According to a note from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) , an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) put forward by Blockforce Capital’s Reality Shares ETF Trusts has been withdrawn.
Reality Shares has requested its application to obtain the SEC’s approval of its ETF to be rescinded on the advice of the commission. A lawyer representing Reality Shares told Coindesk that the SEC thinks it’s “not appropriate to file a registered 40 Act fund with cryptocurrency exposure at this time.”
Though it seems the SEC also took issue with the fact that the proposal had been submitted under a regulatory act that would have led to automatic approval of the ETF within 75 days. The lawyer told Coindesk the SEC took particular issue with this strategy, which may go some way to explaining its removal.
For people hopeful of seeing a Bitcoin ETF on Wall St, the SEC should be making a decision on the VanEck ETF later this month. That is assuming it doesn’t delay its decision for a second time.
Moonday Mornings: Ethereum dev released on $1M bail over North Korea case
Hello Hard Forkers, welcome to another Moonday Morning where we wrap-up the weekend’s hot cryptocurrency and blockchain headlines.
Take a look.
1. Illegal Bitcoin mine in Ukraine rail building busted
A small but illegal Bitcoin mine has been located and dismantled in the Ukraine, according to a Facebook post published by an account which appears to belong to the Chairman of Ukraine’s state railway. Late last year, Yevhen Kravtsov said the farm was located in a railway building in Ternopil in the west of Ukraine.
The farm allegedly installed more than 100 cryptocurrency miners which were attached to the railway building’s power supply in such a way they bypassed the electricity meter. Kravtsov said the people running the mine had saved themselves more than $40,000 by doing so.
2. Ethereum dev released on $1M bond in North Korea case
Virgil Griffith, the Ethereum developer that allegedly travelled to North Korea to give a talk on how cryptocurrency could be used to evade sanctions, has been released on a $1 million bond , AP reports . The bail has been granted despite prosecutors’ fears that Griffith may flee the country before his trial
The news comes shortly after Griffith was formally indicted by US authorities late last week. The developer was placed on house arrest, with an electronic tag, at his parent’s home.
3. Australia doesn’t see the point in Facebook’s Libra project
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is skeptical whether Libra will make inroads in the country at all, ZDNet writes . According to the report, the RBA believes it’s still unclear if there will be strong demand for stablecoins, and cryptocurrency-based products like Facebook’s Libra in Australia.
In a submission to the Select Committee on Financial Technology and Regulatory Technology the RBA said: “Australia is already well served by a range of low-cost and efficient real-time payment methods, such as the New Payments Platform, that utilize funds held in accounts at prudentially supervised financial institutions.”
4. Japan looking at strict rules for cryptocurrency leverage trading
The Japanese Financial Service Agency is reportedly planning to introduce a rule that limits the amount of leverage an investor can use in cryptocurrency margin trading, English-speaking outlet The Japan News reports .
The new rule would see leverage limited to twice the deposits of traders . The industry currently has a self-imposed cap of four times; the new law would cut potential leverage in half. According to sources familiar with the matter, the new rule looks set to come into force in the springtime.
And finally…
5. SIM-swap victim buys Twitter ads to smack talk Bittrex
Gregg Bennett, the man who allegedly lost $1 million worth of Bitcoin in a SIM-swap attack, has taken out Twitter adverts attacking cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex, the Seattle Times reports . The ads spread Bennett’s claims that Bittrex is an “unsafe exchange.” He also maintains a website that documents his case against the exchange.
Bennett fell victim to the SIM-swap attack last year. He claims Bittrex violated or ignored its own security standards and industry-standard practices, which allowed hackers to steal 100 Bitcoin from him. Bittrex has said it’s not at fault and asked for the case to be dismissed.
There you have it, now go get on with your week.
This AI-powered bot is learning how to tweet like Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin
There’s a new form of artificial intelligence that mimics Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin w ith alarming accuracy.
Vitalik Boterin is a bot powered by machine learning (ML). It regularly tweets unique nuggets of wisdom that read eerily similar to the real deal, like this one.
Unlike the organic version, Boterin doesn’t need to eat and sleep, so it can drop knowledge round-the-clock.
Here’s another recently shared by the real Buterin (which should be against the laws of Twitter-physics. Apparently, it isn’t.)
Boterin is fed by a steady diet of Buterin’s tweets, penned articles, and Reddit posts (the latter a suggestion from Buterin himself.)
Its creator David Moskowitz told Hard Fork he felt inspired to start working with ML by participating in a local developers bootcamp geared towards artificial intelligence.
After discovering other keen devs had already created ML-powered Twitter bots for President Trump, Moskowitz wanted to build something similar for the cryptocurrency space.
“[Buterin] is a prolific writer and tweeter, so there would be a lot of data from which to build the model from,” he said. “I figured he would also get a kick out of it since he has a good sense of humor, doesn’t take himself too seriously, and would also appreciate the technological aspect of it.”
The technology powering Boterin is open source. Moskowitz uses a limited version of the GPT-2 deep-learning neural net, a project deemed too dangerous to release by its creators OpenAI. They feared it could be used to manipulate social media and other online communication.
GPT-2 creates sentences by predicting words based on stuff pulled from the internet. OpenAI says it can generate “samples from a variety of prompts that feel close to human quality and show coherence over a page or more of text.”
For Boterin , Moskowitz must manage the tweets, but doesn’t make edits beyond fixing the odd misplaced capital letter.
“The text outputted still requires curation, with about 1 percent usable for tweets. Being a fanboy, I have a pretty good idea of the types of things Vitalik might post, so I’m able to pick out good content,” he said.
(An example of a cut Boterin tweet referenced another prominent Ethereum developer, Vlad Zamfir. It read: “Vlad Zamfir on bitcoin: ‘i actually believe in astrology.’)
So far, Moskowitz has been committed to retraining Boterin with new models released by OpenAI, but it’s still learning.
“A big challenge with ML is getting enough good data,” he said. “I am currently cleaning up the full tweet and Reddit databases, and am hopeful that this will give more consistently high quality tweets and less curation.”
Now, if we can just get the two to communicate for a while, who knows what secrets we might unlock (the identity of The DAO hackers , perhaps?).
