Last week’s biggest crypto news with a special bonus deal inside.
Crypto Espresso – Get Your Weekly Crypto News Fix Right Here
April 11, 2023
Crypto Espresso – Get Your Weekly Crypto News Fix Right Here
April 11, 2023
Top Crypto News Stories Last Week
Last week in the crypto world we saw Elon Musk undermining his defense in his Dogecoin manipulation lawsuit by manipulating the price of Dogecoin, a crypto scammer trying to pretend he had paid a $44 million penalty to the SEC, and the Bitcoin whitepaper that lurks in millions of Apple Macs.
Elon Musk Antics Cause DOGE to Pump and Dump
Elon Musk’s love of Dogecoin is well documented, as is his love of manipulating the price of the coin, and others. Musk figured out in 2021 that with a simple tweet he could pump or dump the price of Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and in fact any cryptocurrency in the space, and he used his powers to do just that during the 2020/21 bull market.
It seems that, after a gap of two years, the urge to mess with the market has gotten the better of him, as last week his antics over Dogecoin once again had a dramatic impact on the price.
Musk is at it again
Last week’s incident may have had its roots in the ongoing lawsuit filed against Musk in June 2022…over Dogecoin price manipulation. A group of DOGE buyers clubbed together to sue Musk for an astonishing $258 billion after accusing Musk, Tesla, and SpaceX of being “engaged in a crypto pyramid scheme by way of dogecoin cryptocurrency.”
These investors bought DOGE in the hopes that Musk would be good to his word and would put it at the center of the Musk universe, but nothing has since emerged in terms of large-scale adoption, and the group, having lost out financially, is blaming Musk.
Musk’s legal team filed a defense to this lawsuit on Friday, March 31, arguing that Musk’s tweets didn’t manipulate the market and that the plaintiffs were responsible for what they bought. True to form, Musk duly changed the Twitter logo to that of the Dogecoin icon the following Monday, sending the price shooting up 30%.
Many expected an announcement of some kind of use case for DOGE to follow, but nothing came, and when the Twitter CEO reinstated the blue bird on Thursday the price quickly dumped back to just 6% higher than where it had been on Sunday night – a nice, totally unmanipulated round trip.
Musk has since offered no explanation as to what the purpose of this experiment was, but if it was an attempt to cash out some DOGE bought back in December in order to break even, it was a success. However, in doing so he has also bolstered the case manipulation against him by a factor simply impossible to calculate.
Crypto Scammer Tries to Fake $44 Million Court Settlement
A scammer has tried to get out of a $22.6 million penalty levied by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by pretending that he had paid the judge with a $44 million surety bond when no such agreement had been reached.
Robert Dunlap, Executive Trustee of the Meta 1 project, has spent three years solidly ignoring the SEC’s attempts to bring him to book after he was adjudged to have pulled off a $13.4 million scam in Meta 1, with his first and to date only contribution coming earlier this month when he tried to claim that he had come to a private arrangement with the judge to pay off the penalty, with $21.4 million on top.
Meta 1 claimed to be a “coin for humanity” which was backed by billions of dollars in holdings of gold and fine art, when in fact it was an empty shell. Dunlap and his team promised returns of up to 225,000% for early investors, siphoning the $13.4 million that eventually came their way into various bank accounts belonging to the team and other associates.
This money went on paying off personal debts and buying luxury cars before the SEC filed an emergency halt in March 2020, since when the agency has been met with complete silence from Dunlap and his team while pushing ahead with its case.
Meta 1 and its directors were slapped with a $27 million penalty by the SEC last September, having failed to respond to any communications. The penalty was approved by Judge Mark Lane in February and sent for final approval to District Judge Robert Pitman.
In the interim, Dunlap last week filed a document purporting to be a ‘settlement of litigation and demand for closure’ of the case, which was supposedly an agreement between himself, on behalf of Meta 1, and Judge Lane, settling the case with a $44 million ‘bond package’.
The amount was peculiar, given that it was 63% higher than the penalty agreed upon for all parties involved, but it closely resembled the $44.44 at which the Meta 1 token was initially sold.
The SEC filed a response just a day later, stating that no one from Meta 1 had settled the matter and that no settlement discussions have ever occurred. It then eviscerated Dunlap’s filing, calling it a “nonsensical document” that followed Dunlap’s pattern of deception in his “illegal, on-going Ponzi scheme” conducted to try and prove to his followers that he had paid up.
The filing only increased the SEC’s desire to stop Dunlap, with Judge Pitman signing off the penalty the same day.
Bitcoin Whitepaper Hidden in Every MacOS Since 2018
One of the more surprising stories of the week involved the Bitcoin whitepaper and its five-year residence inside every MacOS installed in the past five years.
Tech blogger Andy Baio discovered a PDF of the 2008 whitepaper embedded within the files of his operating system while trying to fix his printer, and subsequently discovered that it is present in every Mac using an operating system past 2018.
The news was met with shock and no little confusion by the Bitcoin world, although the news has repercussions for one man in particular – Craig Wright.
Baio found the Bitcoin whitepaper PDF masquerading under the filename ‘simpledoc’ hidden inside the MacOS filesystem, and his investigations revealed multiple Macs with recent OS’s also had the same document.
This led him to surmise that someone at Apple hid the whitepaper in the operating system in time for the 2018 Mojave release and it has never been discovered. In fact, as he was soon informed, the issue of its inclusion was raised in 2020 with Apple but nothing was ever done.
The fact that the file was named in order to hide it from simple discovery means it’s likely that a Bitcoin-loving engineer slipped the PDF in undetected and has been waiting for this moment ever since as a subtle way of promoting the cryptocurrency. Now that the issue has been flagged on a wider scale, it will almost certainly be removed from future operating systems.
The whitepaper is also embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain, which is a much more reasonable location for it to be planted, but this fact has led to a lawsuit from would-be Bitcoin creator Craig Wright, which has a knock-on effect with the Apple discovery.
Wright has sued 26 entities and individuals, from individual Bitcoin developers to the exchange Coinbase, arguing that by encouraging and facilitating the downloading of Bitcoin nodes (which includes a copy of the full blockchain, and therefore the Bitcoin whitepaper), they are infringing his copyright as Satoshi Nakamoto, author of the Bitcoin whitepaper.
When it was discovered that Apple has also been distributing copies of the whitepaper, Wright was asked if it, too, was breaching his copyright. Wright replied on Twitter that, yes, Apple was indeed in breach of copyright law, setting up an intriguing test of his resolve – if he’s serious about his copyright being infringed and being Satoshi Nakamoto, then he will have no choice but to take on Apple in order to maintain his claim. Not doing so would weaken his position in the existing court case and would open him up to more accusations of being a fraud.
His financial backer Calvin Ayre has already funded dozens of lawsuits to date, but whether he would countenance once against the mighty Apple remains to be seen.
Trending Crypto News:
- Coinbase has backed an appeal to overturn the sanctioning of mixing service Tornado Cash, saying it falls under free speech.
- The head of New York State’s Department of Financial Services, Adrienne Harris, has labeled suggestions that Signature Bank was closed because of an anti-crypto bias “really ludicrous”.
- The Bank of England has said that Bitcoin and a British Central Bank Digital Currency can coexist and have differing roles.
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