Weekend Wrap: SBF’s internet sucks, BlackRock denies Voyager buy and more

Sam Bankman-Fried on dial-up level internet

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers have again asked a court to temporarily release the former FTX boss claiming the poor internet connection in his Brooklyn prison is interfering with their trial prep.

In a Sep. 8 letter to District Judge Lewis Kaplan, Bankman-Fried’s lawyer Mark Cohen said his client can’t access an internet-enabled computer twice a week for four to five hours as previously agreed to with United States prosecutors.

Citing an Aug. 30 incident, Cohen claimed Bankman-Fried lost two hours of “review time” due to an unrelated delay involving another inmate at the prison.

Once Bankman-Fried was eventually brought up to the visiting room the internet connection was so slow that it took 10 minutes for the home page to load, his lawyers claimed.

“By 1:00pm — 1.5 hours later — Mr. Bankman-Fried was only able to load one document from the database to review. Effectively, Mr. Bankman-Fried had no access to the internet for the entire 5-hour period.”

“The defendant cannot prepare for trial with these kinds of limitations,” the letter reads.

Cohen claimed Bankman-Fried hasn’t been able to effectively prepare for his trial for the better part of a month and pushed for a temporary release saying it’s necessary in order to make up for the lost time.

BlackRock’s purchase of Voyager was one big lie

Asset management giant BlackRock has denied buying bankrupt crypto brokerage firm Voyager Digital — despite a widely shared press release stating otherwise.

A Sep. 8, a fake press release — syndicated to the Associated Press — claimed that BlackRock planned to acquire Voyager, citing “industry insiders.”

A BlackRock spokesperson told Cointelegraph it’s not acquiring Voyager and stories suggesting otherwise are false.

As first noted by crypto journalist Colin Wu in an X (Twitter) post the same day, the social media account linked at the bottom of the release directed to a newly-created X account with one post and one follower.

EINPresswire was seemingly the first to post the press release, which shows a company called MK Digiworld provided the news. That company’s website only directs users to message a Pakistan-based number.

Voyager’s VGX token still spiked 15% to $0.153 within 12 hours of the AP’s syndication on Sept. 9. However the token has since returned to $0.126, according to CoinGecko.

Remember the guy who threw 8,000 BTC in the trash?

Early Bitcoin (BTC) investor James Howells is gearing up for a lawsuit against a south Wales council over its refusal to let him try to dig up and find a hard drive he threw out over 10 years ago containing 8,000 BTC.

In a Sep. 8 report in the British paper The Telegraph, Howells said the hard drive was accidentally binned by his ex — ending up in a tip managed by Newport City Council.

Since then Howells has been fighting with the council about getting into the tip to find the drive — which it’s refused multiple times citing the negative environmental impact of digging up rubbish.

On Sep. 4, Howells sent an open letter to the council demanding he’s allowed to access the dump and start work by Sep. 18 or face a lawsuit with damages seeking nearly $560 million — more than double what the stash would be currently worth at nearly $206 million.

“I’ve tried everything I can for 10 years,” Howells said. “They didn’t want to play ball, so now we have to go down the legal route.”

Previously, Howells has proposed a venture-backed $11 million project to dig up the drive that would employ artificial intelligence and robot dogs to sort the trash along with experts in excavation, waste management and data extraction.

Someone pays $500,000 in Bitcoin fees

The online crypto community has been left scratching their heads over a single Bitcoin transaction where someone paid nearly 20 BTC, or over $515,000 in fees.

The Sep. 10 transaction was picked up by the blockchain-tracking X account Whale Alert and pseudonymous X user “mononaut” posted the transaction “makes absolutely no sense.”

My best guess is that this was created manually by pasting addresses and amounts into some kind of wallet software.

they meant to set a fee of 8632 sats, but accidentally pasted an output into the fee box, turning it into 1982108632 sats, then broadcast without double-checking.

— mononaut (@mononautical) September 10, 2023

“My best guess is that this was created manually by pasting addresses and amounts into some kind of wallet software,” mononaut wrote.

They explained the user may have accidentally pasted an output amount into the fee box of the software then sent the transaction without checking.

Bitcoin wallet provider Casa co-founder Jameson Lopp said the transaction “looks like an exchange or payment processor with buggy software.”

The transaction that paid nearly 20 BTC ($500,000) fee a few hours ago looks like an exchange or payment processor with buggy software.

They’ve received 60,000+ txns and sent 60,000+ txns from the same address (bad practice) and likely calculated their change output incorrectly. pic.twitter.com/s44Yc8S2ia

— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) September 10, 2023

He added the address seems to operate as a businesses “withdraw-only hot wallet” and probably miscalculated a change output due to having around the same number of sent and received transactions.

Also making news

The X account of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was compromised on Sep. 9 with hackers posting a phishing link that led to them netting a nearly $700,000 payday.

The same day, FTX sued cross-chain protocol LayerZero Labs to try claw back $21 million allegedly illegally withdrawn prior to the crypto exchange’s November 2022 bankruptcy.

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Additional reporting by Brayden Lindrea.