Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/09 – The First Country To Adopt Bitcoin As Legal Tender

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

El Salvador becomes the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. Biden reverses the TikTok and WeChat bans. Did one single customer cause that Fastly internet outage? Interesting raise for a faster Ethereum. Interesting new browser option. And maybe my favorite honey pot operation of all time. Sponsors: Masterworks.io promocode RIDE Cybereason.com Links: El Salvador becomes first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender after passing law (CNBC) Biden revokes and replaces Trump orders banning TikTok and WeChat (The Verge) Fastly claims single customer responsible for widespread internet outage (The Verge) Solana Labs raises $314 million in new funding led by A16z and Polychain Capital (The Block) Vivaldi 4.0 launches with built-in email and calendar clients, RSS reader (Tech Crunch) FBI and Australian police ran an encrypted chat platform to catch criminal gangs (The Record) Encrypted messaging app used by criminals was actually an FBI honeypot (Input) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Wednesday, June 9th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. El Salvador becomes the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. Biden reverses the TikTok and WeChat bans. Did one single customer cause that Fastly internet outage?

Interesting raise for a faster Ethereum, interesting new browser option, and maybe my favorite honeypot operation of all time. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The Central American nation of El Salvador has become the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender after lawmakers voted by a supermajority in favor of a new Bitcoin law, quoting CNBC. The purpose of this law is to regulate Bitcoin as unrestricted legal tender with liberating power, unlimited in any transaction, and to any title that public or private, natural, or legal persons require carrying out. The law reads. Prices can now be shown in Bitcoin. Tax contributions can be paid with the digital currency, and exchanges in Bitcoin will not be subject to capital gains tax. The exchange rate with the U.S. dollar, quote, will be freely established by the market, according to the proposed law. El Salvador's current official currency is the U.S. dollar. The law also says that the state will, quote,

promote the necessary training and mechanisms so that the population can access Bitcoin transactions, end quote. Approximately 70% of El Salvador does not have access to traditional financial services, according to the Bitcoin law. The cryptocurrency is seen as a way to increase financial inclusion. President Naib Buckele submitted the law to Congress after he announced last week that El Salvador struck a partnership with digital wallet company strike to build the country's modern financial infrastructure using Bitcoin technology, end quote. I read a profile of Buckelly recently, though I can't remember where. He's controversial as the leader of El Salvador for reasons that I won't get into now, but he's also young, and a lot of people attribute his rise to power in El Salvador to his mastery of social media.

So this sort of fits with type, right? Apparently, 23,000 people participated in Nick Carter's Twitter space last night discussing this with Buckelly. Also, quoting Balaji Shrinivasin, if I'm reading this right, all economic agents that are technologically capable, of receiving BTC as payment must accept it as payment, though instant conversion to USD is made available to anyone who doesn't want to take price risk, end quote. So interesting that we've reached a world where Bitcoin, far from being stateless and outside the law, is actually a mandated tool of at least one state. Also, if you want to maybe see the angle being played here, this is President Bucheli's tweet from June 6, clearly promoting El Salvador as a sort of crypto paradise. Quote, number one, great weather, world-class surfing, beaches, beachfront properties for sale.

Number two, one of the few countries in the world with no property tax. Number three, no capital gains tax for Bitcoin since it will be legal currency. Number four, immediate permanent residence for crypto entrepreneurs, end quote. See, positioning El Salvador as a. an international haven slash capital for crypto. Fascinating stuff. President Biden has signed an executive order revoking the Trump-era bans on TikTok and WeChat, and the president says his Commerce Secretary will investigate any risks to national security and privacy that foreign-owned apps present going forward, quoting the verge.

The order takes the place of a series of executive orders instituted by President Trump last year, which blocked apps like TikTok, WeChat, and AliPay from U.S. App Stores and took further measures to prevent them from operating in the U.S. The most extreme effects of those orders were forestalled by ongoing court challenges, but Wednesday's order will revoke the orders outright. Instead, Biden's order will institute a new framework for determining the national security risks of transactions that involve apps that are connected to the governments or militaries of foreign adversaries like China or collect sensitive data from U.S. consumers. Wednesday's order calls on the Commerce Department and other federal agencies to work together to craft

recommendations to protect against the collection, sale, and transfer of sensitive U.S. consumer data to foreign adversaries. The Commerce Department is expected to then make recommendations for future executive actions or legislation to address these concerns. Still, the order does not address actions or investigations taken by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Sipheus. Under the Trump administration, Sipheus set several deadlines for apps like TikTok to divest itself from its Chinese owner bite dance. For several months, Oracle was reportedly set to purchase TikTok in order to stave off the former administration's ban, although the deal never came to fruition. Quote, the Sifias action remains under active discussion by the U.S. government, a senior administration official said Wednesday, end quote. Small, somewhat amusing little side note here.

The main angle to have had a take on Fastly bringing down half the internet yesterday, was to point out how one company, and not even an especially big or well-known one, had such a position of power over a key choke point on the internet. But it turns out it was even weirder. It might have been just one client of Fastly that caused the blackout, quoting the verge. The company is now claiming the issue stemmed from a bug in one customer's configuration change. Quote, we experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer.

configuration change. Nick Rockwell, the company's senior vice president of engineering and infrastructure, wrote in a blog post last night. This outage was broad and severe and were truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them, end quote. Apparently, whatever the request was, it triggered a bug that had only been introduced to Fastly's system by an update in mid-May. Clearly, the fault lies with Fastly. If we're not catching that, it had borked its own code. But we have to ask, who did it? Valid, change or no, some specific unnamed customer triggered the bug. It's obvious why Fastly has not named the customer or the exact set of circumstances that created this undesirable outcome,

but we just want to know what does it feel like to take down half the internet by accident, end quote. Interesting raise here. Solana Labs wants to develop a blockchain that is faster and cheaper than Ethereum, and it has raised $314.15 million in a private token sale led by A16Z and Pollychain Capital, quoting the block. Launch last year, Solana is seen as a competitor to Ethereum, which today remains the largest blockchain platform for decentralized projects and applications. Solana, however, is faster and cheaper than Ethereum for executing transactions. Ethereum's current capacity is about 15 transactions per second. Salana's capacity, on the other hand, is around 50,000 transactions per second.

As for cost, Ethereum's average fee per transaction is about $6, while Salinas is around 0.0001 penny. Ethereum's fees are expected to drop when it moves to a proof-of-stake system. We are convinced that scalability and throughput in blockchain are now a solved problem, said Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Salana Labs. The next phase is onboarding a billion users, end quote. The number of projects building on Solana is increasing. There are already more than 90 projects in Solana's ecosystem, as the block research reported earlier this year.

Some of the most notable projects include serum, radium, Maps.Me, and Pyth Network. Still, Solana has a long way to go. The total value locked, or TVL, in Solana's Defi ecosystem, is currently way smaller than Ethereum's. The TVL of Ethereum projects is over $59 billion, whereas the TVL of Solana Projects is still less than $1 billion, end quote. Privacy Focus browser Vivaldi has launched the 4.0 version of its product with built-in email and calendar clients, an RSS reader, and a translator service hosted on the company's own servers, quoting TechCrunch. Vivaldi has always been one of the more interesting of the chromium-based browsers in no small part,

thanks to its emphasis on building tools for power users in a privacy-centric package, but also because of its pedigree, with Opera's outspoken former CEO, Jan von Tekner, as its co-founder and CEO. Today, the Vivaldi team is launching version 4.0 of its browser, and with it, it's introducing a slew of new features that, among other things, include the beta of new built-in email, calendar, and RSS clients, as well as the launch of Vivaldi Translate, a privacy-friendly translation service hosted on the company's own servers

and powered by Ling Vanek's. Vivaldi isn't new to email clients. The company has long offered a webmail service, for example, but building an offline email client into the browser, as well as a calendar client, almost feels like a return to the early days of browsers, like Netscape Navigator and Opera, when having these additional built-in features was almost standard.

Von Techner agrees that for a lot of browser vendors, doing away with these features was about steering users into certain directions, including their own webmail clients. A lot of the decisions around ViviVVVVVVVVenor agrees, A lot of the decisions around Vivaldi mail and calendar were driven by the team's own preferences. That means, for example, that the mail client does its best to do away with the usual folder structure of an outlook, for example, so that its filtering system allows a message to appear in multiple views. Since Vivaldi has always been about customization, you can choose between the traditional horizontal and wide views you're probably familiar with from other email clients. One nice feature here is that you can also control which messages you see through toggles that lets you exclude emails from mailing lists.

and custom folders from the default view, for example. I do like the fact that Vivaldi Mail also distinguishes between unseen and unread mail. As expected, you can use virtually any email provider here that supports the IMAP and pop protocols, but there's also built-in support for Gmail as well. The new built-in calendar, too, supports most of the standard calendar providers, including Google Calendar and ICloud, for example. One interesting design twist here is that the team decided to show all the data available for an event right in the calendar instead of just one or two lines per event. Von Teckner tells me this is very much

his preference. As for the RSS reader, which is still pretty basic and doesn't offer features like the ability to import and export lists of feeds yet. For example, the idea here is to help users leave their respective echo chambers, but also avoid news readers that are focused on news suggestions. The overall implementation here works quite well, with the feed reader providing virtually all of the features you would need from a local feed reader. Whenever the browse finds an RSS feed as you are surfing the web. It will also highlight that in the URL bar, so subscribing to new feeds is about as easy as it gets. You can also subscribe to individual YouTube feeds, because even though YouTube doesn't highlight this, every YouTube channel is

still available as a feed. The new translation feature is hosted on Vivaldi's own servers, so none of the data is shared with any third-party service. Vivaldi uses Link Vanix's technology for this, but hosts it on its own servers. The results are pretty good, and for the most part, level comparable to Google Translate, for example, with the occasional subtle differences between the two, where Google Translate would often offer the more precise translation, end quote. As I said, I've been very happy with Brave so far these two years or so, but this might be a new browser worth testing out. I love the idea of innovation in the dumb old web browser after all this time. Finally today, I love this story. In a huge sting operation, the FBI and Australian

and federal police ran an encrypted chat service called Anam for three plus years to intercept messages between criminals all around the globe, quoting the record. Named Operation Ironside, AFP, Trojan Shield, FBI Interpool. On Monday, law enforcement agencies from Australia, Europe, and the U.S. conducted house searches and arrested thousands of suspects across a wide spectrum of criminal groups from biker gangs in Australia to drug cartels across Asia and South America and weapons. and human traffickers in Europe. In a press conference today, Australian police said the sting operation got underway in 2018 after the FBI successfully seized encrypted chat platform phantom secure. Knowing that the criminal underworld would move to a new platform, U.S. and Australian

officials decided to run their own service on top of Anam, also styled as A&0, an encrypted chat platform that the FBI had secretly gained access to through an insider, end quote. more color on all of this from a piece in input magazine. Quote, it's a trap. Literally, more than 800 people around the world have been arrested in a sting operation after the suspected criminals were tricked into using a secure messaging app created by the FBI. Europol summarized the sting, known formally as Operation Ironside, saying those arrested use the messaging app to traffic cocaine, cannabis, and firearms.

Police seized 55 luxury vehicles and more than $48 million during the raids. The encrypted messaging app in question was called Anam and was installed on special smartphones that couldn't make calls or send emails. Anam purported to be end-to-end encrypted, meaning only the sender and receiver could view messages. In reality, every single message was passed to police who used them to make the arrests. The FBI launched the operation in 2019 in collaboration with the Australian Federal Police, creating the app and enlisting police forces in 20 countries to distribute the app through informants. The website for Anam required invite codes to access, a decent way for law enforcement to ensure an operation is limited to targets or suspected criminals. This isn't the first time that so-called secure messaging devices have led to the downfall of organized crime.

Last year, a similar 800 people across Europe were arrested after police managed to crack the encryption of EncroChat, a company that sold encrypted Android phones with special messaging software. Apparently, the app wasn't as secure as the company behind it claimed. Needless to say, if you're a criminal, it's not a good idea to trust just any app that claims to be secure and encrypted. Unless you're a cryptography expert, it's hard to really know how strong the encryption is or whether someone has built a back door, end quote. Yeah, what I wonder about this is, as smart as this operation was, as clever as it was, does this sort of thing have a limited shelf life? Like, the only reason this worked was because the criminals assumed that governments don't have the sophistication to create programs like this. that that has been disproven, you probably wouldn't be able to get the bad guys to be as

dumbly naive again, right? Still, cool, clever story. Tonight, 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific, a Twitter space. We're going to get into WWDC. So all of you Apple stands, all of you Apple developers come tell us what excited or disappointed you this week. Should be fun. Talk to you tomorrow.