Revolutions leave behind artifacts - not always weapons or flags, but the quieter objects that carried a message before anyone knew how far it would travel. A wheat-pasted broadside on a Los Angeles overpass. A hand-lettered cardboard sign held up in the snow outside a Tokyo office building.
I'm not Satoshi, but I was early in laser focus on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash, hence my ~1992 onwards active interest in applied research on ecash, privacy tech on cypherpunks list which led to hashcash and other ideas.
Identity spoofing against older adults alone grew by 8x between 2020 and 2024, driven in part by convincing AI impersonations of friends and loved ones. It's a problem costing people in the U.S. nearly half a billion dollars a year with no end in sight.
MEV is especially notorious on Ethereum, where it continues to be extracted at a rate equivalent to 11% of block rewards. Data shows that nearly $300,000 was lost in sandwich attacks in September. This reveals that MEV is a recurring hidden fee, not a minor inefficiency, hitting large trades hardest in volatile markets.
As well as millions of customer names and contact details, the databases show how much money people had spent at the stores. The hacker the BBC spoke to says he purchased the spreadsheets for $300,000 (£224,000) in order to target the biggest spenders. He claims to have used the information along with details from another stolen database to scam multiple Coinbase users out of at least $1.5m (£1.1m) in crypto.
In early January 2026, some Ledger customers were notified that personal and order information related to Ledger.com purchases had been accessed during a security incident involving Global-e, a third-party e-commerce partner that acts as the "merchant of record" for certain orders. Ledger stressed that its own hardware and software systems were not breached. However, the exposed purchase data was enough to spark a familiar second act: highly targeted phishing attempts that appear legitimate because they reference real-world details.