Pablo Escobar's Brother Says He Met an FBI Agent Posing As Satoshi Nakamoto (vice.com)

Jordan Pearson, writing for Motherboard: Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar's brother, Roberto Escobar, is launching a new cryptocurrency called "Dietbitcoin." It's a clone of Bitcoin of the kind that can take mere minutes to create, with no changes or improvements whatsoever. But Escobar is nonetheless hawking virtual coins for $2 USD each now, and $1,000 in later rounds of the crowd sale. Now here's the good shit. Along with Dietbitcoin's launch came a 280-page book, part memoir and part manifesto, titled "Pablo Escobar's Dietbitcoin: The True Story by Roberto Escobar." Roberto allegedly authored the book -- when I reached Escobar for an interview the company said he was not available, but CEO Olof Gustafsson told me over the phone that Roberto wrote it. In it, Roberto claims that he had a close encounter with a US government agent posing as the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. This encounter led Roberto to conclude that the US government created Bitcoin and will one day crash the market by selling all of Nakamoto's stashed bitcoins. The veracity of this tale is highly suspect; Roberto Escobar is a well-known eccentric who once claimed to have cured HIV with his knowledge of horses.

Comments

"Knowledge" of horses

[Anonymous Coward]

By knowledge of horses are we referring to carnal knowledge?

This is on slashdot

[fredrated]

Why?

Lose pounds without changing your diet or anything

[goombah99]

What is it with all these coin and blockchain schemes that seem to ignore the obvious.

They all seem to be annoyed that a mining epoch is so slow/compute expensive. SO they do something to remove that.

The fundamental bedrock of any blockchain or coin that allows distributed adversarial authentication is preventing the "double spend". There has to be no way to spend the same "coin" twice.

and for that there has to be a ledger that can't be re-written after a transaction (with high probability or inexpense)

Here's the unremovable fact that makes all this rubbish: SO far no one has invented a distributed trust scheme that, while having all the virtues of bit coin, does not involve Proof of Work (or Stake or Resources or something that ain't free).

that's the barrier to re-writing the ledger.

If I can marshal enough resources to re-write the ledge for less cost than I could gain from a double spend then no one should trust the ledger.

Now there is a difference between fast closures on the ledger entries and expensive to compute entries. Litecoin and the alt-coins has a faster closure rate than bitcoins ten minute equlibrium rate. But I'm pretty sure here they mean fast to be low expesne.

ah, I see

[cascadingstylesheet]

Ah, yes, the only thing more trustworthy and reliable than pyramid scheme fake pseudo "currency" is pyramid scheme fake pseudo "currency" created by a Colombian drug lord's brother.