French Frag Factory

C’est au détour d’un « thread » d’un certain @BryceElder sur Twitter que nous apprenons que la passion d’un hacker ukrainien pour Quake III, Dimitri Bolgakov, a entraîné la chute de la reine des cryptomonnaies !

Satoshi Nakamoto, développeur chez Nintendo du mode multiplayer de GoldenEye N64 et créateur du BitCoin, serait le seul capable de l’arrêter.

Tout est lié. Tout.

Pour ceux qui n’ont pas de compte Twitter :

Bitcoin is a decentralised currency that is backed by energy that is harvested from traffic on the world wide web, or internet.

It was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, a developer at Nintendo who mysteriously disappeared in the 1990s. The multiplayer mode in Goldeneye N64, on which he was lead developer, uses a primitive form of Bitcoin to keep track of high scores.

Today, Bitcoin harnesses energy from everyday web traffic and converts it into coin at a rate of about one block every ten minutes. the HTTP you sometimes in the browser address bar stands for « Hash To The Protocol ». HTTPS is « Hash To The Protocol (Signed) ».

Hackers are constantly trying to guess the block passwords, or « sign » then. But it’s very difficult because passwords must be at least 8 characters long and contain one symbol and one uppercase letter.

Whenever a hacker guesses the password, that block is put onto the ledger, or « blockchain », which is an Excel spreadsheet where all the bitcoins are kept. No single user can control the spreadsheet because it is shareware.

Once on the blockchain, Bitcoins can be traded for goods and services or even for other currencies. And because no one except the hacker knows the password, it is totally anonymous.

To own Bitcoin you have to pay a hacker to crack a password. The more demand for Bitcoin, the more the hackers will charge per hour. This is how Bitcoin’s price changes with supply and demand.

But as Bitcoin’s price rose, people became aware of the environmental cost of producing millions of graphics cards. This is because whenever you give a hacker money he will upgrade his graphics card.

Here’s where the story gets more complicated.  And it’s the story the MSM won’t tell you.

Bitcoin’s success has led to the launch of many other « crypto currencies ». One is called Tether, which is like Bitcoin except it is backed by US dollars rather than web traffic.

Tether is controlled by a man from Ukraine called Dimitri Bolgakov, who is a hacker. He uses the dollars that are put on the Tether blockchain to buy Bitcoin, which involves paying himself to hack the passwords.

Bolgakov then uses the Bitcoin he has hacked to buy Tether, which generates the dollars needed for him to hack more Bitcoin. (This is all detailed in the Tether white paper.)

You will have seen the recent plunge in the price of Bitcoin. This was triggered by Bolgakov last week upgrading to an NVidia GeForce® GTX 1080 Ti, which can play Quake III in max resolution at 60fps with all the lighting and textures enabled.

Since last week, Bolgakov has been playing Quake III and not buying any Bitcoin.

As of this moment, according to a recent post on ETF Sparplan Vergleich, Bitcoin’s biggest investors are gathering in Quake III’s Dungeon Zone to try and kill Bolgakov. However, environmentalists are also corralling there with the intention of protecting Bolgakov and suppressing demand for graphics cards.

So far, Bolgakov’s superior GPU has given him a speed advantage over all other players. But there is still one challenger who can take him down.

The Bitcoin community awaits the return of Satoshi Nakamoto.