by Need to get caught up with what happened in crypto over the weekend?
Here’s the latest on crypto regulation, Bitcoin, blockchain, DeFi and Web3.
Sam Bankman-Fried on dial-up level internet
Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers have again asked a court to temporarily release the
former FTX boss claiming the poor internet connection in his Brooklyn prison is interfering with their trial prep.
In a Sep. 8 letter to District Judge Lewis Kaplan, Bankman-Fried’s lawyer Mark Cohen said his client
can’t access an internet-enabled computer twice a week for four to five hours as previously
agreed to with United States prosecutors.
Citing an Aug. 30 incident, Cohen claimed Bankman-Fried lost two hours of “review time” due to
an unrelated delay involving another inmate at the prison.
Once Bankman-Fried was eventually brought up to the visiting room the internet connection was
so slow that it took 10 minutes for the home page to load, his lawyers claimed.
“By 1:00pm — 1.5 hours later — Mr. Bankman-Fried was only able to load one document from the
database to review. Effectively, Mr. Bankman-Fried had no access to the internet for the entire 5-hour period.”
“The defendant cannot prepare for trial with these kinds of limitations,” the letter reads.
Cohen claimed Bankman-Fried hasn’t been able to effectively prepare for his trial for the better
part of a month and pushed for a temporary release saying it’s necessary in order to make up for the lost time.
BlackRock’s purchase of Voyager was one big lie
Asset management giant BlackRock has denied buying bankrupt crypto brokerage firm Voyager
Digital — despite a widely shared press release stating otherwise.
A Sep. 8, a fake press release — syndicated to the Associated Press — claimed that BlackRock
planned to acquire Voyager, citing “industry insiders.”
A BlackRock spokesperson told Cointelegraph it’s not acquiring Voyager and stories suggesting otherwise are false.
As first noted by crypto journalist Colin Wu in an X (Twitter) post the same day, the social media
account linked at the bottom of the release directed to a newly-created X account with one post and one follower.
EINPresswire was seemingly the first to post the press release, which shows a company called MK
Digiworld provided the news. That company’s website only directs users to message a Pakistan-based number.
Voyager’s VGX token still spiked 15% to $0.153 within 12 hours of the AP’s syndication on Sept. 9.
However the token has since returned to $0.126, according to CoinGecko.
Remember the guy who threw 8,000 BTC in the trash?
Early Bitcoin
BTC
tickers down
$25,804
investor James Howells is gearing up for a lawsuit against a south Wales council over its refusal to
let him try to dig up and find a hard drive he threw out over 10 years ago containing 8,000 BTC.
In a Sep. 8 report in the British paper The Telegraph, Howells said the hard drive was accidentally
binned by his ex — ending up in a tip managed by Newport City Council.
Since then Howells has been fighting with the council about getting into the tip to find the drive —
which it’s refused multiple times citing the negative environmental impact of digging up rubbish.
On Sep. 4, Howells sent an open letter to the council demanding he’s allowed to access the dump
and start work by Sep. 18 or face a lawsuit with damages seeking nearly $560 million — more than double what the stash would be currently worth at nearly $206 million.
“I’ve tried everything I can for 10 years,” Howells said. “They didn’t want to play ball,
so now we have to go down the legal route.”
Previously, Howells has proposed a venture-backed $11 million project to dig up the drive that
would employ artificial intelligence and robot dogs to sort the trash along with experts in
excavation, waste management and data extraction.
Someone pays $500,000 in Bitcoin fees
The online crypto community has been left scratching their heads over a single Bitcoin
transaction where someone paid nearly 20 BTC, or over $515,000 in fees.
The Sep. 10 transaction was picked up by the blockchain-tracking X account Whale Alert and
pseudonymous X user “mononaut” posted the transaction “makes absolutely no sense.”
“My best guess is that this was created manually by pasting addresses and amounts into
some kind of wallet software,” mononaut wrote.
They explained the user may have accidentally pasted an output amount into the fee box of the software then sent the transaction without checking.
Bitcoin wallet provider Casa co-founder Jameson Lopp said the transaction “looks like an
exchange or payment processor with buggy software.”
He added the address seems to operate as a businesses “withdraw-only hot wallet” and probably
miscalculated a change output due to having around the same number of sent and received transactions.
Also making news
The X account of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was compromised on Sep. 9 with hackers
posting a phishing link that led to them netting a nearly $700,000 payday.
The same day, FTX sued cross-chain protocol LayerZero Labs to try claw back $21 million
allegedly illegally withdrawn prior to the crypto exchange’s November 2022 bankruptcy.
