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[raison de arizona]

According to this a cubic foot of gold weighs ~1,200 pounds, so...

[much ado]

Okay, I did not see this in the article...

According to Castello’s team, golden cube was cast at a foundry in Aarau, Switzerland, requiring a special handmade kiln in order to withstand both the sheer size and volume of gold, as well as the extreme temperatures needed to melt it, reaching up to 1100 degrees Celsius. The cube measures over a foot and a half on all sides and has a wall thickness of about a quarter inch.

Moar arithmetic...

Let's say the cube is 1.6 feet on a side, and the sides are 0.25 inch thick.

Convert 1.6 feet to inches:
1.6 ft × 12 in/ft = 19.2 in

Square the side length to get area of each side:
(19.2 in)² = 368.64 in²

Multiply by 6 to get area of all faces:
368.64 in² × 6 = 2211.84 in²

Multiply by thickness to get volume:
2211.84 in² × 0.25 in = 552.96 in³

Convert cubic inches to cubic cm:
552.96 in³ × 16.3871 cm³/in³ = 9061.41 cm³

Calculate weight in grams based on density of gold:
9061.41 cm³ × 19.3 g/cm³ = 174885 g

Convert weight in grams to pounds:
174885 g / 453.592 g/lb = 385.6 lb

That's not too far off. So at least the arithmetic checks out.

[Domenico]

That viral gold cube is actually pretty small. Oh, and it's hollow.

[Gregg]

kentuckey

There are several people at the motorcar company who have been saying this guy created the character to make fun of me.

[Gregg]

Can't vouch for the math, but doesn't sound like a good deal...

The math seems in the ballpark, but I doubt that OBJ received full payment upon signing. It was probably ratably payable over the remainder of the season (weekly, bi-monthly, monthly? - not sure how frequently NFL players are paid). If it came in over time as BTC, OBJ would have income in the then current dollar value of each BTC payment as it was received. Assuming monthly payments over five months, if the exchange rate declined linearly from $50k/BTC to $30k/BTC during that time frame, OBJ's taxable income would have been $600k ($150k+$135k+$120k+$105k+$90). Not a good result, but not nearly as bad as the Tweet suggests.

NFL players are paid their regular "salary" per game, on the Tuesday after they are played. Signing bonuses are paid when they sign, sometimes spread out to annual payments. For most players, the salary is not guaranteed, and every week some players are activated from the practice squad which means they make more that week than if they are not activated.

So, assume for instance, you are a Heisman winning quarterback who signs a 4 year deal with the Browns for $8.64 million dollars. The NFL minimum salary is $660k so he gets, in this case, $6 million in a lump sum (but for the salary cap the team spreads it out for the length of the contract) and every week he gets 1/18th of the $660k on Tuesday. That's for a rookie who gets the big bucks. The minimum is a sliding scale based on how many games a player has played, how many years he has played and each team is allowed to have 16 "practice squad" players who make at least $9,200 a week and that is adjusted according to years/games, too.

Its a good gig, even if you're not a star, but only if you don't consider what being an NFL player does to your body. The only 60 year old ex football player who doesn't have serious pain, concussion or some truly hard to look at hands was a punter.

(I know an ex-football player, he was a Pro Bowl offensive lineman who even made a Diet Coke commercial, helluva nice guy, but he has pain and it hurts me to look too closely at his hands. He has finger that point different directions at once.)

[Gregg]

For that much gold, it might actually be worth it to hire a bunch of locals to subdue the security detail and load it onto a truck... which would be poetic justice for this blatant 'look at this expression of wealth! invest in my get rich quick scheme and you might be wealthy too!'.

Bullshit.

A gold cube that size would weigh 3,000 pounds and be worth $82 million.

(a little google foo later)

Its a hollow box with walls 1/4 inch thick.

[neeneko]

Heh, which makes it even more appropriate. When you look at the various fintok gurus and other influencers, projecting the appearance of wealth is one of the standard tools in trying to scam followers into buying into their coin/nft/book/courses/etc.

[PaulG]

That viral gold cube is actually pretty small. Oh, and it's hollow.

Or... those are huge security guards he's hired.

[PaulG]

Moar arithmetic...

Multiply by 6 to get area of all faces:

I was thinking the bottom side might be plywood. Maybe closer to 2 feet?

[tek]

d1.jpg (164.29 KiB) Viewed 2933 times

[Gregg]

A lot of conversations I have about Bitcoin end with "Well, you don't really understand how so called real money works..." and then, "Dude, I have a Master's and a PhD in Economics, I totally understand real real money, its fake money I don't get"

[Gregg]

They get all bent in the "So called ream money is backed by nothing but blind faith" which is not true. It is accepted on blind faith. Blind faith that the United States Treasury can and will use taxes to redeem bonds held by the Fed and blind faith that Federal Reserve Notes will always be accepted by the Treasury to pay your taxes.

BTC is based on nothing but blind faith. But the US Dollar is based on (and growth of the money supply is tied to) creation of new wealth by productive economic activity. The Fed doesn't just print as much money as they feel like next Monday, they try, as a trend, to match new creation of money to wealth created by things people did. The actual mechanism of creating this new money is for them to buy US Treasury Bond (and this is important) on the secondary market. They are forbidden by law to buy direct from the Treasury, a law they have never broken and forbidden (mostly) by law from owning any assets besides US Treasuries. There have been exceptions since 2008-2009 but for the most part, the Fed buys bonds by creating money to do it matched to how much value added we have done at the motorcar company and thousands of other places turning metal into cars or yarn into sweaters and such. This activity generates tax revenue which pays the interests and principle on the bonds they bought and effectively retired. They make a profit doing this, and the Illuminati doesn't get a cut (we are self funded and if I told you more, I'd have to wipe your hometown off the map with a natural disaster) but the member banks DO get 6% of their invested capital, because they are the ones who fund all this. When the economy slows down and they want to shrink the money supply, they sell bonds and the money paid for them is removed from the money supply, which slows everything down.

BTC uses more energy than Norway to keep a blockchain of every single BTC transaction on every single BTC from creation, it grows in value because the next biggger fool will buy tulips and no productive economic activity is tied directly or indirectly to its creation. It is not accepted for payment of taxes except in third world shitholes like El Salvador and Arizona (really) and if it crashes there is no central authority to redeem it and everybody dies. But you can use it to pay the equal of millions of dollars for the rights to owning Elon Musk's first tweet. Which anyone on the planet can go see for free by logging onto Twitter and looking at it. Just like you can, but you have a Certificate of Ownership and you only paid millions for it.


Lesson endeth.

[RTH10260]

IFF you can trick the Federal Reserve to mint a $$$ edition specially dedicated to you ....

What your organization can learn from the $324 million Wormhole blockchain hack

by Brandon Vigliarolo in Security
on February 4, 2022, 7:12 AM PST

The hacker that made off with millions from blockchain bridge service Wormhole exploited an incredibly common coding error that could be lurking in anyone’s software.

Those following the tech world have probably heard about the recent hack of blockchain bridging service Wormhole that has amounted to the fourth-largest crypto theft, and second-largest De-Fi theft, ever. The attacker who found the exploit created 120,000 Ethereum out of nothing, and made off with about $324 million of it.

For background, Wormhole is a service that lets users exchange cryptocurrencies across blockchains, sort of like swapping one fiat currency for another. In this particular case, the attacker exploited Wormhole in such a way that they were able to trick it into minting 120,000 wrapped ethereum (wETH, a 1:1 value equivalent token that represents ethereum) on the Solana blockchain, most of which the attacker then moved to the ethereum blockchain.

Unfortunately for Wormhole, all of that exploit-created wETH had to steal value from somewhere, and it came from Wormhole’s store of ethereum that lets it back all the wETH on its network.

With those funds missing, Wormhole was unable to say that its network was able to back transactions involving ethereum. It shut down to assess the problem, and with no recourse to recover its stolen funds Wormhole took to actually pleading with the attacker to return the stolen ethereum in exchange for a $10 million bug bounty.

The attacker has yet to accept the offer, and Wormhole was only able to restore its missing crypto thanks to the generosity of another crypto investment organization called Jump Trading, which said of its charitable giving that “we replaced 120k ETH to make community members whole and support Wormhole now as it continues to develop.”

A lesson for everyone: Validate your input

Setting aside the lost funds, charitable giving and overall catastrophe (in a long run of crypto catastrophes) that is the Wormhole hack; ignoring the complexity that is blockchains, to say nothing of cross-blockchain technology; and setting aside the unstable value and environmental impact of crypto, there’s a lesson to be learned from this attack that has, unfortunately, yet to be taken to heart: Validate your input.

According to security researchers who quickly took to Twitter with their findings, the exploit that allowed the attacker to pull 120,000 ETH out of the … ether was because Wormhole wasn’t properly validating what it calls “guardian accounts,” which are considered more secure than regular user accounts.

Using a series of blockchain transactions to insert fake credentials, the attacker was able to fool Wormhole into pulling sysvar instructions from fake ones they had created during Wormhole’s signature verification process. In short, the attacker exploited the fact that Wormhole didn’t properly validate the accounts, giving the attacker the chance to insert their own fake commands that made it appear as if they had the authority to mint ethereum.



https://www.techrepublic.com/article/wh ... hain-hack/

[Gregg]

Give us back our $324 million in a transaction that might enable law enforcement (quit laughing) to track you, and we'll give you $10.

How'd that work out for them?

[keith]

And what use is the [strike]stolen[/strike] counterfeit Ethereum?

Is it entirely indistinguishable from 'real' ethereum? Is its origin not embedded in its blockchain log?

[Estiveo]

Magic beans, man, it's all just magic beans.

[RTH10260]

And what use is the [strike]stolen[/strike] counterfeit Ethereum?

Is it entirely indistinguishable from 'real' ethereum? Is its origin not embedded in its blockchain log?

The etherium is not counterfit. The hacker generated intermediate special (local) wrapped ethereum (wETH) coins within the exchange, these were correctly generated cause the hacker knew how to produce them (as if you were able to get the original punching dies or printing plates from the Federal Reserve). This exchange has a mechanism to release real etherium from the exchange owned wallet back into someone elses wallet when offfered these wETH coins internally. Blockchain transactions cannot be reversed, only be paid back volountary by any new owner. As ownership is anonymous there is no way to force or enforce a reverse transaction

[keith]

And what use is the [strike]stolen[/strike] counterfeit Ethereum?

Is it entirely indistinguishable from 'real' ethereum? Is its origin not embedded in its blockchain log?

The etherium is not counterfit. The hacker generated intermediate special (local) wrapped ethereum (wETH) coins within the exchange, these were correctly generated cause the hacker knew how to produce them (as if you were able to get the original punching dies or printing plates from the Federal Reserve). This exchange has a mechanism to release real etherium from the exchange owned wallet back into someone elses wallet when offfered these wETH coins internally. Blockchain transactions cannot be reversed, only be paid back volountary by any new owner. As ownership is anonymous there is no way to force or enforce a reverse transaction

OK, I get it. The wETH are like a bank check (or cheque depending on your language preference). They counterfeited a bank cheque which was honored with insufficient validation of genuineness.

Your analogy of punching dies or printing plates fails, however. If you use the actual dies to make coins or plates to print money on 'official' paper stock outside of the authorized mint workflow you are making counterfeit money.

[Editor Korir]

Magic beans, man, it's all just magic beans.

Back in the end of 2016, I decided to take the Crypto plunge bought 50 shares of Ethereum at just over $8 a share, waited over 12 months (for long term cap gains) and sold at just over $750 a share for a profit of about $37,000 pre tax. And I have never, not once, been tempted to try investing in crypto again. I was extraordinarily lucky and realized it. I don’t trust crypto, don’t trust Tesla either. I would urge everyone to not invest more than you can lose. I could afford to lose $400 back in December 16, but I’m not trying that again,

[Fortinbras]

I am unclear on the details of Bitcoin, but it sounds too much like a warehouse bank to me.
A warehouse bank is, in essence, sending real money to someone who will keep it secret and presumably safe, and usually getting a receipt for the deposit. When the depositor wants some of his money back, the warebouse banker will send it to him or a designated recipient (usually in the form of a money order) and take a service fee out of the remaining deposit. The point of this is to conceal money from the IRS, ex-wives, litigants, and other creditors. This is very illegal.

The problem is with the reliability of the warehouse banker. The National Barter Assn was running a warehouse bank about 40 years ago when the banker very inconsiderately died - supposedly taking with him the secret of where the cash was and who it belonged to; his family alleged they did not know how to access the money. But the Postal Inspectors and the IRS kept track of who was sending letters to the defunct banker.

About two years ago a crypto-currency operation, very much a warehouse bank, similarly had its banker/admin die without (allegedly) talling anyone how to access the millions of dollars accumulated or who owned how much. Another crypto-currency bank was plundered by hackers who managed to break through its security.

[Gregg]

Money of the future.

[RTH10260]

Money of the future.

How can it be of the future when the Star War heroes did not use it

[Gregg]

Money of the future.

How can it be of the future when the Star War heroes did not use it

Because Star Wars is set in the past, and in Star Wars, we are just a dream Han Solo is having while frozen in carbonite on Tatooine.

[Gregg]

And damn, half the reason to bother is that its totally untraceable.


Well, except by the FBI. But hey, sometimes you need to hide your money laundering from your mother...

Wild Hipster Couple Accused in $4.5 Billion Crypto Crime

https://www.thedailybeast.com/heather-m ... ref=author

[RTH10260]

‘Sexy horror comedy’: Bitcoin laundering suspect is also ‘raunchy rapper’ Razzlekhan
Heather Morgan, arrested on suspicion of laundering cryptocurrency worth billions, has a second life as performer with ‘more pizzazz than Genghis Khan’

Martin Farrer and agencies
Thu 10 Feb 2022 05.29 GMT

A woman accused of laundering billions of dollars in stolen cryptocurrency alongside her husband may end up becoming better known for her excruciating music career as a self-styled “raunchy rapper” called Razzlekhan.

Heather Morgan was arrested along with her husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, in Manhattan on Tuesday over their alleged involvement in laundering bitcoin stolen in a 2016 hack of the virtual currency exchange Bitfinex. They are not accused of involvement in the hack itself but face charges of conspiring to commit money laundering as well as to defraud the United States.

However, the charges risk being overshadowed by Morgan’s portrayal of an apparently lavish lifestyle online as a “badass money maker” and performer. The 31-year-old has published an extensive catalogue of rap videos, DIY techniques and other lifestyle issues on social media platforms including Instagram and TikTok, calling herself the “Turkish Martha Stewart” or the “Waffle Queen of Korea”.

On her website, Morgan calls herself Razzlekhan or the “Versace Bedouin … the raunchy rapper with more pizzazz than Genghis Khan”.

“I’m a real risk taker/pirate riding the flood/I’m a badass money maker,” she raps in one video in which she refers to herself as the “Crocodile of Wall Street”.



https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... razzlekhan