garnered attention from the founder of Ether, Vitalik Buterin, who attended a recent conference hosted by the Crypto Cats. "I'm so excited to see the future of computing getting so involved with Web3. Carnegie Mellon has been at the forefront of computer science for decades, and these kids are continuing that tradition by revolutionizing the efficiency with which blockchains can concentrate crypto-backed assets among select stakeholders". He added, "I'm particularly interested to see how these new ideas might be integrated into the metaverse".

Such exciting news. At any rate, this reporter is sold on the idea, and I look forward to the prospect of minting an NFT of Farnam Jahanian on the AndyCoin blockchain. To the moon!

Read the rest here:
Carnegie Mellon University Students Create New Cryptocurrency, dubbed AndyCoin - CMU The Tartan Online

Amazon recently lost control of IP addresses it uses to host cloud services and took more than three hours to regain control, a lapse that allowed hackers to steal $235,000 in cryptocurrency from users of one of the affected customers, an analysis shows.

The hackers seized control of roughly 256 IP addresses through BGP hijacking, a form of attack that exploits known weaknesses in a core Internet protocol. Short for border gateway protocol, BGP is a technical specification that organizations that route traffic, known as autonomous system networks, use to interoperate with other ASNs. Despite its crucial function in routing wholesale amounts of data across the globe in real time, BGP still largely relies on the Internet equivalent of word of mouth for organizations to track which IP addresses rightfully belong to which ASNs.

Last month, autonomous system 209243, which belongs to UK-based network operator Quickhost.uk, suddenly began announcing its infrastructure was the proper path for other ASNs to access whats known as a /24 block of IP addresses belonging to AS16509, one of at least three ASNs operated by Amazon. The hijacked block included 44.235.216.69, an IP address hosting cbridge-prod2.celer.network, a subdomain responsible for serving a critical smart contract user interface for the Celer Bridge cryptocurrency exchange.

On August 17, the attackers used the hijacking to first obtain a TLS certificate for cbridge-prod2.celer.network, since they were able to demonstrate to certificate authority GoGetSSL in Latvia that they had control over the subdomain. With possession of the certificate, the hijackers then hosted their own smart contract on the same domain and waited for visits from people trying to access the real Celer Bridge cbridge-prod2.celer.network page.

In all, the malicious contract drained a total of $234,866.65 from 32 accounts, according to this writeup from security firm security firm SlowMist and this one from the threat intelligence team from Coinbase.

Coinbase TI analysis

The Coinbase team members explained:

The phishing contract closely resembles the official Celer Bridge contract by mimicking many of its attributes. For any method not explicitly defined in the phishing contract, it implements a proxy structure which forwards calls to the legitimate Celer Bridge contract. The proxied contract is unique to each chain and is configured on initialization. The command below illustrates the contents of the storage slot responsible for the phishing contracts proxy configuration:

Coinbase TI analysis

The phishing contract steals users funds using two approaches:

Below is a sample reverse engineered snippet which redirects assets to the attacker wallet:

Coinbase TI analysis

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How 3 hours of inaction from Amazon cost cryptocurrency holders $235,000 - Ars Technica

A new guidebook "The Energy Bomb: How Proof-of-Work Cryptocurrency Mining Worsens the Climate Crisis and Harms Communities Now" from Earthjustice and Sierra Club, is the first to comprehensively document the explosive growth of cryptocurrency mining in the United States and examine how this industry is impacting utilities, energy systems, emissions, communities and ratepayers.

Cryptocurrency mining is an extremely energy-intensive process that threatens the ability of governments across the globe to reduce our dependence on climate-warming fossil fuels.

If we do not take action to limit this growing industry now, we will not meet the goals set forth by the Paris Agreement and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to limit warning to 2C.

This guidebook discusses several such examples where fossil-fueled cryptocurrency mining has increased local air, water, and noise pollution, increased costs on others, and increased climate pollution at a time when we should be doing everything in our power to move in the opposition direction to mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

After cryptocurrency mining was banned in China in 2020, the amount of mining operations exploded in the United States.

In the year prior to July 2022, Bitcoin consumed an estimated 36 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, as much as all of the electricity consumed in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island put together in that same time period.

The past two years have demonstrated that the industry preferentially seeks readily-available energy and minimal regulation, re-starting defunct coal and gas plants, flooding the restructured electricity market in Texas, and tapping into power grids where regulators have little oversight.

This explosive growth strains energy grids, raises retail electricity rates, and increases total carbon emissions and local air pollution.

The design of proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining incentivizes miners to ramp up operations as quickly as possible, often irrespective of the source of energy.

Indeed, big mining operations have shown a willingness to invest in otherwise uneconomic power sources, like defunct coal plants or low-capacity gas plants, as long as that electricity can be made available quickly. Unlike other large electricity users, cryptocurrency mining operations have a short time horizon, and most have shown little interest in investing in new clean energy.

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The Environmental Impacts of Cryptomining - Earthjustice

Cyberattacks continue to afflict the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, with another vanity wallet address joining the list of DeFi victims, who collectively lost more than $1.6 billion in 2022. According to an alert issued by blockchain security firm PeckShield, a hacker was discovered after stealing 732 Ether (ETH), or approximately $950,000, from an address generated by the Ethereum vanity wallet address generator Profanity. After draining the wallet, the exploiters transferred the cryptocurrency to the recently approved cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash.

#PeckShieldAlert Seems like $950k worth of crypto has been stolen by 0x9731F from Ethereum vanity address generated with a tool called Profanity. The exploiter already transferred ~732 $ETH into Mixer pic.twitter.com/QOZfnE49H4

PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) September 26, 2022

Earlier in September, decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator, 1inch Network warned community members that address generated with profanity were not secure. The DEX urged cryptocurrency holders with vanity addresses to transfer their assets as soon as possible. According to 1inch, the vanity address generator seeded 256-bit private keys with a random 32-bit vector, indicating that it is unsafe.

Following the DEX aggregators warnings, blockchain investigator ZachXBT announced that an exploit of the Profanity vulnerability has already allowed some hackers to escape with $3.3 million in digital assets.

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$1 million in cryptocurrency was stolen as a result of a vanity address exploits - The Tech Outlook

Over the past 24 hours, Polkadot's DOT/USD price rose 3.15% to $6.46. This continues its positive trend over the past week where it has experienced a 1.0% gain, moving from $6.38 to its current price. As it stands right now, the coin's all-time high is $54.98.

The chart below compares the price movement and volatility for Polkadot over the past 24 hours (left) to its price movement over the past week (right). The gray bands are Bollinger Bands, measuring the volatility for both the daily and weekly price movements. The wider the bands are, or the larger the gray area is at any given moment, the larger the volatility.

The trading volume for the coin has tumbled 14.0% over the past week while the circulating supply of the coin has risen 0.18%. This brings the circulating supply to 1.15 billion. According to our data, the current market cap ranking for DOT is #11 at $7.47 billion.

Powered by CoinGecko API

This article was generated by Benzinga's automated content engine and reviewed by an editor.

Link:
Cryptocurrency Polkadot's Price Increased More Than 3% Within 24 hours - Polkadot (DOT/USD) - Benzinga

Last week, Iran joined the league of many other countries, with the launch of its very own central bank digital currency (CBDC) called, crypto rial. So far many countries have conducted several CBDC experiments with private sector entities as per World Economic Forum (WEF). These include the Bank of Canadas Project Jasper, the National Bank of Cambodias Project Bakong, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and Bank of Thailands Project Inthanon-LionRock, and the BIS and Swiss Digital Exchanges Project Helvetia, among others.

CBDC can enhance the efficiency of cross-border payments as well as can provide an alternative to correspondent banks. The Multiple CBDC (mCBDC) Bridge is a co-creation project that explores the capabilities of distributed ledger technology (DLT) and studies the application of CBDC in enhancing financial infrastructure to support multi-currency cross-border payments, Sankhanath Bandyopadhyay, economist, and CBDC expert told FE Blockchain.

Meanwhile, the Central Banks of Hong Kong, Thailand, China, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are working with the bank of international settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub to develop a prototype platform, called mBridge. CBDCs can potentially enable more real-time and cost-effective globalisation of payment systems. It is conceivable for an Indian importer to pay its American exporter on a real-time basis in digital dollars, without the need of an intermediary, Vipin Malik, chairman, and mentor, Infomerics Rating, a credit rating agency, said.

As per industry experts, policy creation and regulation of digital currencies require a systemic approach. It is believed that policymakers need to envision a system where stablecoins and retail CBDCs can co-exist along with another payment mechanism.

In 2021 bureau of Indian standards (BIS) survey of central banks found that 86% of digital assets companies were actively researching the potential of CBDCs, further 60% were seen to be experimenting with the technology and 14% had deployed a pilot project, each.

Meanwhile, back at home, Shaktikanta Das, Governor, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), at the recently, held Global Fintech Festival in Mumbai, said, that the RBI is now actively working towards a phased implementation of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in both wholesale and retail segments.

At a time when the cryptocurrency has drawn a lot of flak from the government, this may help in easing a lot of issues, currently faced by the players, There are many macro-prudential risks associated with its operation and acceptability; henceforth it needs to be implemented in a calibrated and careful manner. The RBI, in its Report on Trend and Progress of Banking in India 2020-21 has highlighted that many central banks are swiftly moving towards designing their own CBDCs, Swarup Gupta, financial head, economic intelligence unit, added.

Also Read: KuCoin Labs Lou Yu to speak at Token 249 conference on Web3.0-based developments

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As Iran joins the league of cryptocurrency with its own CBDC, will India bite the bullet any soon - The Financial Express

According to different sources, the bank of Russia and the countrys ministry of finance have reached an agreement that will allow cross-border cryptocurrency settlements.

As per Deputy Finance Minister Moiseev Alexei, the policy explains How to acquire cryptocurrency and what can be done with it, and its use in cross-border settlements.

The report published by Russia- based publicationKommersant, Russia Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Moiseev stated that the government department has mutually agreed with the central government over a rule that would allow residents to send cross-border payments using cryptocurrency. The policy is purposely built to help Russian nationals to enjoy their digital wallets.

According to the report Moiseev said, the issues discussed in the policy focus on,howtoacquirecryptocurrency,whatcanbedonewithit, andhowitcanorcannotbesettledwithitinthefirstplaceincross-bordersettlements.

According to the Russian News Agencies, the central bank reportedly spoke with government officials about the issues the government can face in cross-border crypto payments. However, the bank of Russia, on the other hand, disagreed with allowing crypto exchanges to function legally and not accepting them as legal tender.

Russian Deputy FinanceMinister Moiseev Alexei, on September 5 stated that Now the people are opening crypto wallets outside the Russian Federation, it is necessary to do this in Russia with entities supervised by the central bank, which are required to comply with Anti-Money Laundering and Know Your Customer requirements.

Cryptocurrency has a complicated history with Russia. In the year 2020, the country passed legislation prohibiting the use of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) for payments.

In July, President Vladimir Putin also signed legislation prohibiting the use of digital financial assets as payment. Denis Manturov, Russias Trade Minister, suggested in May that crypto payments would be legalized sooner or later.

According to the survey report: 72% of Russian says that they have never dealt with Bitcoin

Since Russias invasion of Ukraine in February, the countrys government, businesses, and individuals have beensubjected to severe economic sanctions.

Whereas, on September 15, theUSTreasuryDepartmentadded22individualsandtwoRussian-basedentitiestoitssanctionslist,claimingtheyhelpedthegovernmentsgoalsinUkraine.

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Russian Officials Approved the Use of Cryptocurrency for Cross-border Payments - TechJuice