Centralization Strikes Again - Dog Days Of Summer July & August Edition
Perhaps the biggest problem with mass surveillance is the knowledge of mass surveillance. Fear about it produces intense conformity, so people start censoring their own conversations and eventually they start censoring their own thoughts.” - Julian Assange, Reddit AMA
Hey friends, thanks for tuning in. We missed the July edition, so we are amalgamating the best (well, technically the worst) of both months into a “Dog Days Of Summer” Centralization Strikes Again extravaganza! May we find balance in the world between the forces of centralization and decentralization. Enjoy. - Tim
Timeline
Jul 1 - Voyager Digital, a crypto platform that had previously lent money to Three Arrows Capital, suspends trading, deposits, withdrawals, and loyalty awards amidst the cascading default meltdown. Source
Jul 2 - Over a billion Chinese citizens’ sensitive personal data is leaked from an Alibaba cloud server belonging to the Shanghai police. Source
Jul 6 - International hotel chain Marriott Hotels suffers a 20GB data breach leaking sensitive customer data including credit card details. Source
Jul 8 - Canada experiences widespread Rogers outage, knocking out Internet and cell phone service for millions. Source
Jul 8 - PlayStation Store removes purchased movies from its store, blocking users that have previously purchased it from accessing certain titles in Germany and Austria. Source
Jul 10 - Mass protests spark in rural China when four banks suspend withdrawals, leading to suspicions of a larger liquidity crisis and contagion risk from China’s slumbering real estate markets. Source
Jul 13 - Celsius Network initiates financial restructuring following its collapse. Source
Jul 14 - Chinese cloud word processing app WPS faces backlash over locking a user out from their content over sensitive content. Source
Jul 20 - In an eerie ode to Tienanmen Square, tanks roll onto the streets amidst the ongoing rural China protest over inability to withdraw from banks. Source (thanks to @0xAbe11)
Jul 20 - Minecraft developer Mojang releases official statement on banning the use of NFTs and blockchain technology in its game. Source
Jul 26 - South Carolina bill outlaws websites that provide instructions on how to get an abortion shortly after a ruling from the Supreme Court overturning the right to obtain one. Source
Jul 26 - Russia orders search engines to put a disclaimer on Wikipedia results it claims are ‘fakes’. Source
Jul 28 - Wikipedia locks its page on the term “recession” and prevents further editing. Source
Aug 4 - Reports surface that the Solana wallet drains are a result of unencrypted transmission of private wallet keys via logging and telemetry. Source
Aug 8 - TornadoCash is added to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons List (SDN) as part of wider sanctions. #CodeIsSpeech Source
Aug 8 - Circle freezes 75,000 USDC belonging to unsuspecting TornadoCash users. Source
Aug 8 - GitHub suspends TornadoCash developer Roman Semenov’s account. #CodeIsSpeech Source
the worst part about THIS is that it is ordinary users (not only in the US), who will be scared away from using Tornado Cash and similar (possibly new) protocols, while the crime will still find its way through more centralized analogs 😬Absolutely wild. The US Treasury just sanctioned a bunch of Ethereum addresses associated with Tornado Cash https://t.co/3jwowUktjealexmiller.eth @alexmillertechAug 9 - Uganda’s military demands citizen’s DNA for digital identity rollout. Source
Aug 9 - An investigative piece by Vice reveals how Facebook cooperated with authorities by giving over private messages and data of a teenager attempting an in-home abortion following the Supreme Court overruling. Source
Aug 9 - Crypto infra providers Infura and Alchemy blocks RPC requests to TornadoCash. Source
Aug 9 - GitHub changes its privacy policy to introduce more tracking for marketing purposes while simultaneously disregarding do-not-track requests. Source
Aug 10 - A report reveals that Instagram and Facebook can track anything you do on any website within their in-app browser. Source
Aug 10 - Email marketing service Mailchimp cracks down on crypto-related newsletters such as Decrypt & Messari by suspending their accounts, citing “Acceptable Use Policy”. Source
Aug 11 - A man holds 10 people hostage in a Beirut, Lebanon bank for withholding his deposits, which is needed for his father’s medical bills. Source
Aug 11 - DeFi platform Oasis block wallet addresses with previous associations to TornadoCash and deem them “at-risk”. Source
Aug 12 - The Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD) arrest TornadoCash developer Alexey Pertsev, with no charges given other than “suspected concealment of criminal financial flows” and “facilitating money laundering”. #CodeIsSpeech Source
Aug 12 - Additional businesses and protocols have gone beyond what sanctions law requires in order to signal compliance, such as OpenSea, dYdX, Discord, Aave, and Flashbots. Source
Aug 12 - RPC provider Pocket Network blocks addresses associated with TornadoCash. Source
Aug 12 - India freezes $46m worth of assets from crypto lender Vauld following its bankruptcy. Source
Aug 13 - US CDC appears to have deleted previous statements that “mRNA and spike proteins do not last long in the body” from their website. Source
Aug 16 - Trading on Bed, Bath, & Beyond is halted multiple times during trading hours for volatility. Source
Aug 17 - Ontario crypto exchanges imposes new limits on purchases following updates to regulations. Source
Aug 18 - CEX FTX freezes a user account that previously interacted with privacy protocol Aztec Network’s zkmoney, citing “high risk”. Source (thanks to @ethotim)
Aug 21 - A New York Times investigative piece reveals how a dad, who took photos of his toddler’s groin area for doctors to review in advance, was flagged by Google. It then marks the father as a criminal with reverberating effects. Source
Aug 24 - Streaming platform Plex imposes password resets on its users after hackers steal more than 15 million users’ data. Source
Op-Ed
If you are interested in contributing to this OpEd, please reach out to my contacts at the bottom. We’d love to hear from you!
The following series is a 3-part OpEd by ChainSafe’s Elizabeth Kukka on society’s increasing need for decentralization.
The views expressed are those of the author’s and may not reflect those of ChainSafe’s.
DecentralMania
Part 1 - Hope & Possibility
“Believe something and the Universe is on its way to being changed. Because you’ve changed, by believing. Once you’ve changed, other things start to follow. Isn’t that the way it works?” Diane Duane - So You Want to Be a Wizard
It was the year 2020, PayPal announced that it would begin to offer cryptocurrencies to its customers. The very next year, Bitcoin hit $1 trillion dollars in market capitalization. And in January 2022, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order on cryptocurrencies. It took about thirteen years to get here, but crypto has finally gone mainstream. Who would have guessed? And, what does this have to do with decentralization? Everything.
A social experiment was launched without a CEO or Central Authority, demonstrating how collective and directed change are possible through sheer belief, and participation of people. This has since evolved to include hundreds of different blockchains, thousands of cryptocurrencies, federal government participation, Fortune 500 adoption, Mom & Pop grocery shops, researchers, developers, and designers working toward the next iteration of the internet. The decentralized internet, also known as web3, is just one possibility.
Web3 is a continuum of the internet that we know today. It takes the core benefits of Web2 - connecting people, products, and information, from every corner of the globe - and adds important and overlooked layers like privacy, data ownership, incentives, and community directed governance, to create an internet that is co-owned and co-operated by its user base. The dominant model today is an internet owned by corporations whose sole purpose is to increase shareholder profits, capturing and maintaining the time and attention of billions of people, with little to no benefit to the user base, and maximizing value solely to shareholders.
This is a great opportunity, and a chance to re-design and build the internet in a more fair and equitable way. Starting with an assessment of what went wrong with Web2, and building from there.
Stay tuned for part 2 next month!
If you have any feedback, send them my way or reach out via Twitter or Telegram (@haochizzle).
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About ChainSafe
ChainSafe is a leading blockchain research and development firm specializing in infrastructure solutions for the decentralized web. Alongside client implementations for Ethereum, Polkadot, Filecoin, and Mina, we’re building a portfolio of web3 products — Files, Storage, web3.unity, and more. As part of our mission to build innovative products for users and better tooling for developers, ChainSafe embodies an open source and community-oriented ethos. To learn more, click here.