Bees Of Bitcoin Stories

Hello Bees,* August 2021, an NFT marketplace’s trade volume exceeded 3 billion dollars.* Visa buys a crypto punk NFT for 150,000 dollars.* Lionel Messi launches his NFT crypto art collection ‘The Messiverse’.* WWE released John Cena NFTs.That’s in this episode of Bees of Bitcoin where we explore all things crypto. Well, NFTs.IntroA digital picture of a rock sold for 3 million dollars. But, why would anyone buy a picture of a rock?First of all, it’s just a JPEG image.Secondly, it only exists virtually.Thirdly, it can be viewed by anyone for free.Then who in their right mind would buy such a thing?That too, for whopping millions of dollars.The main argument behind this is:Digital Scarcity and has everything to do with Human Psychology.CollectiblesWe as humans have an innate need to own things. Some people dream of owning cars, houses, and jewelry. If you’re a billionaire, you wanna own mansions, helicopters, and superyachts. If you’re steve cohen, you’d own a 14-foot preserved shark. From Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts to the Mona Lisa portrait, I could never understand why people wanna own ancient pieces of art.With the recent advancements in technology, NFTs are becoming the new collectibles. The three-letter magic, NFT, means Non-Fungible Tokens.Sounds too technical, right? So, let me break it down for ya. Let’s first understand what fungible means.Fungible is Replaceable.The value of 1 dollar in your hand is the same as 1 dollar in my hand. 1 Bitcoin of yours holds the same value as 1 bitcoin of mine.Non-fungible, however, is unique. Like you and I. Non-fungible tokens or NFTs are not interchangeable with other tokens. This concept is not new and it has been used in collectibles for centuries like baseball cards and Beanie Babies. Infuse the concept of collectibles into crypto, and you get NFTs.You might remember the artist Beeple who made waves in the crypto community when he sold his 13 years of art collated in a single JPEG image as the NFT raked in 69 million dollars. The craze for NFTs peaked during early 2021 and waned soon after. Now the enthusiasm is revived, thanks to the bull market.This time, the party was kickstarted by * Pudgy Penguins,* Bored Ape Yacht Club,* Art Blocks, and Surprise, Surprise,* Cryptopunks.You might remember the two-decades-old dot com bubble where people invested a s**t ton of money on budding internet companies. The NFT rally that’s happening now is not very different.But before diving deep into that, let’s talk about collectibles. Shall we?Have you collected Pokémon cards and traded them with your friends?Then, you must know what I am talking about. Or at least, you must have heard about it. If not, you must be living under a rock, and have no clue that the rocks now sell for 3 million dollars. You may be wondering what’s special about a rock?This is not some solid mass of rock along the beachside. It’s the digital pictures of a rock-based on some royalty-free clipart produced in the 90s. Apparently, there are only 100 of these things, and people are going crazy to own this s**t.So, I visited the amazon of NFTs, Opensea. Suddenly, I was introduced toCool Cats, Gutter Cats, Dope Shibas, CyberKongs, Party Penguins, Chromie Squiggles, Meebits, and a heck of a lot of so-called art.It doesn’t stop there. Axie Infinity, an NFT-based online video game is raking in millions selling digital creatures, that, according to them, love to battle, build, and hunt for treasure.But what does one do with the digital art that they buy for millions of dollars? One of the major benefits of owning a pudgy penguin or a crypto punk or a digital picture of rock is getting to display the art mainly on your Twitter profile pic. And, maybe show the world that you belong here.Yeah! You heard that right!But it’s not like all NFTs are unusable except for profile pictures.WWE and Visa’s NFTsWWE recently released John Cena NFTs.These NFT holders will get a chance to witness WrestleMania, the biggest wrestling event hosted every year. The holders of the NFT get two front-row tickets along with Unprecedented VIP access and hotel accommodations. It’s not just the world’s biggest entertainment company that entered the space.The world’s biggest payment processor Visa announced that they’ve bought one of the “CryptoPunk” digital avatars, one of the thousands based on NFTs for $150,000 worth of Eth."We felt that CryptoPunks would be a great addition to our collection of artifacts that can chart and celebrate the past, present, and future of commerce," Visa's head of crypto told in an interview.Visa’s reason to enter crypto space? To learn more about the growing market.They think NFTs will play an important role in the future of retail, social media, entertainment, and commerce. Visa is known for going to extreme lengths to protect its turf.Visa is also partnering with cryptocurrency startups BlockFi and crypto.com to offer credit cards that reward purchases with Bitcoin. They have set up their internal crypto

Hello world!Would you rather wear a dali mask, organize a team, buy a shitload of weapons and go rob the royal mint of Spain, or choose to drain 600 million dollars from the comfort of your home, with just your laptop and an internet connection?I’d choose the latter.August 2021, the crypto world witnessed the largest heist in cyberspace, not one of the largest, but, the largest hack of 600 million dollars worth of cryptocurrencies. And surprisingly, the hacker returned all the money back, saying he or she did it for fun.This is the story of greed, control for power, and most importantly “trust”.That’s in this episode of Bees of Bitcoin where we explore all things crypto.IntroPolynetwork is a Decentralised Finance platform, that’s just a fancy term for saying no one is in control of your funds except you. Modern cryptography protects your funds. Or at least, that’s what you are told to believe. Polynetwork allows users to swap tokens across various blockchains. The network operates on one fundamental fact. “Code is Law”. A set of smart contracts, that’s nothing but a bunch of computer code, gets executed when specific conditions are met. What if this code gets exploited?That’s exactly what happened. The poly network team posted this tweet, to begin with.The hacker stole 600 million dollars worth of digital assets from three different blockchains, Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Polygon Network.As soon as the tweet started spreading in crypto communities, CEOs of major exchanges rushed to Twitter to update they’re doing everything they can to stop the hacker.Binance CEO tweetedOther centralized exchanges such as Huobi and OKEx also ensured to watch the flow of coins on those transparent blockchains to prevent the hacker from spending the hacked funds.Even though the networks are decentralized, many online exchanges are heavily centralized.They can stop, freeze or prevent a certain individual from spending their funds if it lands in their exchange’s wallet. As soon as this news broke, Tether Limited, the corporation which issues USDT stable coins, froze the funds in the wallet of the hacker. That’s around 33 million dollars worth of crypto.Polynetwork then issued a statement to the hacker on Twitter.There’s a lot to unpack here.Dear Hacker….Dear Hacker?Come on!If shitcoin executives were to draft an email to Afghanistan,Dear Taliban…Meanwhile, the hacker tries to spend millions of dollars worth of crypto. But for some reason, the transaction fails. The hacker tries again, but still, the transactions fail to go through. One more time fails again.HanashiroUpon seeing this activity on the transparent blockchain, a user who goes by the alias hanashiro attempts to help the hacker. He sends an empty transaction to the polynetwork exploiter’s address, along with million-dollar information.Dont use your USDT tokenYou’ve got blacklistedYes, you can send messages on the blockchain.This time, the hacker did a transaction without the USDT token, and it went through.And, you won’t believe this, the hacker tipped hanashiro 13.37 Eth, that’s roughly 42,000 dollars for the information.At this point, we wonder, who is hanashiro?Why is he trying to help the hacker?When we look up his wallet, Hanashiro is obviously a crypto whale. The one with a large number of crypto holdings. The transactions he makes range in a couple hundred thousand dollars. Hanashiro then starts sending the money he received, to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, and a couple of other charities. Hanashiro claims he’s just a crypto enthusiast who was passing by.Meanwhile, here’s a victim’s perspective.It looks like a lot of Chinese funds/individuals are affected because PolyNetwork is used by Neo and Ontology to bridge assets over from Ethereum.On the other hand, the hacker sent messages like,Wonder why tornado? Will miner stop me? Teach me plz!He is, of course talking about, laundering money through Tornado, a fully decentralized protocol for private transactions on Ethereum.And obviously trolling others.One Twitter user describes Poly hacker as the most dramatic, theatrical, and narcissistic in the short Defi hack story.He went on to say,It would have been a billion hack if I had moved the remaining shitcoins! Did I just save the project? Not so interested in money, now considering returning some tokens or just leaving them here.What if i make a new token and let the DAO decide where the tokens go.DAO, meaning, decentralized autonomous organization. In other words, he was thinking of letting people decide where the funds should go.After all those mood swings trying to handle half a billion dollars of money, the hacker makes a U-turn move. He was ready to return the fund but says he failed to contact the poly network.He says he needs a secured multisig wallet from them, which is to make sure that the team behind the poly network doesn’t misuse funds.It's already a legend to win so much fortune. It will be an eternal legend to save the world.I made the

Hello world.* Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher enjoyed the spotlight not only for not bathing their kids but also for making 8 Million dollars in crypto by selling stoner cats NFTs. * Ethereum’s London Hard Fork is Coming to make transactions efficient. The much-anticipated upgrade crucial for the future of Ethereum is not making everyone happy.* 12-year-old makes over 160,000 dollars overnight selling weird whale NFTs. In the latest addition to the NFT craze, 3350 pixel-art of whales’ trade volume exceeded 1 million dollars in crypto.* Binance Faces Intense Regulatory Scrutiny, prompting its CEO CZ to look for his replacement.That’s in this episode of Bees of Bitcoin where we explore all things crypto.Stoner CatsThe Internet loves cats. 4 years ago, Cryptokitties combined Crypto and Cats enabling users to breed digital cats. Now the latest Stoner cats infuse Crypto, Cats, and Cannabis.You’ve gotta be kitten me!Cryptokitties is known for choking the ethereum network, thus resulted in high gas fees. And Ethereum’s developers are dying to scale its network.But before that, why does it have to be only Elon Musk capturing all of the crypto world’s attention? Why not Vitalik Buterin?Of course, he’s not gotta smoke weed on a live podcast, but he can feature as a stoner cat. The JOINT effort from industry-leading crypto experts to top celebrities to creative animators is dope.By the way, did you know that the first thing ever sold on the internet was weed? The Stanford students in 1971 used ARPANET to arrange a meeting place and did the exchange.Back to the story, apart from Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, the animated short series also features Chris Rock, Seth MacFarlane, and Jane Fonda.It’s a story of Ms.Stoner, a pot-loving granny who lives with her cats. Each episode is 5 to 7 minutes long and the total content length is around 45 minutes. 8 million dollars for barely an hour of content. Not bad.The animated Series Can Only Be Watched by NFT Holders. The ones who bought at least one of the 10,420 stoner cats. All you do is, use your wallet that contains one of the stoner cats to log in and start watching the episodes.Now you may wonder, why only 10,420 tokens?I get why they end it with a 420. 10,000 numbers of it are aimed towards the crypto elite. Those with huge chunks of crypto and is ready to buy literally anything. These are the people that have bought Cryptopunks. The weird-looking pixel art.Only 10,000 supposedly rare pieces of art are available to buy. Launched back in 2017, Cryptopunks have always been a hit. It was the first of its kind. They are gaining momentum these days, thanks to a couple of crypto influencers. The top bid of one of the 10,000 Cryptopunk NFT goes for 4200 Ethereum.That’s approximately 7 and a half million dollars worth of crypto at current prices for a single JPEG image.This is artificial scarcity. So far, 3300 wallet holders have bought all the minted tokens of stoner cats. The average price of every stoner cat comes at around 800 dollars.It’s interesting what the stoner cats team is trying to do. This is an experiment that will eventually eliminate the costly middleman like Netflix. Here’s what their manifesto says.“At Stoner Cats, we believe that storytellers deserve an outlet where they can be valued and supported without having to bow to the machine of big media. So we’re tilting the model on its head and testing a new architecture using NFTs that can connect storytellers directly with their audience and essentially decentralize content production.”After researching this, I said to myself.“Come on, now! How is a JPEG file valued at millions of dollars? This is insane!”It doesn’t even exist in real life, like the Mona Lisa painting or Van Gogh's starry night. But, there’s something to take account of. The series starts with Ms.Stoner saying the weed delivery guy,“Material Possessions are a Social Construct”.Meaning, it doesn’t exist in objective reality. It exists because humans agree that it exists. Be it cash, gold, or even a digital picture of a cat. People believe it has value.No wonder why Satoshi Nakamoto described Bitcoin as,“If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy”.Now back to the stoner cats. Looking to buy one of these TOKEn?I should warn ya. The price is HIGH.Really really high!So, maybe, just maybe, the average joe is gonna probably watch the pirated version on Youtube or on Torrents. But the crypto elite doesn’t care about the average Joe. In fact, quite the opposite. Vitalik Buterin’s “The Oracle” cats are currently being sold at 3 to 5 times the original price it was bought for.How high will the NFT rally go?I don’t know…But probably the price of Ether is set to go high as the network is ready for an upgrade.London Hard ForkA phase of Ethereum 2.0 dubbed as the London Hard fork that has nothing to do with the Brits, is going live.But why London?They just ran out of names for their planned network upgrades. It was suggested to