The man who stole all the NFTs plus a crowdsourced bid to buy the constitution falls just short

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The art of the steal

Last week, every NFT available on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, totalling nearly twenty terabytes of data, was made available on a site called the NFT Bay in an act of artisitic/educational defiance pulled off by Australian software and dev ops engineer Geoffrey Huntley.

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Like its namesake, the popular torrenting website The Pirate Bay, the site allowed visitors to search by a Top 100 list or filter out groups like the Bored Ape Yacht Club or Axie Infinity.

In an FAQ , Huntley said that his goal with the project was that people learn to understand what people are buying when purchasing NFT art right now is nothing more then directions on how to access or download a image. He went on: There is a gap of understanding between buyer and seller right now that is being used to exploit people. The image is typically not stored on the blockchain and the majority of images Ive seen are hosted on web2.0 storage which is likely to end up as 404 meaning the NFT has even less value.

He first came up with the idea after talking with English programmer Stephen Diehl, and says the whole thing took him about three days and was easier than riding a unicycle.

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For anyone worried Huntley might right-click and hit save on their very own non-fungible token, he says the educational art project was a one-time deal, and that he would soon be uploading the entire thing to the Internet Archive.

DAOs pursuit of the constitution ends in unhappiness

For a brief moment in time, there was a chance that a group of crypto investors would obtain their very own and very real copy of the U.S. Constitution, which they planned to turn into an NFT. Those dreams were dashed against the blockchain when the group, ConstitutionDAO, lost a bid at Sothebys to Citadel CEO Ken Griffin. However, before that loss they managed to crowdsource around US$47 million in Ether.

Over 17,000 donors put in a median investment of US$206. So the question remains, what will happen to all that money? Well, ConstitutionDAO had created governance tokens called $PEOPLE, to be obtained at a rate of 1 million $PEOPLE tokens per 1 ETH donated done through crowdsourcing platform Juicebox. Investors would have used the token to vote on what to do with whatever assets they collected.

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On Saturday, the DAO announced it would be launching another governance token, We The People (WTP), which investors can trade in for the proportional value of the previous token. This caused $PEOPLEs value to plunge. But since the group was unable to obtain the constitution, neither token holds any power. None of that mattered anyway, as within 24 hours the group announced theyd be scrapping plans for WTP. In turn, $PEOPLEs value rose once more, leaving several Discord chatrooms full of confused and angry investors.

Investors two choices as of now are to continue going along with a group that failed its stated purpose, or to lose most of their money on gas fees for a refund. The total cost in gas fees for donating to the project neared US$1 million. DAO governance tokens as a whole are a US$40 billion market.

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Binance looking for big ticket investment

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao told the Financial Times in an interview Tuesday that the exchange is in talks with sovereign wealth funds about possibly taking a stake in the company. He declined to reveal exactly which funds theyve been chatting with, but did say the ticket size involved will not be small it wont be a short process.

The aim for Zhao is to improve perceptions and relationships with governments and regulators, who havent exactly been happy with Binance over the past year. Currently, Binances Singapore arm is backed by Vertex Ventures, the venture capital wing of Singapores sovereign wealth fund, Temasek.

Zhao also spoke at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum last week were he revealed Binance was recording daily transaction volumes of US$170 billion, a far cry from US$10 to US$30 billion two years prior.

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Also in line with appeasing regulators is picking a global headquarters. On November 19, Zhao said that Binance had picked a location. This week, Binance set up their fourth legal entity in Ireland, Binance Exchange (Ie). This follows three companies created in September: Binance (APAC) Holdings, Binance (Services) Holdings and Binance Technologies.

In October, Zhao told Reuters that the exchange is considering Ireland, so it would seem to be a done deal, if not for a November interview with French newspaper Les Echos where he called France a natural choice. Meanwhile, Dublin decided in October to increase taxes for large multinational firms to 15 per cent from 12.5 per cent.

Crypto gets big-name critics in Modi and Clinton

The Indian government is still seeking to ban most cryptocurrencies under a bill that will be submitted at Parliaments Winter Session which kicks off at the end of the month. According to a bulletin posted on Lok Sabha, the Indian Parliaments official website, The Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, 2021 would also help to create a central bank digital currency.

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The Bill also seeks to prohibit all private cryptocurrencies in India. However, it allows for certain exceptions to promote the underlying technology of cryptocurrency and its uses, the bulletin said.

The text of this new bill is unknown, and speculation remains on how much if at all the text has changed from a draft bill submitted in January. Certain government officials have indicated a softer stance on crypto. As well, on Nov. 17, the Reserve Bank of India mentioned the possibility of launching a pilot CBDC in the 2022 fiscal year.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a speech that, It is important that all democratic nations work together on this and ensure it does not end up in wrong hands, which can spoil our youth. His comments echo those of Hillary Clinton , who called on nations to keep a tab on their rise at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore.

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One more area that I hope nation-states start paying greater attention to is the rise of cryptocurrency because what looks like a very interesting and somewhat exotic effort to literally mine new coins in order to trade with them has the potential for undermining currencies, for undermining the role of the dollar as the reserve currency, for destabilizing nations, perhaps starting with small ones but going much larger, she said.

Shining a light on the cost of mining

On Tuesday, Galaxy Digital Research unveiled a report showing a model for calculating the cost of Bitcoin mining.

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We realized that when you look at mining public mining companies, theres really a few metrics that they all report, Amanda Fabiano, Galaxy Digitals head of mining told Forbes . Its the current hash rate, future expected capacity and then their cost to mine a coin. So we dug in a little bit and saw that everyone differs on how they calculate their cost per coin; its not very transparent.

Their method comes in three steps: first, calculating the marginal cost of production, meaning power and hosting costs as well as any capital expenditures for facilities or the machines themselves. Second is calculating the direct cost of production with a set depreciation schedule. That varies based on the company, but Galaxy chose a three-year period. Finally, the total cost of production is calculated, which includes any labour involved.

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The model isnt infallible, as it doesnt include factors like revenue generated from price appreciation or future mining capacity. But tracking these metrics at all is important for a number of reasons, from the environmental to the economic.

My expectation is that vertically integrated companies cost to mine a coin will stay consistent or decrease over time, said Fabiano. If were able to start tracking these metrics now, well be able to see the impact of owning your own infrastructure on electricity costs.

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