Daily Tech News 30 January 2022

Top Story

• Questions and Answers will return next weekend.
  
  
  
• Investors in the DeFi protocol Wonderland are wondering if their money is safe after the co-founder of Wonderland was revealed to have been the co-founder of collapsed crypto exchange QuadrigaCX. (Motherboard)
  
  DeFi is decentralized finance - financial transactions that don't go through a bank or other centrally controlled choke point - or, it increasingly seems, pass even the most basic tests of fiscal sanity.
  
  QuadrigaCX made the news two years ago when its other co-founder, Gerald Cotten, suddenly died in rural India - of Crohn's disease, not something that commonly causes sudden death - leaving hundreds of millions in investor funds locked securely in a hardware wallet that no-one else had the keys to unlock.
  
  And if you buy that, I have a DeFi protocol to sell you.
  
  Most of the fuss that time focused on Cotten's sudden disappearance, assuming that he was responsible. The remaining founder, Michael Patryn, had his funds conveniently separate from that hardware wallet and didn't lose a dime.
  
  But who is Michael Patryn, and should his association in what can be charitably described as an unmitigated disaster be disqualifying for a brand new DeFi protocol?
  
  Continued on page A2.

Tech News

• Who is Michael Patryn?
  
  

  2/ 2018-2019 he was "Michael Patryn". Him and now missing/deceased co-founder Gerald Cotten started Quadrigacx, a Canadian crypto-exchange.
  
  They basically ran a ponzi, with on chain evidence showing that Cotten may have traded with user's funds.

  — MidasTheFool (@MidasTheFool) January 27, 2022

  
  

  4/ Mysteriously Cotten "died" on this trip to Crohn's. Many believe the death was faked with weird details around the issuance of his death certificate, wife's reaction, etc. Many don't buy that he died.

  — MidasTheFool (@MidasTheFool) January 27, 2022

  
  
  But one mistake, even a huge one like-
  
  

  8/ They called it https://t.co/hQtF6x1wyy and Omar was arrested as part of 6 others in the USA. He did time for this stunt, but soon after went to Canada and changed his name (again).

  — MidasTheFool (@MidasTheFool) January 27, 2022

  
  

  12/ He also ran another ponzi called Midas Gold. Basically took people's money.. and didn't give it back.
  
  The guy has been around since 2002, before most of you were even here. I've seen him post in forums and I know the vile acts he is capable of.

  — MidasTheFool (@MidasTheFool) January 27, 2022

  
  
  Oh.
  
  
  
• Classy guy. With the infamy of QuadrigaCX, how did he slip under the radar of the other founders of Wonderland?
  
  

  2/ Many people in the world are judged by their early mistakes, this comes prevalent into the life of ex inmates that can’t get access to financial services after being felons.

  — Daniele never asks to DM (@danielesesta) January 27, 2022

  
  
  There's something of a difference between blocking ex-cons from opening bank accounts and putting them in charge of the fucking bank. You idiots control a billion dollars of other people's money.
  
  

  I'm on the side of @danielesesta and @Osxifu
  We haven't been rugpulled, there hasn't been a security breach, and decision making has been solid.
  So what if something happened 17 years ago?
  He did the time and it seems that he learned from it. A lot of things change in 17 years.

  — 808 Silver (@808_Silver_) January 27, 2022

  
  
  Okay, to be fair some of those other people deserve to lose all their money.
  
  

  TIME has been delivering what it promised since day one and now suddenly yall are worried about one of their team members? Where was the concern 3 months ago when their market cap was over 2B while you raked in 90,000% APY?

  — BUBS (@Cryptobubs2) January 27, 2022

  
  
  Which doesn't sound at all like a Ponzi scheme, from a convicted criminal with a long history of Ponzi schemes.
  
  Do you people want draconian regulations? Because this is how you get draconian regulations.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Minecraft-based NFT game Blockverse just disappeared with a million dollars of users' money. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Over three thousand blockchain projects disappeared with all their users' money in 2021 alone.
  
  
  
• Ugh. Where was I?
  
  
  
• The WD Black SN750 SE is okay. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a DRAMless PCIe 4 SSD. It performs similarly, is priced similarly, and has similar power consumption to PCIe 3 SSDs with DRAM such as Samsung's 970 Evo Plus, though models with DRAM are less likely to have weird slowdowns in edge cases.
  
  
  
• Micron has some new PCIe 4 SSDs too. (Serve the Home)
  
  Micron SSDs are all enterprise models - they use the Crucial brand for consumer products. So these deliver slightly slower performance than desktop drives but endurance of up to 35PBW - 3 drive writes per day for five years.
  
  
  
• The IRS is reconsidering their requirement for all taxpayers to go through a vtuber audition before being permitted to, uh, pay their taxes. (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  This particularly idiotic program outsourced all your personal information including live video chat to a startup called ID.me. Government agencies are controlled by federal privacy laws; private companies even when operating under government contract are not.
  
  The scheme is so outrageous that even Ted Lieu was able to criticise it without putting his foot in his mouth:

  Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) called it "a very, very bad idea by the IRS" that would "further weaken Americans' privacy."

  
  
  
• Ongoing chip shortages are due in part to misplaced investment. (The Register)
  
  Most of the hundreds of billions pouring into new semiconductor fabs are pouring into new semiconductor fabs - 7nm and smaller - but the most critical crunch is with older nodes - 40nm and larger.
  
  Samsung's new 17nm node is a step in the right direction - it's an update of the old, reliable 28nm node, keeping element sizes the same but with the vertical transistors (FinFETs) used on all modern process nodes. I'm not sure I've seen any other stories on companies deploying new resources for older nodes.