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Tips on how to best secure your crypto

By Matt Muller, Head of Security Operations, CoinbaseAs crypto trading becomes increasingly mainstream, our Security team here at Coinbase has seen cybercriminals getting even more creative and persistent in their attempts to steal assets. While that can sound a little scary at first, the good news is that you can dramatically improve your digital security…

By Matt Muller, Head of Security Operations, CoinbaseAs crypto trading becomes increasingly mainstream, our Security team here at Coinbase has seen cybercriminals getting even more creative and persistent in their attempts to steal assets. While that can sound a little scary at first, the good news is that you can dramatically improve your digital security with just a few easy steps. Not only will this help protect your funds on Coinbase, it can be applied to the rest of your digital life as well!When someone is able to log into one of your accounts to perform fraudulent activity, this is called an “account takeover”, or “ATO” for short. But how do these fraudsters get into your account in the first place? One common method is called a “SIM-swap.” In a SIM-swap attack, fraudsters will actually contact your wireless carrier pretending to be you, and persuade the customer service agent to redirect your cell service to a different device, by changing the SIM card number associated with your account (hence the name of the attack.) Once they succeed, they are able to receive all calls and SMS messages sent to your phone number — including any two-factor authentication codes sent to you via SMS. From there, fraudsters will frequently pair those SMS 2FA codes with stolen passwords to try and log into your email account, social media profiles, cloud storage accounts like Dropbox, or financial accounts like Coinbase.At Coinbase, we do a lot of work behind the scenes to detect and try to stop SIM-swap ATOs targeting our customers’ accounts. We also believe that using SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) is better than using no 2FA at all. That said, we encourage everyone to follow the two simple steps below and apply them to all the accounts they care about — not just their Coinbase accounts.Use a password managerYour passwords should be at least 16 characters, extremely complex and unique for your accounts. That’s hard to do by yourself, but password managers like 1Password or Dashlane can be used to create and remember your passwords.Are you currently using a password that has been exposed in a third-party data breach somewhere? You can check to see if you’re using a risky password by visiting haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords.Use 2-factor authentication (2FA)In addition to strong passwords, where available, use two-factor authentication (2FA). And always use the strongest type of 2FA the platform allows, ideally a Yubikey or similar hardware security key.If a service provider doesn’t allow Yubikey, use an authentication app like Google Authenticator or Duo Security instead of SMS-based 2FA if possible.If SMS-based 2FA is the only thing available, at the very least require a one-time 2FA code sent to your device every time you login so someone can’t access your account if they have stolen your password.If an organization doesn’t offer any of these options, consider not using that service.Staying vigilant in the wildIt’s not only important to play defense with the right security tools when protecting your accounts, but it’s also important to stay smart in the wild.Some guidelines:Don’t make yourself a targetDon’t brag about your cryptocurrency holdings online, just like you wouldn’t advertise inheriting $50 million.Review your online presence and see how much personal information someone could learn about you to steal your identity. (The good folks at Consumer Reports put together this self assessment.)Don’t fall for tricksHackers posing as tech support — even bad actors posing as Coinbase customer support specifically — may pressure you for account credentials. Coinbase will never ask you for passwords, 2FA codes, PIN numbers or for remote access to your computer.Coinbase will never ask you to create test accounts on other platforms or provide your ID or banking information over email or social media. We do not offer Facebook support chat and we will never call you by phone.If someone reaches out to you and you’re not sure if it’s a scam, you can reach out to security@coinbase.com to confirm whether it’s legitimate. And remember, Microsoft, Google, and Apple will never call you about your computer.Check the URLScammers create fake sites that look like real exchanges but are designed to steal account information. Double check the web address before you login into your account or input any of your credentials.If we emailed you and include a link, copy the link and paste it into a text editor before entering it into your browser to make sure you know where the link is really taking you.This phishing domain uses an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) which closely resembles www.coinbase.com. However, looking closer will reveal that the domain is actually www.coįnbase[.]com (note the character accent below the “i”).While Coinbase has gone to great lengths to secure our environment, it’s important that everyone understands their role in maintaining the security chain. By following some basic security steps, you can make sure your crypto stays safe. To learn more, visit our Help Center.Tips on how to best secure your crypto was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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Microsoft

Market Veteran Raoul Pal Predicts Ethereum Comeback Against Bitcoin with Donald Trump’s Victory

Crypto market expert Raoul Pal believes Trump could create a more favorable regulatory environment, which might help Ethereum outperform Bitcoin. Pal compares Ethereum to Microsoft in its early days, saying its reliability and widespread adoption make it a top choice for traditional finance institutions. Pal acknowledges that while Ethereum has strengths…

Crypto market expert Raoul Pal believes Trump could create a more favorable regulatory environment, which might help Ethereum outperform Bitcoin.
Pal compares Ethereum to Microsoft in its early days, saying its reliability and widespread adoption make it a top choice for traditional finance institutions.
Pal acknowledges that while Ethereum has strengths…
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Microsoft’s decision on Bitcoin could trigger shareholder lawsuit

Key Takeaways Microsoft shareholders will vote in December on a proposal driven by the NCPPR regarding Bitcoin investment. NCPPR warns that Microsoft’s decision not to invest in Bitcoin could lead to shareholder litigation if Bitcoin’s value rises. Share this article Microsoft shareholders will vote in December on whether the company should assess investing in Bitcoin

Key Takeaways

  • Microsoft shareholders will vote in December on a proposal driven by the NCPPR regarding Bitcoin investment.
  • NCPPR warns that Microsoft’s decision not to invest in Bitcoin could lead to shareholder litigation if Bitcoin’s value rises.

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Microsoft shareholders will vote in December on whether the company should assess investing in Bitcoin, a proposal driven by the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR).

According to a report by Cointelegraph, the NCPPR warns that Microsoft could face shareholder litigation if it decides against Bitcoin investment and the digital asset’s value subsequently rises.

“If Microsoft publicly decides it’s not in shareholders’ best interest to buy Bitcoin, and then Bitcoin’s value rises, shareholders may have grounds to sue,” Ethan Peck, deputy director of NCPPR’s Free Enterprise Project, told Cointelegraph.

Microsoft’s board has recommended shareholders vote against the proposal, stating they already evaluate a “wide range of investable assets,” including Bitcoin.

In its proposal to Microsoft, the NCPPR highlighted MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin investment strategy, noting that it has outperformed Microsoft by over 300% this year despite conducting a fraction of Microsoft’s business volume.

The research center also highlighted increasing institutional adoption through spot Bitcoin ETFs.

In October alone, BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF reportedly acquired $4.6 billion in Bitcoin, bringing the ETF’s total valuation to $31 billion, according to data from Farside Investors and Arkham.

Collectively, Bitcoin ETFs now hold over $72 billion in market cap, underscoring the growing interest from institutions.

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With Decentralized AI and Tokenized Ownership, We Can Fight ‘The Six’

Opinion Share Share this article Copy link X icon X (Twitter) LinkedIn Facebook Email With Decentralized AI and Tokenized Ownership, We Can Fight ‘The Six’ Orthodox venture capital will never provide the resources for decentralized AI to take on Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, et al. The only way is to supplant equity financing with user-owned, token-based

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With Decentralized AI and Tokenized Ownership, We Can Fight ‘The Six’

Orthodox venture capital will never provide the resources for decentralized AI to take on Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, et al. The only way is to supplant equity financing with user-owned, token-based systems, says Michael J. Casey, Chairman of The Decentralized AI Society.

By Michael J. Casey|Edited by Benjamin Schiller
Updated Nov 1, 2024, 7:20 p.m. Published Nov 1, 2024, 7:16 p.m.
(Pixabay)

The past two days’ share price moves for the six most heavily capitalized companies in the U.S. tell you all you need to know about why we must urgently decentralize the artificial intelligence economy.

The first headlines were that the third-quarter profits and revenue from Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, Meta and Amazon all beat or met expectations. Yet, with the exception of Amazon’s on Friday, Big Tech’s shares all sold off in response to their earnings announcements, dragging down with them chip-maker Nvidia, the sixth member of the group, whose quarterly reporting is scheduled a month later.

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What spooked investors were some daunting capital expenditure numbers on AI computing power and model development. Alphabet, for one, said it did $13 billion in capex last quarter and expects to do the same in this one while Meta upped its full-year projected spending to $38-40 billion. The giants are in a spending war as each tries to outrace the others toward AI supremacy. Each one of them stands to lose profit margins if it gets out of control.

Let’s be clear: between them, The Six are booking $1.8 trillion in annual revenues, a number that would put their combined inflows in 10th place of global country rankings if we viewed them as a proxy for national GDP – just behind the gross output of Brazil’s 220 million people. Meanwhile, The Six have a combined market capitalization of $15 trillion, capturing an astounding one third of the entire S&P 500 index. Despite – or perhaps because of – this unprecedented scorecard, these companies are relentlessly competing for world domination. Doing what great American companies have always done, they’re unleashing a competitive instinct that, in a normal capitalist economy of diversified goods and services, is the core driver of technological progress.

So, don’t worry about The Six. Worry about us. Because our problem amid the dizzying advance of AI is definitely not one of a shortfall in technological progress. It’s that this particular form of technological progress comes with risks to human autonomy and safety. And to mitigate them, the question of who controls AI’s development and whether their incentives are aligned with the broadest base of humanity is fundamental.

Just as was the case for Alphabet’s Google, Meta’s Facebook and Amazon’s marketplace, the development of these six companies’ large language models (LLMs) and other AI machinery is occurring within closed, black-box systems.They’ve ingested the troves of data we all unwittingly poured into internet sites, and have built highly complex codebases into which no one has visibility. Between them, they dominate all layers of the AI stack: the storage (Amazon Web Services), the chips for computation (Nvidia), the AI models (Microsoft, with its investment in Open AI), the data (Alphabet and Meta) and the devices we use to interact with AI services (Apple). They might be competing with each other, but they form a vertically diversified oligopoly. Or rather, given the undeniable power that their technology can wield over people’s lives, they’re an oligarchy. Indeed, the secrecy around the means by which they exercise that power is characteristic of most oligarchical dictatorships.

Toward the latter phase of the Web2 era, people eventually came to understand Bruce Schneier’s memorable observation that we are not the internet platforms’ customers; we are their products. With that awareness, we’re now also finally opening our eyes to how these companies have long been incentivized to modify people’s behavior in unhealthy ways to maximize shareholder returns. It is no longer controversial to talk of the psychological harm done by the algorithms of Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok and their ilk, which were blatantly designed to exploit dopamine releases to encourage continued, addictive engagement.

When Frank McCourt and I published Our Biggest Fight in March 2024, we were overwhelmed by parents’ horror stories of the harm social media had done to their kids. And then a Harris Poll coordinated by NYU Professor Johathan Haidt found that young people are just as concerned: nearly half of Gen Z wishes that TikTok and X (Twitter) never existed, even as 83% of the same cohort said they spend four hours a day or more on social media.

So, if we now know of the harms, why on earth would we extend the same oligopolistic control structure into the AI era? AI will put the Web2 oligopoly on steroids.

This is why I believe the creation of distributed, collectively owned open-source AI is a vitally important use case for Web3 and blockchain technology. It’s the only way to avoid the problem of misaligned incentives.

Sure, there are technical challenges, such as the latency that, for now, makes distributed machine learning inefficient, the capacity limits of on-chain data, or the privacy risks inherent to public blockchains. But innovators are already hard at work on outside-the-box solutions to these problems, motivated by the huge economic and reputational payoff promised by overcoming them. And when they do, the inherent information advantages enjoyed by open systems over closed systems will give decentralized AI a fighting chance. Achieve that, and “DeAI” will represent not only the right moral path but also the economic winner.

Here’s the rub: time is not on our side. And the fight is heavily lopsided. As cited above, The Six have an unprecedented $15 trillion war chest. In the 2000s, Facebook and Google learned that their high-value share prices gave them a currency with which to relentlessly acquire startups that could either enhance or threaten their dominance. Now, The Six have even greater capacity to buy up and integrate whatever breakthroughs in AI are coming, be it in independent AI agents or more efficient systems of compute. Their financial clout means that the most important innovations, those that offer the best hope for a more decentralized AI economy, are at risk of being subsumed into their centralized system. Remember, they’re competing with each other and are incentivized to do whatever it takes to win.

To fight their centralized approach, we must flip the paradigm. Orthodox venture capital will never provide anywhere near enough resources for decentralized competitors to take on the big guys. The only way is to supplant equity financing models with full user-owned, token-based systems. In the future, when your home devices provide the compute and deliver your privacy-preserved data into open-source models that are proven to act in your interests, you will earn tokens for that work. And, with that currency, you will pay for all the cool services delivered by your personal AI agent. It’s a new, distributed financing and payments system for a new, decentralized AI economy. It is the only way.

Yet, to succeed, the crypto and blockchain industry has to reimagine itself. If startup founders see DeAI merely as a new source of get-rich-quick token-pump opportunities, or if the leaders of the Layer 1 platforms now turning to the field are fixated more on applications that temporarily drive up the dollar value of their tribe’s cryptocurrency rather than on those that address real, economy-wide problems, this movement will fail. To win this fight, this industry must become more interoperable. It must become more collaborative.

This is not to say we should squash the competitive instincts that are vital to innovation. But it is to acknowledge a need for better cross-industry organization. Through collaborative bodies such as the new Decentralized AI Society, different stakeholders can work with each other to advance common interests around standards, reference architectures, taxonomies, policy objectives and open-source, cross-chain protocols that everyone can use regardless of the token they hold. We’re not building to pump our bags or take our token “to the moon.” We’re building to create a new decentralized AI economy for the benefit of all humanity.

Come join the fight.

Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.

Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.

Opinion
Michael J. Casey

Michael J. Casey is Chairman of The Decentralized AI Society, former Chief Content Officer at CoinDesk and co-author of Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age. Previously, Casey was the CEO of Streambed Media, a company he cofounded to develop provenance data for digital content. He was also a senior advisor at MIT Media Labs’s Digital Currency Initiative and a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to joining MIT, Casey spent 18 years at The Wall Street Journal, where his last position was as a senior columnist covering global economic affairs.

Casey has authored five books, including “The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order” and “The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything,” both co-authored with Paul Vigna.

Upon joining CoinDesk full time, Casey resigned from a variety of paid advisory positions. He maintains unpaid posts as an advisor to not-for-profit organizations, including MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative and The Deep Trust Alliance. He is a shareholder and non-executive chairman of Streambed Media.

Casey owns bitcoin.

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Michael J. Casey

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Metaplanet Exceeds 1,000 Bitcoin Holdings After Latest Purchase

TLDR Metaplanet purchased 156 additional BTC, bringing total holdings above 1,000 BTC Company stock rose 6.06% following the announcement Metaplanet achieved 116% Bitcoin yield in October 2023 Company raised 10 billion Yen through Stock Acquisition Rights Microsoft considering Bitcoin investment, subject to shareholder approval Metaplanet, Asia’s largest corporate Bitcoin holder…

TLDR Metaplanet purchased 156 additional BTC, bringing total holdings above 1,000 BTC Company stock rose 6.06% following the announcement Metaplanet achieved 116% Bitcoin yield in October 2023 Company raised 10 billion Yen through Stock Acquisition Rights Microsoft considering Bitcoin investment, subject to shareholder approval Metaplanet, Asia’s largest corporate Bitcoin holder…
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