I met him at a summer school a couple of years ago, a remarkable character. He developed WikiScanner, which exposed the "beautification" of U.S. politician's Wikipedia pages, conducted from the White House and other government building's IP addresses, which was creative and in the public interest.
I'm surprised that giving a talk about blockchain and crypto-currencies would be considered that sensitive, as the whole Web is full of (open source) software and instructions how to use Ethereum, the ETH currency and related stuff.
> Griffith: I need to send 1 [REDACTED UNIT OF CRYPTOCURRENCY] between North and South Korea. Other Guy: "Isn't that in violations of sanctions?" Griffith: It is.
Strange: The Virgil Griffith that I met was very smart, not sure if he would have had such an exchange in an unencrypted medium. He came across as an ultra-tech savvy prankster that had also hacked his high school's payment system (he did not say that because he was prevented under court order, so he just quipped "google me").
Edit: I was wondering about that strange redaction of "[UNIT OF CRYPTOCURRENCY]". Clearly, as he is working on Ethereum, that one has the ETH currency, so likely it was that. Could the unredacted just say "1 ETH" (not a secret)? Then the transfer would have just been symbolic, not actually evading sanctions at scale. On the other hand if he was (allegedly) talking about 1 million ETH or BTC then it would smell more like a serious crime, assuming for a moment that exchange really happened. [BTW, 1 ETH = ~$3,000 versus 1 BTC = $40,000 at the moment, so the unit makes an order of magnitude difference.]
I met him at a summer school a couple of years ago, a remarkable character. He developed WikiScanner, which exposed the "beautification" of U.S. politician's Wikipedia pages, conducted from the White House and other government building's IP addresses, which was creative and in the public interest.
I'm surprised that giving a talk about blockchain and crypto-currencies would be considered that sensitive, as the whole Web is full of (open source) software and instructions how to use Ethereum, the ETH currency and related stuff.
> Griffith: I need to send 1 [REDACTED UNIT OF CRYPTOCURRENCY] between North and South Korea. Other Guy: "Isn't that in violations of sanctions?" Griffith: It is.
Strange: The Virgil Griffith that I met was very smart, not sure if he would have had such an exchange in an unencrypted medium. He came across as an ultra-tech savvy prankster that had also hacked his high school's payment system (he did not say that because he was prevented under court order, so he just quipped "google me").
Here's an EdTech talks he gave 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymGl84RORLQ
Edit: I was wondering about that strange redaction of "[UNIT OF CRYPTOCURRENCY]". Clearly, as he is working on Ethereum, that one has the ETH currency, so likely it was that. Could the unredacted just say "1 ETH" (not a secret)? Then the transfer would have just been symbolic, not actually evading sanctions at scale. On the other hand if he was (allegedly) talking about 1 million ETH or BTC then it would smell more like a serious crime, assuming for a moment that exchange really happened. [BTW, 1 ETH = ~$3,000 versus 1 BTC = $40,000 at the moment, so the unit makes an order of magnitude difference.]