All posts tagged: blockchain

Pump.Fun’s Bounties Platform Is a Black Hole of Circular Grifting

Pump.Fun’s Bounties Platform Is a Black Hole of Circular Grifting

Published by skeptic

Would you run into a crowded university lecture hall, fart into a megaphone, and bellow “fartcoin” at the top of your lungs? If so—and should you have the means to document this stunt on video, preferably capturing the audience’s reaction—you may claim a reward of approximately $1,000. The money, of course, will be dispensed in fartcoin, a meme cryptocurrency trading at a little over 10 cents at time of publication, with a total market capitalization hovering around $130 million. Such is the promise of Pump.Fun GO, a new feature on Pump.Fun, one of the fastest-growing crypto businesses of the past few years. It supposedly allows users to “pay anyone to do anything.” Crypto bounties are put up by individuals—or pooled from multiple wallets—and held in escrow by Pump.Fun until a countdown clock runs out. Finishing a task is supposed to net you the prize payout; creators get a refund if nobody completes the mission. Pump.Fun, whose legal department did not return a request for comment, has said without clarifying its process that it moderates and …

How the evolution of blockchain is changing our ideas about trust

How the evolution of blockchain is changing our ideas about trust

Published by skeptic

In the shadow of the 2008 global financial crisis, trust in the financial system was at a historic low. Banks had failed, markets had collapsed, and confidence in central institutions had been deeply shaken. It was in this moment of uncertainty that an anonymous figure, Satoshi Nakamoto, published the Bitcoin white paper – a nine-page document that quietly introduced a radical new idea: a financial system that would not rely on trust in institutions at all. Rather than banks or governments, transactions would be verified by a shared digital network run collectively by its users – a system that became known as blockchain. But blockchain was never just about technology – it was about rethinking mechanisms of trust, so it could be engineered rather than delegated. Nakamoto’s vision was made possible through a consensus mechanism known as “proof of work” (PoW), which required participants to solve complex computational problems to validate transactions. The system was intentionally costly to operate. That cost was precisely what made it secure: changing the shared record of transactions would require …

Ben McKenzie Says Crypto Has a Secret Ingredient: Male Loneliness

Ben McKenzie Says Crypto Has a Secret Ingredient: Male Loneliness

Published by skeptic

Ben McKenzie had a question: “When did WIRED die?” Specifically, the actor-director wanted to know when did WIRED “‘DIE,’ all caps.” McKenzie wasn’t asking for himself; he was engaging in the time-honored celebrity tradition of reading mean tweets. Although, in this case, the object wasn’t himself so much as the publication hosting the event. McKenzie, who famously played Ryan on The O.C. before becoming a leading voice of crypto skepticism, was sharing the stage with WIRED senior correspondent Andy Greenberg for the first of what will hopefully be a series of smaller events that we are calling WIRED@Night. On April 16, about 100 people gathered at event partner Ace Hotel Brooklyn to sip drinks from Aplos, Faccia Brutto, The Sorting Table, and Manojo and ponder the future of cryptocurrency. McKenzie, coauthor of Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, has a new independent documentary in theaters called Everyone Is Lying to You for Money. Greenberg, who often writes about crypto scams, talked to him about scenes from the book and movie, …

Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn Wants to Delete the Blockchain

Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn Wants to Delete the Blockchain

Published by skeptic

Luis von Ahn could have retired to a beach somewhere years ago. Best known as the CEO of the learning app Duolingo, von Ahn in the early 2000s invented the captcha, those infuriating little online tests that force people to prove they’re not robots. But after selling his creation to Google in 2009, von Ahn didn’t waste any time launching his next venture: a company borne of his experience growing up in Guatemala, one that’s now among the most prominent education platforms in the world. Von Ahn’s mom, a doctor, spent all of her extra income to send him to private school, giving von Ahn opportunities that most of his peers never saw. It is, as he tells me in this week’s Big Interview, the reason he founded Duolingo more than a decade ago, with the goal of making high-quality education free and widely available. Today, the company reaches more than 130 million users worldwide, from immigrants learning new languages to celebrities like George Clooney. Inequality may have inspired von Ahn, but his company now …

Your Vape Wants to Know How Old You Are

Your Vape Wants to Know How Old You Are

Published by skeptic

Based on testing, the companies behind Ike Tech claim this process has a 100 percent success rate in age verification, more or less calling the tech infallible. “The FDA told us it’s the holy grail technology they were looking for,” Wang says. “That’s word-for-word what they said when we met with them.” The FDA did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. But Glantz is not at all convinced these protections will work. “The FDA is just showing their pro-industry bias,” Glantz says. “If I were running the FDA, I would prohibit these devices from having any Bluetooth capability at all, period. There are just too many ways it could go south. Every technical fix has a work-around.” The verification features would be tied to just one person, so when the vape is on, that person could share a puff with anyone nearby without verifying their age. At that point, Wang says it comes down to personal responsibility. “You really have to count on the responsibility of that person,” Wang says. “If it’s a 21-year-old …

Blockchain Slumlord Startup Implodes in Real Time

Blockchain Slumlord Startup Implodes in Real Time

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech If you’re not a renter in Detroit, you might not have heard about RealT, a startup that allows crypto bros to buy up blockchain-based ownership shares of rental properties in downtrodden cities. The scheme works on a fractional ownership model, in which each property is split into “tokens” to be organized like cryptocurrency on the blockchain. Last year, stories of the deplorable conditions of these rentals began circulating courtesy of Outlier Media, which found that leaky roofs, black mold, and busted air conditioners were common conditions at RealT properties. Now, the chickens seem to be coming home to roost. According to new reporting by Outlier, the Florida-based RealT has stopped nearly all weekly payouts to token holders — the platform’s crypto investors — as its Michigan division, New Detroit, faces tax forfeiture of over 300 Detroit properties. That, it seems, is due to millions of dollars it owes the city in unpaid taxes, water fees, and over 1,000 …

The Download: A blockchain enigma, and the algorithms governing our lives

The Download: A blockchain enigma, and the algorithms governing our lives

Published by skeptic

Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen, an Australian man in his mid-30s, with a rural Catholic upbringing, is a founder of THORChain, a blockchain through which users can swap one cryptocurrency for another and earn fees from making those swaps. THORChain is permissionless, so anyone can use it without getting prior approval from a centralized authority. As a decentralized network, the blockchain is built and run by operators located across the globe. During its early days, Thorbjornsen himself hid behind the pseudonym “leena” and used an AI-generated female image as his avatar. But around March 2024, he revealed his true identity as the mind behind the blockchain. More or less. If there is a central question around THORChain, it is this: Exactly who is responsible for its operations? It matters because in January last year, its users lost more than $200 million worth of their cryptocurrency in US dollars after THORChain transactions and accounts were frozen by a singular admin override, which users believed was not supposed to be possible given the decentralized structure. Thorbjornsen insists THORChain is helping …

Crypto-Funded Human Trafficking Is Exploding

Crypto-Funded Human Trafficking Is Exploding

Published by skeptic

Cryptocurrency’s frictionless, transnational, low-regulation transactions have long promised the ability to pay anyone in the world for anything. More than ever before, that anything includes human beings: victims of human trafficking forced into scam compounds and the sex trade on an industrial scale, bought and sold in crypto deals carried out with impunity, often in full public view. In new research published today, crypto-tracing firm Chainalysis found that crypto-funded transactions for human trafficking—largely forced laborers trapped in compounds across Southeast Asia and coerced into working as online scammers, as well as sex-trafficking prostitution rings—grew explosively in 2025. According to the firm’s analysis, based largely on tracing across blockchains the cryptocurrency those criminal operations use, researchers found that crypto transactions for human trafficking grew at least 85 percent year over year. The total amount of those transactions, Chainalysis says, is now at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually—though it declined to give an exact number for that sales total because it considered its measurements to be a conservative estimate that likely undercounts the …

The 5 worst ideas of the 21st century – and how they went wrong

The 5 worst ideas of the 21st century – and how they went wrong

Published by skeptic

These are our selections for the worst fumbles of the 21st century: ideas that were great, but got twisted or misused and didn’t deliver on their original promise. Bitcoin For years, it was a constant refrain in the tech world: “Put it on the blockchain.” Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that was invented in 2008 and went mainstream in the late 2010s, brought blockchain technology into the public eye, and it has exploded ever since. On the face of it, bitcoin seems like a good idea – it is a currency that isn’t overseen by any government or banking regulator, but rather by a public ledger: the blockchain, in which all transactions are recorded. Copies of the ledger are distributed on a network of computers around the world, kept secure by a combination of sophisticated cryptography and the fact that each copy of the ledger can be checked against all the others to ensure its accuracy. This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century. Browse the full line-up …

In Cryptoland, Memecoin Fever Gives Way to a Stablecoin Boom

In Cryptoland, Memecoin Fever Gives Way to a Stablecoin Boom

Published by skeptic

When US president Donald Trump launched his own meme cryptocurrency on January 17, days before his return to the White House, I was halfway up a Swiss alp, attending a crypto conference in the town of St. Moritz. Memecoins, which typically have no purpose beyond financial speculation, were having a moment. The previous year, millions of new memecoins had flooded the market; a few, like Fartcoin, had rocketed to billion-dollar valuations. Pump.Fun, a platform for launching and trading memecoins, had become one of the fastest-growing crypto launchpad businesses ever. Now, the soon-to-be president was getting in on the act. Over lunch on the second day of the conference, beneath the ornate stucco ceiling and golden chandeliers of the venue’s dining hall, I located a table designated for a conversation about memecoins. Whereas other tables were half full, the memecoin workshop was oversubscribed; latecomers pulled up chairs to create two full rows. The discussion was led by Nagendra Bharatula, founder of investment firm G-20 Group. Bharatula had recently coauthored a paper arguing that memecoins, despite their …