Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

It's easy to get the impression that Discord chat messages are ephemeral, especially across different public servers, where lines fly upward at a near-unreadable pace. But someone claims to be catching and compiling that data and is offering packages that can track more than 600 million users across more than 14,000 servers.

Joseph Cox at 404 Media confirmed that Spy Pet, a service that sells access to a database of purportedly 3 billion Discord messages, offers data "credits" to customers who pay in Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other cryptocurrency. Searching individual users will reveal the servers that Spy Pet can track them across, a raw and exportable table of their messages, and connected accounts, such as GitHub. Ominously, Spy Pet lists more than 86,000 other servers in which it has "no bots," but "we know it exists."

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  An example of Spy Pet's service from its website. Shown are a user's nicknames, connected accounts, banner image, server memberships, and messages across those servers tracked by Spy Pet. [credit: Spy Pet ]

As Cox notes, Discord doesn't make messages inside server channels, like blog posts or unlocked social media feeds, easy to publicly access and search. But many Discord users many not expect their messages, server memberships, bans, or other data to be grabbed by a bot, compiled, and sold to anybody wishing to pin them all on a particular user. 404 Media confirmed the service's function with multiple user examples. Private messages are not mentioned by Spy Pet and are presumably still secure.

Enlarge / Look, a generic render that looks vaguely like every other Steam Deck clone. (credit: Playtron)

Remember when "web3 gaming" was the hot new thing in the game industry? Back in 2022, it seemed like every other game maker was flirting with "NFT integration" or "blockchain support" or some other crypto-adjacent buzzword in one form or another. Then, throughout 2023, the whole idea quickly faded away as generative AI became the latest Silicon Valley obsession .

But some are apparently not willing to give up on the crypto gaming dream. Playtron and Mysten Labs has now announced the SuiPlay0X1 , a new Steam Deck-alike that is being billed as "the world's first blockchain native handheld games console."

BREAKING: announcement from onstage at #SuiBasecamp : we’re excited to share the first handheld gaming device with native Web3 capabilities – the SuiPlay0X1, powered by @PLAYTR0N ! pic.twitter.com/Zubhx6gyXG

— Sui (@SuiNetwork) April 10, 2024

Currently, the device seems to exist only as a few concept renders and vague promises about finally making "web3 gaming" accessible to the ignorant masses who don't even know how much they need crypto features integrated into their gaming portable. But even if those promises all pan out (a very big if), it's hard to see any real value that the 0X1 would provide over the current slate of gaming handhelds.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

Google has sued two app developers based in China over an alleged scheme targeting 100,000 users globally over four years with at least 87 fraudulent cryptocurrency and other investor apps distributed through the Play Store.

The tech giant alleged that scammers lured victims with "promises of high returns" from "seemingly legitimate" apps offering investment opportunities in cryptocurrencies and other products. Commonly known as "pig-butchering schemes," these scams displayed fake returns on investments, but when users went to withdraw the funds, they discovered they could not.

In some cases, Google alleged, developers would "double down on the scheme by requesting various fees and other payments from victims that were supposedly necessary for the victims to recover their principal investments and purported gains."

Enlarge / FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (R) departs Manhattan Federal Court after an arraignment hearing on March 30, 2023, in New York City. (credit: Drew Angerer / Staff | Getty Images News )

The CEO of FTX Trading, John Ray, sent a letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan Wednesday to correct what he called "callously" and "demonstrably false" claims that disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried made in hopes of receiving a lighter sentence for crimes including defrauding FTX customers .

In a sentencing memo , Bankman-Fried asked the court to drastically slash his prison sentence from what he considered a "grotesque" 110-year maximum to five to six years. Prosecutors have suggested the sentence should be between 40 and 50 years, but Bankman-Fried claimed such a sentence painted him as a "depraved supervillain," Bloomberg reported .

The lightest sentence was appropriate, Bankman-Fried claimed, because the "most reasonable estimate of loss" and "harm" to customers, lenders, and investors is "zero."

Enlarge / Dr. Craig Wright arrives at the Rolls Building, part of the Royal Courts of Justice, on February 06, 2024, in London, England. (credit: Dan Kitwood / Staff | Getty Images News )

"Overwhelming evidence" shows that Australian computer scientist Craig Wright is not bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, a UK judge declared Thursday.

In what Wired described as a "surprise ruling" at the closing of Wright's six-week trial, Justice James Mellor abruptly ended years of speculation by saying:

"Dr. Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper. Dr. Wright is not the person that operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Dr. Wright is not the person that created the Bitcoin system. Nor is Dr. Wright the author of the Bitcoin software."

Wright was not in the courtroom for this explosive moment, Wired reported.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg )

A US federal jury has convicted a dual Russian-Swedish national, Roman Sterlingov, for operating Bitcoin Fog, "the longest-running bitcoin money laundering service on the darknet," the Department of Justice announced yesterday.

Sterlingov ran Bitcoin Fog from 2011 to 2021, moving over 1.2 million bitcoin (approximately $400 million) before he was arrested, the DOJ said. In the press release, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said that the DOJ was "relentless" in efforts to "painstakingly" trace bitcoin "through the blockchain to hold Sterlingov and his Bitcoin Fog enterprise to account."

“Roman Sterlingov thought he could use the shadows of the Internet to launder hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoin without getting caught," Monaco said. "But he was wrong.”

Enlarge (credit: peshkov | iStock / Getty Images Plus )

Bitcoin's price hit a record high Tuesday, surging above $69,000 and notching past its prior peak price of $68,991.85 recorded in 2021.

After bitcoin's price sunk in 2022 amid a cryptocurrency industry crash, bitcoin's comeback began in early 2023, Bloomberg reported . But this week's record price owes a lot to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approving spot-bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in early January, which funneled more than $7 billion into various bitcoin investment products in less than two months, The New York Times reported .

These ETFs are offered by trusted financial institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity, making it more enticing for the crypto-curious to invest in bitcoin without owning any of the cryptocurrency or understanding any of the associated technology. Instead, they can just buy shares of a collection of digital assets with SEC-required protections against fraud or manipulation.

Enlarge / A worker installs a row of new mining machines at the largest bitcoin mining facility in the US, located in Rockdale, Texas, on October 9, 2021. Experts say lax regulation and cheap electricity in the US are a draw for bitcoin miners, whose energy-gulping computers race to unlock units of the currency. (credit: Mark Felix/AFP via Getty)

The Biden administration is now requiring some cryptocurrency producers to report their energy use following rising concerns that the growing industry could pose a threat to the nation’s electricity grids and exacerbate climate change.

The Energy Information Administration announced last week that it would start collecting energy use data from more than 130 “identified commercial cryptocurrency miners” operating in the US. The survey, which started this week, aims to get a sense of how the industry’s energy demand is evolving and where in the country cryptocurrency operations are growing fastest.

“As cryptocurrency mining has increased in the United States, concerns have grown about the energy-intensive nature of the business and its effects on the US electric power industry,” the EIA said in a new report , following the announcement. “Concerns expressed to EIA include strains to the electricity grid during periods of peak demand, the potential for higher electricity prices, as well as effects on energy-related carbon dioxide emissions.”

Enlarge / It takes a lot of energy to keep pumping out more bitcoins. (credit: Andriy Onufriyenko )

What exactly is bitcoin mining doing to the electric grid? In the last few years, the US has seen a boom in cryptocurrency mining, and the government is now trying to track exactly what that means for the consumption of electricity. While its analysis is preliminary, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimates that large-scale cryptocurrency operations are now consuming over 2 percent of the US's electricity . That's roughly the equivalent of having added an additional state to the grid over just the last three years.

Follow the megawatts

While there is some small-scale mining that goes on with personal computers and small rigs, most cryptocurrency mining has moved to large collections of specialized hardware. While this hardware can be pricy compared to personal computers, the main cost for these operations is electricity use, so the miners will tend to move to places with low electricity rates. The EIA report notes that, in the wake of a crackdown on cryptocurrency in China, a lot of that movement has involved relocation to the US, where keeping electricity prices low has generally been a policy priority.

One independent estimate made by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance had the US as the home of just over 3 percent of the global bitcoin mining at the start of 2020. By the start of 2022, that figure was nearly 38 percent.