darkvegas

Welcome to the dark side!
https://dark.vegas

Last Notes

2026-10-16 04:25:17 UTC

A bug in Pirate Chain's code let an attacker create about 40M extra ARRR coins, increasing the total supply by roughly 20%. The dev team asked everyone to stop transacting while they prepare a chain rollback.
https://xitter.cf/PirateChain/status/2110556351948595344
Pirate Chain is a modified dPoW fork of Zcash. Earlier this year, Zcash and Zano suffered from inflation bugs. Zcash migrated to another shielded pool, while Zano rolled the chain back by one month to remove counterfeit ZANO from circulation.
https://dark.vegas/zano-vs-zcash-inflation-bugs

2026-10-14 06:27:54 UTC

Cake is the most popular mobile wallet and a major sponsor in the Monero ecosystem, but the community is split on whether Cake is good or evil.
Let's look at the major accusations related to KYC confiscation, VPN blocking, Chainalysis node, ToS, centralized node, lobbying, and see if any of them hold the ground.
https://dark.vegas/evil-cake

2026-10-11 05:30:06 UTC

A federal judge in Chicago sentenced Raheim Hamilton, a co-founder of darknet marketplace Empire Market, to 40 years behind bars. Hamilton also agreed to forfeit 1,230 BTC to the US gov, which is the largest known state holder of Bitcoin due to frequent asset seizures.
Uncle Sam began staking sats back in 2013 by seizing 144,000 BTC from Silk Road, the first successful DNM that accepted BTC payments. Its founder Ross Ulbricht spent 12 years in prison before being pardoned by Trump following Bitcoin lobbying efforts.
Apart from DOJ seizures, the SEC is another agency building a portfolio through frequent fines against crypto companies. I wonder when the feds will start distributing these assets to "victims"?
https://decrypt.co/380561/empire-market-co-creator-sentenced-to-40-years-over-430m-dark-web-bazaar

2026-10-01 01:36:19 UTC

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"That drama queen" here. Elon's attack on Nitter is an attack on free speech and he's using state violence to advance his case. I'm not sure why you disagree, so let's break it down. Lemme know which of these statements you disagree with and why.
1. Code is speech.
2. An attempt to censor Nitter's git repo is an attack on free speech.
3. A tweet is speech.
4. Sharing information (like a tweet) is speech.
5. An attempt to restrict people from sharing information is an attack on free speech.

2026-09-28 17:12:19 UTC

We use privacy-focused hosting service Kyun to host a portion of our infrastructure, which went down on September 16, 2026, due a serious incident on Kyun's side. After a few days of waiting, we decided to redeploy everything to another server.
Most of our infra runs on Spasm, which has easy deployment methods with Docker/Podman and Ansible, as well as scripts for restoring backups, but Session SOGS is pretty outdated, so it only supports old distros like Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22, and restoring a backup is not a trivial task. Anyway, this incident was a great stress test for our infrastructure that allowed us to evaluate our censorship resistance, since our directory, podcast, videos, blog, forum, and Session channel went down.
Here is a full report that explains which parts of our infrastructure survived during an outage (Session, SimpleX, Spasm, Nostr) and how vulnerable they are to censorship.
https://dark.vegas/infra-stress-test-amid-kyun-outage

2026-09-28 16:57:44 UTC

The Coldcard disaster showed that even in 2026 most people still don't understand seed generation. If you rely solely on the device RNG, you're doing everything wrong. The only way to stay safe is to generate your own entropy.
https://dark.vegas/do-your-own-entropy

2026-09-22 16:25:18 UTC

The UK gov is cracking down on p2p trading with a multi-agency raid on crypto hubs in London. The financial watchdog issued cease-and-desist letters at the three premises.
https://decrypt.co/378495/fca-targets-three-more-london-sites-over-unregistered-p2p-crypto-trading
Meanwhile, UK's online censorship law enters its litigation era.
https://forum.dark.vegas/news/spasmid019d39c657e0a1a57de2a96
UK 2026: no knifes, no crypto, no anonymity, no free speech

2026-09-13 21:22:41 UTC

The privacy community is full of holy wars similar to the crypto world. That leads to biases and tribalism around false narratives. A good example is the Session vs SimpleX war. Both solutions are flawed walled gardens, but they are currently the best messengers in town with very different architectures and use cases.
We originally started growing our community on Session in 2021 and then slowly expanded to SimpleX a few years later. It's now time to connect both communities so people can exchange knowledge and debate architectures without unnecessary holy wars.
The first Session Simplex bridge written by @natsec is now open source, so feel free to share your feedback and submit feature requests.
https://dark.vegas/session-simplex-bridge

2026-07-19 06:51:49 UTC

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"Without privacy these is no democracy"
Workshops are good, fundraising is great, but this slogan is horrible. Somebody should explain W3PN what democracy is and how we ended up in this dystopian future with the full agreement of the silent majority.