Skip to main content

Be wary of MyAlgo's wallets!



Don't know what this is all about, but it evidently has something to do with the still-ongoing breakdown of the crypto world. With it has come the breakdown of what some people not too long ago were calling Web 3.0

MyAlgo on Twitter: "IMPORTANT: ⚠️We strongly advise all users to withdraw any funds from Mnemonic wallets that were stored in MyAlgo. As we still don't know the root cause of recent hacks, we encourage everyone to take precautionary measures to protect their assets. Thank you for your understanding." / Twitter


Some people?  Heck, TBH, I was one of them. In June of last year, still less than a year ago, I wrote this: How Blockchain is Changing the World: Finance, Marketing, and Web3 | Gate 39 Media 

Don't go there and read the whole thing. You can read the gist of it here:

Consider eCommerce. On Web 1.0 there would be, say, a catalog for prospective buyers of widgets. Users would scroll through it to find the widget they fancy. They might then use an email address to say, “I’d like your catalog item 3456.” Or they might use a more convenient on-screen button for the same purpose.

But Web 2.0 has payment systems integrated with credit cards and with payment processing sites such as PayPal. It encourages user reviews, refunds, and negotiated transactions.

Put simply: Web 1 was about the publishers and Web 2 was, and largely still is, about the platforms. Now a Web 3 (or Web3 without the extra space, or web 3.0 if you want to look old school) is struggling to be born. There is a broad consensus, though it is one with some dissenters, that the next wave will be about users-as-creators, with crowdsourcing and blockchains making everybody an entrepreneur.

---------------------------------------------- 

Well ... no. It didn't work out. The "some dissenters" were right. Or, to be slightly more kind to myself, Web3 has been indefinitely postponed.

To return to the above link: MyAlgo is a digital wallet for the cryptocurrency Algorand. Recent hacks have been stealing the Algorands in an amount that converts into more than $9 million US dollars, from the trusting owners of such wallets. 

Ouch. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
17 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more