Almost half a billion dollars of bitcoins vanishes bandcamp

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Airbnb Miscellaneous Airbnb Unforgettable trips start with Airbnb. The ERC standard that led to the booming market of NFTs is now being revised to allow for a more dynamic standard for paying out royalties, no matter the platform that mints the NFT. As the number of prints in circulation grows for a particular original, the price of issuing its next print increases at an exponential rate. EulerBeats Genesis LP 19 Unlike other NFTs where the metadata is hosted on a centralized web server, the metadata of the music and image is contained within the token implementation itself.

This is important : if the EulerBeats website were to ever shut down, you would still be able run the art and beat generator script, stored on the Ethereum chain in perpetuity. Not necessarily. Right now, most NFTs are minted as ERC tokens, which means that when an artist initially sells their work to a buyer, that will be the only time they receive money for the sale.

If the buyer then flips it on a secondary market like OpenSea for 5 times the price, the original artist sees none of that. Zora is a new NFT platform for creators of all types attempting to change this. If the original is sold for 0. Also, because these creator shares are automatically paid out with smart contracts, and auditable on Ethereum, the creator never has to worry about tracking them down: they just get paid in perpetuity to their original Ethereum address that they minted the NFT with.

This is a powerful concept akin to royalties in the music world, but automatic and auditable. Currently the method that Zora uses for paying creator shares is not reproducible on secondary markets. The creator share percentage is only paid out if the secondary sale also occurs on Zora. The main motivation of this is to create a modified NFT standard so that NFTs created, purchased, or sold on one marketplace still pay out royalties regardless of the next marketplace it is sold on.

With this standard, it would be possible for the artist to set a royalty amount that can be paid to the creator on any marketplace that implements these tokens. Back to our earlier example, if an artist were to mint an NFT on Zora, they would still be entitled to their creator share if the purchaser sold it on another marketplace. I expect that more marketplaces will begin adopting this standard, which is already backwards compatible with the dominant ERC NFT standard.

Cool, but how does this all work with traditional Performing Rights Organizations? In the year , enterprising artists have already begun tokenizing audio files and selling them to fans as NFTs.

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He was certain that, as long as that part of the disk was undamaged, he could recover his fortune. As Howells tried to ready a plan to present to officials in Newport, the value of the cryptocurrency kept rising. More and more garbage piled on top of the hard drive, and the private key for his bitcoin sank deeper and deeper. He kept pleading his case to city officials.

He thought of suing Newport, but such moves, commonplace in America, are rare in the United Kingdom. As a systems engineer, he knew how to organize a project, and through the years he assembled an increasingly sophisticated strategy for finding the hard drive. He met with potential investors, and eventually made arrangements with two European businessmen who agreed to support a recovery operation.

Howells would get only about a third of the proceeds. He had hoped for a much higher sum; the money was his, after all. He became increasingly convinced that this was a realistic path. The city did not accept his offer. He had thought that he was striking a blow for the little guy by mining bitcoin; now it was clear that, in Newport at least, little guys still had no power.

She listened politely to his proposal to recover the bitcoin, at no cost to the city, but was not persuaded. Howells, there is absolutely zero appetite for this project to go ahead within Newport City Council. Months of silence followed. We had been talking and texting for nearly a year, mostly on the messaging app Telegram. He had been by turns evasive and defensive, often coming across as an unyielding cyber libertarian. Tech shaped his world view.

On October 21st, the day I arrived in Newport, the value of a bitcoin had just hit a new peak: nearly sixty-seven thousand dollars. Howells met me by the train station, wearing jeans and a crisp sweatshirt from Lonsdale. He drives a twenty-year-old BMW convertible that he bought before his bitcoin days. He is small and fit, with a skin-fade haircut and a light-brown half beard. The over-all effect was of concision and capability. Moments after we sat down in a coffee shop, he pulled out his phone and showed me an app that he uses to track his holdings.

We had Welsh pancakes, and he paid with cash. As we drove across the River Usk, he mentioned that, in , while the city was building a new arts center along its banks, workers had dug up a fifteenth-century Iberian sailing ship.

The next day, we visited the local antiquities museum, where he showed me a cooking pot, likely belonging to a Roman soldier, that had been buried in a nearby field. From the shattered remains trickled a trail of coins. Howells compared them to his buried hard drive, then corrected himself: the coins were not like bitcoin at all. Sometimes, he explained, messengers and go-betweens had clipped off a bit of precious metal to repay themselves for the trouble of handling transactions.

The percentage of silver in Roman coins kept declining, setting off runaway inflation. The widespread use of bitcoin, he assured me, would prevent a similar economic collapse. We went to the dump. It was a bucolic site between an estuary and docks where, many years ago, ships had been loaded with Welsh coal. Derricks stood idle. Newport felt rickety: faded signs on small businesses, empty land where factories had once stood.

As he drove, Howells mused on why the local officials had refused to allow him to dig up his hoard. He theorized that the dump had not been following environmental regulations, and that unearthing a section of landfill could embarrass the city and make it vulnerable to lawsuits.

He drove to the area where he had estimated that his hard drive would likely be. We passed through an open gate and stopped in a paved lot. This large, empty space looked like it was destined for some sort of industrial development by the city, but Howells wanted it to serve first as the command headquarters for his excavation project.

We got out. Twenty-one million! He pointed at an incline about a hundred feet away: at the top was a tufted hill with gauges inserted in it, to measure gas release. As he spoke, his dog, Ruby, ran back and forth at our feet. Before he showed me the slides, we went down the street to buy beer and crisps at the nearest convenience store.

He had equipped the cashier to accept bitcoin a few years ago, but it had not proved a success. He gave the proprietor two pounds, and a pound that he owed from an earlier visit. We returned to his house. On a wall of the living room, above his computer, was a gold-and-black Bitcoin clock. Its hands were stopped. Howells studied the technology behind hard drives and came to believe that the city officials were wrong.

Although the covering of the drive was metal, the disk inside was glass. He conceded that the hard drive would have been subjected to some compacting when it was layered in with soil and other trash. He was certain that, as long as that part of the disk was undamaged, he could recover his fortune. As Howells tried to ready a plan to present to officials in Newport, the value of the cryptocurrency kept rising. More and more garbage piled on top of the hard drive, and the private key for his bitcoin sank deeper and deeper.

He kept pleading his case to city officials. He thought of suing Newport, but such moves, commonplace in America, are rare in the United Kingdom. As a systems engineer, he knew how to organize a project, and through the years he assembled an increasingly sophisticated strategy for finding the hard drive. He met with potential investors, and eventually made arrangements with two European businessmen who agreed to support a recovery operation.

Howells would get only about a third of the proceeds. He had hoped for a much higher sum; the money was his, after all. He became increasingly convinced that this was a realistic path. The city did not accept his offer. He had thought that he was striking a blow for the little guy by mining bitcoin; now it was clear that, in Newport at least, little guys still had no power.

She listened politely to his proposal to recover the bitcoin, at no cost to the city, but was not persuaded. Howells, there is absolutely zero appetite for this project to go ahead within Newport City Council.

Months of silence followed. We had been talking and texting for nearly a year, mostly on the messaging app Telegram. He had been by turns evasive and defensive, often coming across as an unyielding cyber libertarian. Tech shaped his world view. On October 21st, the day I arrived in Newport, the value of a bitcoin had just hit a new peak: nearly sixty-seven thousand dollars. Howells met me by the train station, wearing jeans and a crisp sweatshirt from Lonsdale. He drives a twenty-year-old BMW convertible that he bought before his bitcoin days.

He is small and fit, with a skin-fade haircut and a light-brown half beard. The over-all effect was of concision and capability. Moments after we sat down in a coffee shop, he pulled out his phone and showed me an app that he uses to track his holdings. We had Welsh pancakes, and he paid with cash. As we drove across the River Usk, he mentioned that, in , while the city was building a new arts center along its banks, workers had dug up a fifteenth-century Iberian sailing ship.

The next day, we visited the local antiquities museum, where he showed me a cooking pot, likely belonging to a Roman soldier, that had been buried in a nearby field. From the shattered remains trickled a trail of coins. Howells compared them to his buried hard drive, then corrected himself: the coins were not like bitcoin at all.

Sometimes, he explained, messengers and go-betweens had clipped off a bit of precious metal to repay themselves for the trouble of handling transactions. The percentage of silver in Roman coins kept declining, setting off runaway inflation. The widespread use of bitcoin, he assured me, would prevent a similar economic collapse.

We went to the dump. It was a bucolic site between an estuary and docks where, many years ago, ships had been loaded with Welsh coal. Derricks stood idle. Newport felt rickety: faded signs on small businesses, empty land where factories had once stood. As he drove, Howells mused on why the local officials had refused to allow him to dig up his hoard.

He theorized that the dump had not been following environmental regulations, and that unearthing a section of landfill could embarrass the city and make it vulnerable to lawsuits. He drove to the area where he had estimated that his hard drive would likely be. We passed through an open gate and stopped in a paved lot. This large, empty space looked like it was destined for some sort of industrial development by the city, but Howells wanted it to serve first as the command headquarters for his excavation project.

We got out. Twenty-one million! He pointed at an incline about a hundred feet away: at the top was a tufted hill with gauges inserted in it, to measure gas release. As he spoke, his dog, Ruby, ran back and forth at our feet. Before he showed me the slides, we went down the street to buy beer and crisps at the nearest convenience store. He had equipped the cashier to accept bitcoin a few years ago, but it had not proved a success.

He gave the proprietor two pounds, and a pound that he owed from an earlier visit.