Bombshell Twitter Thread That Maps Out All of the Ethereum USDT / Tether

Looks like Bitfinex & Binance are sitting on at least 15B+ USDT between the two of them alone (at least according to the blockchain analysis).

https://twitter.com/librehash/status/1377752738113728512?s=20

Edit: Sorry I'm a fucking idiot and misspelled 'rampant' in that initial post ; don't discount the quality of information disseminated in that thread because of that though.

Been a while, but feeling like the old Cryptomedication again.

Should be fun to see what the responses are.

They'll probably ignore it - until the Tron blockchain analysis comes out & publicly publish all of the wallets that they own on Tron (you'd be surprised who owns what ; and also worried to know that >30B has been moved on to exchanges in the past 5-7 months).

This thread is not nearly as good as it could be: https://twitter.com/librehash/status/1377752738113728512?s=21

Ran into multiple errors on Twitter that forced me to essentially recreate the thread multiple times over. It appears that the pictures are published in the wrong slot on certain tweets (not even sure how the fuck that happens)

Apology From This Channel to You All

Regardless of the reason for the errors, you have my sincerest apology.

Clerical errors reflect a lack of discipline and laziness. And you all deserve a lot better than that.

I'm frustrated with myself because it is critical that you all receive this information in an intelligible manner.

I will make a concerted effort to make this up to everyone that is following this channel. You can bank on that.

IRS Bounty on Monero is Not Just For Tax Investigations

URL = https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/founder-international-cryptocurrency-companies-indicted-multi-million-dollar-securities

This screenshot is from the Department of Justice's website, where an unsealed federal indictment against a prolific scammer in the cryptocurrency space.

The highlighted sentence says, "This case was investigated by the FBI and IRS-CI."

To be clear, the entire case hinges on blockchain analysis conducted by these organizations.

Also, the main defendant here is a non-U.S. citizen; so doubtful that the IRS was assisting the FBI in hopes of extracting unpaid taxes

Why This is Being Stated

Monero is a cryptocurrency that a lot of people depend on to be as private and secure as it claims to be.

For those individuals, a failure in any of Monero's privacy / security assurances spells certain disaster.

If this is something that nobody cares about, then no harm, no foul.

But if there are people that care, then this is an issue.

Chainalysis and Integra Were Reported Winners of the IRS Bounty on Monero

You remember the bounty that was put out by the IRS a few months ago where they announced they were willing to shell out >$1 million to pay any entity on God's green earth with the ability to trace Monero transactions?

There was a taker. Chainalysis and Integra. They won the contract in October 2020.

https://news.bitcoin.com/chainalysis-and-integra-win-1-25-million-irs-contract-to-break-monero/

Monero Users Have a Finite Timeline

1. The IRS forwarded both entities (Chainalysis and Integra) $500k a piece to start working on an adequate solution to trace Monero addresses (rest due upon turning in a successful prototype)

2. A working submission is due in eight months ; that's June 2021, which is a whopping two months away from today.

3. "Testing and development will occur in the ensuing 120 days" (that means they'll be mastering this tool in the 120 days following the successful submission of a solution in June 2021)

This is not a vague whimsical idea by the government.

This is why I blew the fucking whistle on Monero and considered forking the project.

If the known issues are not fixed and/or brigaded against and not taken seriously, then Monero's privacy assurances will be compromised.

This isn't fear mongering or FUD, its just reality.

Why its Likely Chainalysis Will Be Successful

This is a little less intuitive than you may imagine - but I don't think Chainalysis will be successful because of their valuation, vast resources at hand, or "experience" / years spent researching & examining transactions + performing an analysis of them.

Chainalysis will be successful because Monero (Cryptonite) was built with a very heavy influence by Blockstream.

By that, I mean things like:

1. Stealth addresses

2. TXOs (as a concept)

3. Deriving subkeys from a "master address"

4. 'Confidential Transactions' (Gregory Maxwell's idea specifically)

Look at "Fluffypony"

Notice how all the "blockchain animals" are affiliated with Blockstream?

1. Chikun (Charlie Lee) - Former Coinbase employee, advocates for Lightning Network & Bitcoin solutions perhaps even more so than Litecoin itself, is invested directly into the Lightning Labs (where Elizabeth Stark works)whale. Also invested into Pixelmatic - another Blockstream construction

2. "Fluffypony" - going to get to this guy in just one second

3. "Excellion" - Samson Mow ; CTO of Blockstream for quite some time

4. "Whalepanda" - A major whale in the Bitfinex trading community (whalepool) ; here's a tweet that should provide pretty unequivocal proof of that - https://twitter.com/WhalePanda/status/1196807799205961728?s=20

Chainalysis is Owned by Digital Currency Group

You can corroborate that using information directly on their main website (dcg.co/portfolio).

As a major supporter of the Lightning Network as well as most (if not all) agendas that are pro-Bitcoin (or pretend to be), DCG has been a life blood for Blockstream (in more ways than one).

Thus, having individuals placed within Chainalysis that are extremely familiar with the Bitcoin ecosystem, its developers as well as the 'ins' and 'outs' of how it all works gives them a major advantage in dissecting Monero down to its roots.

Proving That Ethereum is Not Decentralized

This was done in a Twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/librehash/status/1378484286722994179?s=20

This thread is of noticeably higher quality than the ones that you read in the past.

The only issue here is that the thread is cut off prematurely due to (yet another) "error" by Twitter (extremely fucking annoying).

Additional information is being appended to the end of this thread as speak. No stone was left unturned here in this claim.

Any and all are invited to rebut the claims made within.

Extended the Thread to Expose Archivenode.io

They claim that they provide the general public with free access to an archive node at 'archivenode.io'

This is patently false. And since they received $35k in donations to provide such a service (yet are failing to do so), this is also a scam.

This was exposed here: https://twitter.com/librehash/status/1378483099571417092?s=20

Specifically, I applied for access back in November 2020. Over two months after submitting the initial application, I was informed that I had been "denied" for erroneous reasons (despite the fact that I provided a perfectly legitimate reason for why I sought access to such data).

When I responded (albeit aggressively), questioning their rationale, they dug their feet in on it and claimed that they only provided access to the node for those that "need it".

It was not explained why they felt that I was any "less needing" of access to the node than any other applicants.

I'm One of the Few That Had a Community-Based Rationale

I wanted to inspect the node to get a better idea of how it functions, what data is contained within it, and how effective something like this could be as an ad hoc replacement to Infura.io endpoints.

What nobler reason would one have to provide than that? All of this content and research curated by Librehash is being generated and disseminated for free (no cost to access ever).

So how is it they felt that this was such a lucrative and sustainable venture that I ought to be deprived of access to the archive node altogether?

And why promote this as something for the "general public" when it really isn't? (questioning whether they have at this point)

Breaking Down the Ethereum-Based Solution That I Gave to Hudson Jameson

You may think that this channel is only antagonistic to the efforts of the blockchain space, but this is far from true.

This channel is simply ran by someone that's passionate about seeing things get better.

Which is why I reached out directly to Hudson Jameson a week or so ago to pitch a potential solution that Ethereum should explore to lighten the load on its blockchain and ultimately reduce gas fees w/o having to strongarm the miners into accepting their proposed solution (which looks really bad from the standpoint of a project trying to market itself as open source & decentralized)

More details on this will be posted in @librechain

Tether Bombshell

I was digging through one of my older articles and noticed something interesting.

I wrote a story about the Tether chain swaps back in 2019. Specifically, I tracked one swap which was identified by Paolo Ardoino as a 'chain swap' of USDT from Ethereum to Tron.

While reading that story...I noticed that Tronscan used to have the names of the exchanges that owned certain addresses listed right there on their site.

Now they don't anymore.

https://twitter.com/librehash/status/1378597556234555395?s=20

You can't find this on the wayback machine, archive.is, or anywhere else.

What are the chances?

Here's a screenshot of the Tether rich list on Tronscan back in October 2019.

Notice the names of the exchanges that own certain addresses are listed right there in plain view.

This is what it looks like now.

Notice how the 'name tag' category is completely absent.

If I didn't know any better, I would say that they removed these names later so that no one would know which addresses belong to who

There are no valid links on the internet archive machine, archive.is, or any other archive-based site like that.

What a find. Gave me just enough information to ID every USDT address out there.

This should be the right mapping for the top Tron UDST addresses.

Enjoy

Diversity is Badly Needed in Blockchain

Its one of the major reasons for why blockchain hasn't "taken off" like that.

This idea has been promoted in this channel before and everytime it is, there's always backlash or anger because of it - and that's fine.

Blockchain would be 10x better if there were more women and other demographics involved.

And that doesn't mean targeting these groups to be your customers for a new start-up / blockchain project. That's not diversity.

That means approaching people as equals. As a potential CTO, co-developer, team member, research partner, etc.

An equal.

And if you are going to spread an idea to other cultures, do it in a way that's respectful to their dignity that acknowledges the fact they're human like you.

The most cringy thing you see in blockchain are those initiatives to "help out Africa" by 'banking the unbanked'.

The people in Africa are not idiots in huts. And they're not devoid of infrastructure either. Its condescending and exclusionary when approaching an entire culture with that attitude.

You don't know what someone knows or what they can until you sit down and speak. But mostly listen.

Blockchain Space Doesn't Listen Enough

Everybody is always in marketing mode. 24/7.

Yapping.

"This project does ___", "blockchain is a financial revolution that will...", "We're going to ...!"

This space could benefit a little bit from learning to shut the fuck up and listen to others.

Allow people to dislike Bitcoin. Its fine. They don't need to be attacked for it. Even if you think they're wrong.

Be open minded to the possibility that YOU could be wrong. Even in spite of all the research, fancy degrees, multiple times you read the whitepaper, etc., you may still be wrong.

And that's okay.

Listening would do this space good.

Exposing Monero For What it is

Full blown thread can be found here = https://twitter.com/librehash/status/1378920646625820674?s=20

This campaign isn't going to stop at this point because Riccardo Spagni is a bad actor in the blockchain space.

That thread above breaks down Monero to the minutiae to show mastery of the protocol's inner workings as well as the historical events that have occurred with Monero.

Then it extrapolates from there to show the double-spend vulnerability that Monero faced back in 2017 (and erroneously claimed that nobody had exploited despite providing no evidence for this claim)

Riccardo Spagni is an Idiot Pt. #232389

Check out this Reddit post by Riccardo Spagni.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/kfpw6y/you_should_read_the_annotated_version_of_the/ggccxsb/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Here he states:

" I found Surae on Reddit, in r/jobs or r/forhire or one of those subreddits. He was a mathematician but had no cryptocurrency experience at all. I offered him a job to annotate the whitepaper"

- Despite being the alleged "lead" that forked the protocol to begin with, you felt the need to hire someone else to annotate the whitepaper for you? The whitepaper is <20 pages, and we're just talking annotations here - not rewriting it. This should be a simple task for someone that's allegedly the lead developer of a protocol to follow through with.

- The people that he hired were individuals that had no knowledge of cryptocurrencies at all. Perhaps they knew math & cryptography, but a critical factor for success in building a well-developed cryptocurrency is...actually knowing something about cryptocurrencies.

- These people were hired off of r/jobs on Reddit. So, its clear that he was down to hire just about anyone on the internet to annotate th e whitepaper for him (*sigh*)

- Why was Riccardo paying someone to do this in the first place? Seems like Monero has been a financial pursuit since the beginning

Riccardo Spagni "stepped down" as the "lead developer" because he doesn't know shit about developing.

He doesn't understand Monero on a conceptual level.

He can't actually speak up and comment on how the protocol works in a substantive manner.

That's why there was a double-spend vulnerability detected in the protocol.

Bombshell announcement related to NFTs coming out soon.

This is not being stated to “hype” anyone up about it beforehand or anything like that.

I’m hoping to:

1. Protect the end user (you). I run this channel on a daily basis alongside a Discord, Twitter, blog, forums, non-profit & many other blockchain-related initiatives. I’ve been doing so for 5+ years, so if something confuses me, then I assume it’s gotta be confusing the hell out of a lot of other people too. That motivates me to get to the root of “what’s going on”, trim the marketing bullshit and give you all the raw.

2. Provide verifiable information & leads to the extent where you all can corroborate anything being said in here or come to your own conclusions about it. My primary motivation for doing this stems from my first experiences in crypto. Wasn’t sure who to trust, who know what they were talking about vs. who just wanted my money etc. ; it was hard as hell to compare X to Y, because there’s often no *objective* source of information for either one. All content related to X might day “Wow, X is this exciting new thing doing all of this! X has figured out blockchain”. But then Y’s content would say “Wow, Y this exciting new thing doing all of this! Y has figured out blockchain”.

3. Force the channel to be held to account for theories / ideas being espoused. I had to keep it real with myself at a certain point when entering crypto years ago. Did I care if so and so was legit as long as I still got my bag? But on the flip side, do I really want to be one of the ones that enables someone to do something I personally feel isn’t ethical? Are my morals worth $X?

Trust me when I say I get it. I know some people are completely aware of how shiesty certain things are and they just want to make their money.

They know some of these projects are “scam farms” & maybe they think they can get their $$ out before the potential rug pull.

Maybe they’re aware plenty of DeFi projects are pyramids wrapped within Ponzi schemes. Or that a project like Arweave could never work in practice. But they also couldn’t give a fuck less because they see said project has appreciated by +20% in a day or a week.

Librehash is designed to satiate this latter individual too. You don’t need to have a “holier than thou” and “only in it for the tech”. Be in it for whatever reason you want to be in it. Who am I or anyone else to sit here and impose mandatory values upon you?

Librehash is an honest attempt to try to provide an objective medium that can satiate a diverse array of motivations / needs for high-quality, objective information in the blockchain space.