Dave and Steph, Thank you for getting this information to me. Best regards

Thanks for sharing the info with Christopher, Dave. I will get a link to conveniently share the notebooks from last study group, if it's possible.

Again, here is the link to the previous blockchain study group, registration/login required to see the videos. https://www.bigmarker.com/series/daily-study-group-blockchain/series_details

Thank you Leanne. I agree with you that Web3 technologies are relevant, but I am not optimistic about its decentralized future. The big question then becomes: are there any benefits of a centrally-governed blockchain model if it comes to that?

David, thank you for this stark outlook. I totally agree with you. I do think the aspirations of Web3 and the likelihood that we are entering a decentralized democratic economy or social order do seem fragile. But I don't think that this means that Web3 technologies and tools are irrelevant. There have always been reformers and rebels in existence and I don't think they will be pushed completely to the side. Rather, I think there will be a rich ecosystem of debate and experimentation. Maybe not dominating the debate or the outcomes, but still there nonetheless.

I think these kinds of reports by the media show how confused or intentionally misleading they are.

The FTX situation has n-o-t-h-i-n-g to do with crypto and everything to do with fraud at a centralized exchange.

Conflating the two, rather than highlighting reality, is imo standard operating procedure for the media over the last few decades.

I am interested in the media reports of crypto fraud and theft; I became inspired by Dariia Porechna's posts on crypto ransom by the DarkSide group:

Sleuthing DarkSide Crypto-Ransom Payments with the Wolfram Language—Wolfram Blog

DarkSide Update: The FBI Hacks the Hackers?—Wolfram Blog

Last year, I looked into a report of an unsophisticated blackmail email scam received by a nonprofit organization, asking for payment in crypto. I started to look into the scammer's transactions (using their wallet address). I discovered that the scam was very unsophisticated, however the scammer still managed to receive one payment through the Binance Exchange and moved the proceeds out to many Bitcoin addresses (that's where it became more complicated).

In my own sleuthing I learned that Blockchain technology offers something of a contradiction: on the one hand all transactions are open, even fraudulent ones, but it's pretty hard to make sense of them.

So for next Friday, I found these two posts on crypto theft: one is the recent FTX case and the other the Ronin Bridge case of April this year:

https://hub.elliptic.co/analysis/477-million-moved-out-of-ftx-in-suspected-theft/

https://www.elliptic.co/blog/540-million-stolen-from-the-ronin-defi-bridge

My question related to those posts is: How can crypto be regulated to prevent theft and anti-money laundering (AML) while keeping its decentralized nature?

Hi David, we are looking into this. I see the same as you.

At the moment, I use the BTC.com API to get more data from bitcoin. The number of transactions per BlockChainData Dataset in the Wolfram Language is capped and the process to get more is either slow or more complex than using the BTC API.

If Wolfram Research is using the same API, the total number of transactions can be retrieved with the "total_count". If the total number of transactions is off, then so is the total balance.

Bitcoin stores transaction date-times as UnixTime in UTC (GMT-0). Some times in the current BlockchainTransactionData seems off by one hour (as of writing, Nov 2022).

The date conversion in BlockchainTransactonData uses the user's current timezone, not the prevailing timezone offset that corresponds to the historic date.

When I use the BTC API, I convert them with this function I found with the help of this Community:

DateConvert[ux_Integer] := 
 FromUnixTime[ux, 
  TimeZone -> 
   TimeZoneOffset["America/Chicago", "GMT", FromUnixTime[ux]]]

Now all date-times are the same as reported by BTC Explorer.