#cryptocurrency

[ararebreedstory]

For the longest time, when people would say "Cryptocurrency," this is what I'd imagine.

[utopicwork]

Justice Department shuts down its cryptocurrency fraud unit

The order by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is in keeping with Trump's embrace of digital currencies.

04/08/25

"The Justice Department has shut down its unit that investigates cryptocurrency fraud “effective immediately,” even as the Trump administration ramps up its embrace of the emerging digital currency market, according to a memo by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche."

[probablyasocialecologist]

If (or when) Bitcoin is no longer a thing, ASICs [Application-specific integrated circuits] cannot be put to work to find cures for cancer or calculate future weather conditions on Mars. ASICs can only mine Bitcoin. When they’re burned out, usually after 18 months or so, they’re scrapped. For every 100 ASIC units coming off the factory conveyor belt today, only three will go on to guess the number correctly. Retired ASICs create around 37,000 tonnes of burned-out electronic waste every year; more than the Netherlands produces. For every one transaction entered on the Bitcoin blockchain today, the equivalent of two iPhones worth of e-waste was produced. And most of this burned-out kit is being shipped illegally to its final resting place in South Asia or Africa. The waste machines are often contaminated with so-called forever chemicals such as polyfluoroalkyl substances. Their use as a non-conductive coolant fluid is popular among Bitcoin miners. When improperly disposed of though, cancer rates and thyroid disease rocket. The chemicals’ persistence also causes environmental problems – forever.

Peter Howson, Let Them Eat Crypto: The Blockchain Scam That's Ruining the World

[bitchesgetriches]

Inside the 'Nightmare' Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town

A Bitcoin mine moved to a small town in Texas. One by one, the residents fell ill.

Can we be done with cryptocurrency now? Please?

We've been on this train for a while now:

Investing in Cryptocurrency is Bad and Stupid 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How my DRM-free principles left me owning the rights to a German audiobook

Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.

Long story short: thanks to a series of misunderstandings, I had to shell out more than ten thousand euros to prevent a German audiobook of my work from being released with DRM and now I need your help (assuming you speak German) to get the book into readers' ears!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-auf-deutsche-drm-freie

For more than a quarter-century, I've had an iron-clad policy of not releasing my work with "digital rights management," this being a kind of encryption that keeps my readers from reading the books they've bought in the apps of their choice.

There's two reasons for this: the first is, it's just grossly unfair. If you buy one of my print books, you can shelve it on any bookcase and read it sitting in any chair, under any company's lightbulb. It's stupid and offensive for a company like Amazon/Audible to declare that you can only read the ebooks and audiobooks you buy using the apps they approve.

But the second reason is more insidious and subtle. By retaining control over the apps that you must use to read or listen to your books, companies like Amazon are able to lock you into their platform. That means they can change the deal even after you've made your purchase (for example, Amazon has been caught deleting ebooks from people's Kindle apps and readers and Audible has experimented with inserting ads into your audiobooks after you buy them).

This lock-in isn't limited to readers, either. Once Amazon has all my readers locked in, the company acquires control over me, the writer. After all, if my readers can't switch from Amazon to another bookseller, then I can't switch from Amazon to another bookseller, because that would mean asking my readers to start over buying all their books again.

Amazon has a long history of squeezing its sellers – including writers and publishers – once it has them locked in. Today, 45-51% of every Amazon Marketplace purchase from an independent seller is skimmed off by Amazon in junk fees. The company makes $58 billion/year charging vendors for search placement (rather than putting the best match for shoppers' searches at the top of the result). And they stole at least $100m from Audible audiobook authors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

In 1998, the US passed a law (Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) that makes tampering with DRM a felony with a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine (for a first offense). In the years since, the US Trade Representative bullied every US trading partner into adopting this law. The EU did so in 2001, with Article 6 of the Copyright Directive.

This means that it's literally a crime for me, the author of a book, who holds the copyright to the work, to authorize you, a reader who bought the ebook or audiobook on Amazon, to convert the digital file so that it works with apps that compete with Amazon's.

So that's why I don't allow my work to be sold with DRM.

Everyone I do business with knows this – my publishers, my agents, etc – and over the past quarter century and more than 30 books, all of these people have bent over backwards to accommodate this policy of mine, even when it meant changing the workflow they used for thousands of books just to make an exception for me. I'm incredibly grateful for this.

But eventually, someone was bound to slip up, and that's how I ended up owning the German audiobook for my novel Red Team Blues.

After Red Team Blues was published in English in 2022 and became a national bestseller, many foreign publishers snapped up the translation rights. Among them was Heyne, my German publisher, who commissioned a fantastic translation by Jürgen Langowski that has sold briskly in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Heyne also commissioned an audiobook, beautifully read by a beloved German audiobook narrator, Uve Teschner.

But somewhere in there, everyone forgot that this audiobook could only be sold without DRM. And since Audible, Apple Books and Audiobooks.com refuse to carry DRM-free books, that meant that they would not be able to sell the books in the places where 90+% of readers look for them.

No one is to blame here. It's just an oversight. But it left us all in the awkward position of my publisher having spent more than EUR10,000 on an audiobook that they would never be able to recoup on. Both my publisher and my agent offered to eat these costs, but I felt bad about this, given the great lengths both had gone to over the years to help me live my principles through my books.

Besides: I have this platform of mine, the newsletters and lists of people who've bought audiobooks from me before and the people who've backed the Kickstarters for my previous English works, and I decided I would buy the audiobook rights from my German publisher and try to make the money back by selling directly to my German fans.

Today, I've launched a Kickstarter campaign to sell the DRM-free German audiobook. I'm also selling the DRM-free ebook, and the German paperback, which will be fulfilled by my pals at Berlin's excellent sf/f bookstore Otherland (due to the Trump tariff nonsense, these can only be shipped in the EU, UK, and Switzerland):

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-auf-deutsche-drm-freie

There's something for English-speaking readers, too: discounted editions of the English-language ebook and audiobook (read by Wil Wheaton), available in bundles with the German titles, or on their own. Europeans can also order the print edition of the book (again, fulfilled by Otherland in Berlin).

Now, I don't actually speak German. I grew up speaking Yiddish, much of which I've forgotten, which means that I can kind of grunt out ungrammatical German-adjacent phrases (the Otherland folks generously translated my Kickstarter page into German). That means that I have extremely limited ability to promote this Kickstarter to German-speaking audiences. I'm really relying on my readers here: if you are a German-speaker and/or have German-speaking friends, please let them know about this!

When you do, your pals are going to ask you what the book is about. Red Team Blues tells the story of the last case of Martin Hench, a 67 year old high-tech forensic accountant who's spent 40 years in Silicon Valley, busting the weirdest financial scams that three generations of tech bros cooked up. For this final job, Marty's been called out of retirement to resolve that scammiest of all tech-bro schemes, a cryptocurrency heist.

Marty's dear old pal Danny Lazer has built a new – and wildly successful – kind of blockchain, built on the security chips in mobile devices, called Trustlesscoin. Lazer is a cypherpunk legend, but that's not why Trustlesscoin went from zero to more than a billion in capitalization in a few short months: all that money poured in because some of the world's most ruthless criminals came to appreciate how Danny's cryptocurrency could facilitate money-laundering.

That would be bad enough, but Danny is exactly the kind of very smart guy who is more than capable of outsmarting himself. That's how he came to build a cryptographic back-door into Trustlesscoin, a secret key that allows the bearer to rewrite the supposedly immutable transactions in the network, which is to say, to steal all the money.

That's where Marty Hench comes in: Danny summons Marty to his home in Palo Alto because someone has stolen the physical token that this billion-dollar key lives on, and if someone doesn't get it back soon, it's only a matter of time until a billion dollars goes missing, and then the kind of people who resolve their monetary disputes with bone-saws and red-hot pokers will come looking for Danny.

That's where the story starts – but it turns out that recovering Danny's missing keys are the easy part. The hard part comes next, when Marty finds himself in the crosshairs of the violent international crime syndicates that boosted the keys in the first place.

People really like this book. It's the kind of book you stay up all night reading (or, as Molly White from Web3 is Going Just Great put it, "don't start reading it at bedtime if you have to be awake for something the next morning"). If you find yourself craving morning Marty Hench in the morning, I've published two more bestsellers recounting his earlier adventures: The Bezzle and Picks and Shovels.

Check it out for yourself. Here's the first chapter of the German audiobook, read by Uve Teschner:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8e2or8ze_4

And here's the first chapter of the English audiobook, read by Wil Wheaton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb8yJeASgho

The campaign only runs for a brisk three weeks (I've got to get it all put away before I head out on tour with Enshittification in October), so act fast:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-auf-deutsche-drm-freie

And please, tell your German-speaking friends!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/21/martin-mensch/#horbuch

[gwydionmisha]

White House Reveals How Trump Could Buy More Bitcoin—Priming A Price Earthquake

A senior White House official has revealed how the U.S. could buy bitcoin...

The goal is to drain the treasury of valuable assets to give Trump and a handful of his mega-donors by buying up their scam bitcoin. This will be a massive transfer of taxpayer money directly into the pockets of billionaires.

This is NOT a coincidence:

Trump family crypto venture to launch a stablecoin

The move comes as the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are working to enact regulatory changes that could benefit the cryp

Now is a great time to tell your Senator's to oppose Cynthia Lummis' Crypto bill.

If you can't safely contact them in person, here are some other options:

Five Calls to your critters: https://5calls.org/

Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resist.bot/

[thedaddycomplex]

The fact that Donald Trump wants his name on printed U.S. paper currency should strike fear in the hearts of everyone who bought his dip-shit cryptocurrency.