Why Crypto Networks Should Preserve Russian Propaganda ~ CEOM Coin

The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day

Mar. 1, 2022

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Welcome to The Node.

If you received two editions of the Node yesterday, sorry about the repeat email – we hope you enjoyed both issues.

In today's newsletter: Ukraine expands cryptocurrency fundraising. BitConnect "Ponzi" founder nowhere to be found. And Spanish soccer giant wants its own crypto.

Questions? Feedback? We'd love to hear from you – simply reply to this email.

–Daniel Kuhn

Today's must-reads

Top Shelf

CHARITABLE EFFORTS: Ukraine is expanding its cryptocurrency fundraising efforts by opening a Polkadot (DOT) wallet after the network's founder, Gavin Wood, promised a $5 million personal donation on Sunday. Wood's donation sent Tuesday brings the total amount of DOT contributed to nearly $6 million. Meanwhile, Ukraine has put out a call for information related to Russian and Belarusian politicians' crypto wallets as it looks to enforce financial sanctions. Several crypto exchanges have already banned high-ranking officials or instituted blanket bans for Russian users. Follow CoinDesk's continuing coverage of Ukraine.

PONZI GONE? BitConnect founder Satish Kumbhani is nowhere to be found after being indicted in the U.S. for allegedly operating a $2.4 billion Ponzi scheme. Kumbhani, an Indian citizen, was charged by the U.S. Department of Justice last Friday. Officials said that Kumbhani has likely vanished from India, and his whereabouts remain unknown.

FOR THE FANS: Spanish soccer giant FC Barcelona wants to create its own cryptocurrency, according to its president. It remains unclear what the club's crypto would be used for – like popular fan tokens or a means of payment for tickets and merchandise. The club, owned and operated by its fans rather than shareholders, has previously rejected offers to be associated with crypto enterprises.

CRYPTO MINING: European regulators have officially, completely stripped language that may have banned proof-of-work crypto mining on the continent as part of the proposed crypto regulation package called Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA). This comes after sustained criticism from legislatures and the crypto industry, which noted the consensus algorithm is the heart of the two dominant crypto networks, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Voting on the entire package is still delayed indefinitely. Meanwhile, hacker group LAPSUS$ is selling a customized bit of code that could help miners get around the "hashrate limiter" on chipmaker Nvidia's high-end gaming cards.

Overheard on CoinDesk TV...

Sound Bites

"The majority of spending is actually done in crypto."

–Michael Chobanian, founder of Kiev-based crypto exchange Kuna, who has been central to fundraising efforts for the country, CoinDesk TV's "First Mover."

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What others are writing...

Off-Chain Signals

Coinbase Is Latest Exchange to Deny Ukraine Request to Block Russian Crypto Users (Decrypt)
FTX Pledges Up to $1 Billion for Philanthropic Fund to 'Improve Humanity' (Decrypt)
KPMG Canada Buys World of Women Ethereum NFT, ENS Domain Name (Decrypt)
Crypto VC Electric Capital raises $1 billion in new funding (The Block)
Listen to Cryptopia, episode 1 of Innovated: Blockchain City (Protos)
Kraken CEO: Exchange must ban US traders if it freezes Russian accounts (Protos)
Russia eyes sanctions workarounds in energy, gold, crypto (Associated Press)
In Largest-ever NFT-backed Loan, 101 CryptoPunks Put Up as Collateral (Blockworks)

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Putting the news into perspective

The Takeaway

Why Crypto Networks Should Preserve Russian Propaganda

Yesterday, Twitter, Facebook and other social media companies announced they would begin targeted attempts of removing Russian disinformation, one of the aggressor nation's most potent weapons in its attack on Ukraine. As harmful as "fake news" and propaganda can be, there's a strong case that evidence of this information war should be preserved.

Although private companies have every right – and sometimes the legal or moral obligation – to curate their platforms by removing or boosting content according to their own prerogatives and bottom lines, understanding history is often as dependent on remembering lies as documenting facts.

Decentralized crypto platforms are designed to be information-agnostic, making them potentially important venues for understanding these times of conflict. By distributing trust and replicating data across nodes worldwide, they ensure this information remains undoctored.

That's at least partly why Sam Williams, founder of decentralized storage platform Arweave, has called for people to back up and save the disparate accounts of the war using his platform. In particular, he's looking to record the same "fake news" that Twitter and Facebook are removing.

"We built Arweave in this way to ensure that records of history cannot be altered after they happen," Williams told CoinDesk in a private message. It's "a global, permanent archive that anyone can write to."

Examples of Russian disinformation are widespread – from unsubstantiated accounts of Ukrainian border guards welcoming Russian soldiers to photos of the Ukrainian army deploying chemical weapons or using civilians as human shields.

Further, there's evidence that the Kremlin, Russia's intelligence agency, had a premeditated media strategy meant to set the narrative of the war, (which they hoped was quicker than it it turning out to be). On Feb. 26, for instance, state-owned media conglomerate Ria Novosti published a triumphant article declaring Russia had succeeded in its "special military operation."

Before being taken down, the article stated that Russia had restored "its historical fullness" by "gathering the Russian world," and uniting "the Russian people" against Western aggressors.

Clearly, having these contested claims circulate in wider conversation could increase misunderstanding of the conflict. Fake news is often less about getting people wholeheartedly to believe a false narrative, than simply sowing distrust of credible facts and institutions. It's a messy business, and one that needs serious investigation.

As media site Protocol noted, tech giants have long-enforced their "corporate content-moderation policies" by removing "sock-puppet accounts" and posts tied to Russian content farms. Last week, Twitter, Google and Facebook began to limit Russian advertisements to stop the spread of fake news.

The social media companies' actions here are protected first by the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, which allows private organizations to speak freely, including to moderate or censor discussions, and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet platforms from liability if they choose to allow certain content .

But these ads, sock-puppets, false flags, distorted narratives, crisis actors and outright lies are all significant. Withholding information from public view, including articles from sanctioned media outlets and spam, might diminish our understanding of Russia's campaign and Putin's motivations. Itmight also prevent activists, writers and legal institutions from holding bad actors to account.

"If we had not stored information that we now know to be false in our archives surrounding the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam war or the 1939 invasion of Poland, we would not understand how these wars started," Arweave's Williams said.

"In each of these cases, 'facts' we later realized were at least partially untrue" – including the "existence/non-existence of WMDs in Iraq, the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam, and the Gleiwitz incident in 1939" – "were all initially misreported in some form," he added.

There are sustained calls from influential people for deleting Russian propaganda. Jim Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox, "During the Cold War, we would never let Pravda publish in the United States." Graham Brookie, a senior director at The Atlantic Council, said, "you have to mitigate online harms that make war worse for humans." Others go further in calling for the expulsion of Russian students and employees from U.S. institutions.

Calls for censorship also come from the other side. In early 2019, the Kremlin began disconnecting Russia from the global internet, allowing them to control what information civilians can view. The agency routinely asks social giants to block information – calls that Facebook (with ~70 million Russian users), among others, often happily follows lest – itlose access to the entire market. (Russia has also threatened tech employees with imprisonment during disputes.)

Social giants mostly follow the speech laws of the countries they operate in, even if they must abandon the lofty ideals of "free speech."

Open, decentralized platforms operate according to different, perhaps higher, values that information should always be readily accessible, unadulterated and durable. Several crypto exchanges, including Binance and Kraken, took a similar line when declining to follow traditional financial institutions from "freezing" Russian accounts (though official economic sanctions may change that position).

Crypto, in its truest form, presents a permissive view of data and finance – both money and information should be free. This perspective places a high degree of trust and responsibility on users to think critically about what they're consuming and in what they're investing. But it's perhaps the only consistent standard that can be applied.

All other ways of reckoning with or packaging information are subject to the whims of human judgment, coercion and sanction.

Recentralization?

William's first call to action to document the war came earlier this month, before shots were fired. Over 10 million documents related to the war have since been preserved, according to its block finder. But his Berlin-based company has long been trying to bridge the gap between the Western internet and Russia's limited web.

Read the full essay here.

–Daniel Kuhn

A Satoshi Nakamoto NFT for the Metaverse

No one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is. This is one of the central mysteries of the cryptocurrency industry. To recognize his contribution to the birth of the Bitcoin ecosystem, BitBTC.money is creating a series of Satoshi Nakamoto avatar NFTs that will live in the metaverse. These in turn are being designed to pay tribute to other important Bitcoin contributors.

The core members of BitBTC met Minhua Ouyang (Bonnybb.eth) in New York, where they learned she had started creating NFTs in July 2019 and was one of the earliest NFT creators in the city. After brainstorming with BitBTC team members, she decided to create the Satoshi NFT project.

*This is sponsored content from BitBTC.