Stock Market, anti-Web3/Shkreli Peanut Gallery

What's new in Shkreli's world?

Hi everyone! Sorry I have been MIA. I have a lot going on.

Stock Market

Siga is finally falling as the markets realize monkeypox will not be too impactful. I made this sarcastic tweet a week or so ago:

This chart is a bit updated, includes the most recent data and revisions. Around 300 people are diagnosed with this self-resolving, R_0 <1.0 disease every day, and that is declining as awareness spreads. It’s kind of like herpes * 10E-7.

My portfolio is up 6% over the last month or two. The “competition” I had with Matt Kohrs is over but I’ll try to keep running this trading account for anyone who thinks its helpful. You can see all trades and NAVs on Github, exported straight from Interactive Brokers.

I have always been more focused on creating wealth by creating my own companies than investing. Investing does pay the bills, too. Congrats to anyone who followed my LQDA advice, as that stock has done quite well. I still like it, less of course, now that it has almost doubled. That’s the only formal recommendation I’ve made. You’ll know it’s a “real” recommendation when I either make the trade myself or post it on r/WSB. Everything else is just words. WSB is not what it used to be, sadly.

AMC. I’m still short. Obviously the idea that you could issue a new stock that doesn’t do anything is being born out as ridiculous. Otherwise, Microsoft would have XBOX, Pfizer could issue DRUG and market caps would go wild. Reason is prevailing a bit here. AMC isn’t some mega short or anything, there is some modest downside remaining, but, I think capitulation from “Apes” is probably coming. No one will want to stay excited a year or two from now without serious business changes. Serious business changes mean serious risks of execution. This game is not easy.

Druglike, Being Hacked, Peanut Gallery

I was hacked! I have learned that there is so much fraud in cryptocurrency that somehow, some people, mostly complete morons, believe that I somehow hacked myself as an “inside job”. One friend at a16z commented that only an idiot could possibly believe that. They are right. But, given the unending fraud in the space, it is somewhat reasonable to question every hack as self-motivated. It’s probably unreasonable to immediately assume every hack is an inside job, though. Some really careless and, quite frankly, dangerous people did that in my case.

While the company Druglike will release its own data and statements, I have conclusive proof of my lack of involvement. In addition to the extremely embarrassing facts I’ve released about what actually happened (a RAT masquerading as an adult torrent), the logic and blockchain data speak for themselves. Thankfully, I am speaking with law enforcement later this afternoon in an effort to track down the culprits. Some funds have been frozen, and I am specifically focused on Changenow as a KYC-less exchange that was used to ‘mix’ the stolen assets.

While many in crypto don’t want to see pressure against Tornado Cash, Changenow and mixers in general, I think that some KYC (especially in the circumstance of crime), doesn’t hurt. Fiat on/offramps in the US require KYC anyway, so why allow the rest of the world to facilitate crime? It feels like we want liberty for everyone other than the United States, which only hurts us as others shrug their shoulders, exploit, hack and money launder while we cut our nose to spite our face defending the sanctity of freedom we don’t enjoy. I’m not against Tornado, but as a victim (with admittedly poor OpSec awareness) I feel like there should be a better way.

Anyway, Druglike is doing just fine as we have bought back a bunch of the sold tokens and replaced some LP. The token for Druglike is an ERC-20 contract named “MSI”. This brings me to some peanut gallery constituents.

Peanut Gallery #1: Matt Levine

Matt is a somewhat decent writer, but those are a dime a dozen in the NYC liberal milieu. What he’s not is a practitioner. Practitioners are the only valuable commentators you need to listen to. A former (bored? failed?) practitioner isn’t so exciting. So while Bloomberg’s overpriced terminal subsidizes whatever pittance Matt gets to scrawl sardonic ‘takes’ on whatever is going on in finance, the Shkreli coin asset class that I didn’t even create is collectively trading for more than $5 million. The actual companies behind them are worth far more. Sucks to be Matt, I guess.

What is the point of writing and not practicing? Is it to race Michael Lewis to the bottom in ignorance? “How fast can I be misleading and useless to as many people as possible?” Matt seems to have taken issue or observed that MSI’s token price has dropped. Aside from not being able to control markets for assets, I would point out that the Shkreli token was created on 5/21 to ostensibly commemorate my release from prison. Understandably upset, I confronted the people who set up this contract with the goals of them ‘shutting it down’ (not possible) and discovered they created an interesting community of supporters. I decided to relieve them of the plight of Ponzinomics by actually helping to create actual software that goes with their token (you can try this software out at screen.druglike.com). Trying to help people playing financial musical chairs is a good thing. Bringing something real to crypto is a good thing. Of course, a bubble was created and this token traded to $30 million. It fell to $10 million and then I clicked a porn link. It’s at $5 million now.

I’m okay with all of this (excluding the frustrating security mistake). If you are directly saying that I scammed someone, and you’re willing to put your real name behind it, I will sue you. I don’t care if that makes me “weak” in your mind. Why?

The thing esteemed commentators don’t understand is when you build a company, it is your ‘baby’. You instantiate it, you nurture it and grow it with all the love and care you can. You mess up sometimes, but you work hard to make it the best company you can. If someone wants to denigrate your company, that’s okay. I do that to a lot of other people’s companies. But if someone wants to suggest you’re a bad father, or much worse, that you’re a child abuser, that crosses a line emotionally that is hard to explain. It only makes sense if you’ve done this before.

Peanut Gallery #2: Molly White

Molly is a ‘programmer’ despite little evidence to the contrary (do you see how two can play this game?). Check out her illustrious github (https://github.com/molly) where you will see tons of commits… to her website repo. Six years of experience at Hubspot frontend doesn’t qualify you to say or do very much. Nevertheless, Molly pontificates broadly and foolishly on whatever she can that casts ‘web3’ (whatever that is) in a negative light. This mostly consists of regurgitating various crypto hacks and seemingly implying “crypto sucks because it gets hacked a lot”. There is no salient thought there.

By the way, what do I think web3 is? Web3 is just a suite of tools based on innovations and trends in ‘crypto’ (another circular definition). Things like ZKP, distributed ledgers and attendant tokens are ‘web3’. You can’t precisely define this technology just as you can’t precisely define SaaS: it means different things to different people. Technology is full of these nomenclature ambiguities and replacing critical thinking with jabs at semantics is about as useless as White’s career.

Anyway, it seems clear that “writing about technology” (which I’m not sure she’s doing) is a more promising career for Molly than actually making technology. Molly never tried our software, which she herself couldn’t build in a million years. But she sees fit to comment on it. Molly quotes zachxbt, a crypto investigator, who I worked with on my hack, and helped freeze hacker funds, while also maintaining I was not hacked. Molly is mad about Adam Neumann’s success because she can’t do anything like that. This has nothing to do with web3 or technology at all, she’s just mad at the white “tech bro” because that’s what liberals do.

Molly doesn’t like facts or thinking (thankfully the courts do). She likes narrative because her idiot readers like narratives. If you’re a developer who has a thorn in their ass about learning a new stack, you shouldn’t be a developer. But you might gain some solace reading White’s blog because you think you may now not need to learn the web3 stack. You’re fine with the Facebook and Google auth libraries, why learn a more trustless/secure one? You like the web just as it is. Solidity scares you. You want to keep DOM safe and sound, thank you very much. Probably the same people who thought we’d never transition to the web in the first place. People working on Siebel and PeopleSoft stuck in client/server ERP ‘90s.

In my case, Molly can’t understand the difference between a software company and a pharmaceutical company. That makes sense since she hasn’t started any kind of company, ever, and I’ve done plenty of both. I understand entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone: it’s very difficult, blogging and editing Wikipedia is a bit easier. Having said that, let me help out: a pharmaceutical company researches pharmaceuticals by testing them in animals and people, and upon winning regulatory approval, sells them via the prescription drug framework. A software company has software engineers who generally write code in a programming language. That code is compiled into some sort of application. That application is monetized. You may be familiar with that, I think you may have been gainfully employed at one time or another by one? If you need help understanding what a pharmaceutical company is, ask around! But no, software and pharma are different, it turns out, despite her wishing otherwise (https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=martin-shkreli-dumps-his-projects-token-in-hack).

Journalists and writers tend to project their wishes instead of writing about what happened. That’s misleading and shameful. Molly’s title, “Martin Shkreli dumps his project’s token in “hack”, is willfully misleading and shameful, and, in fact, libelous. The amount of commas in the preceding sentence is probably illegal, too. She even claims I am “pulling off a scam”. I am speaking to law enforcement later today about the IC3 filing I made. They’ve taken my victimhood seriously enough to help out. Molly wants to accuse me of a crime. I think that merits legal action. Sorry, Molly. Hope your blog revenue can pay your legal bills.

Molly recapitulates the quickly debunked error that I ‘funded’ my own attacker’s wallet. No, that was my own wallet. Here are the addresses. I’m not sure Molly knows how to traverse the blockchain. Databases are something backend engineers do, I believe.

Destiny

Destiny, whose IRL name is Steve Bannon or something, used to be my ‘internet friend’. Then he also claimed I was hacked without any spot of thinking or research. Nice friend.

Proof of hack

OKX has the address of a hacker that sent funds from my wallet to the hacker’s wallet that is also implicated in a December hack. While it is possible that I was also behind the December hack (apparently tricking people to sign up for something called MutaMask.xyz), phishing from prison, I think it is far more likely this is just a group that likes to take money from dumb/hapless people (including me).

I filed an IC3.gov form, which is available for an intrepid journalist who is actually willing to tell the truth. After two weeks, I just received an IC3 response from the FBI! I’m talking to them today and am quite excited to get to the bottom of this. Those emails are available to an intrepid journalist willing to pursue truth over narrative, as well. Here are redacted versions:

Here is some basic info if you want to follow the chain:

My 3 wallets prior to hack:

0x6B490F3570b53e4B92656a57E17Fc9fE1E18C2Ca (main wallet)

0x7f3d3098B2618f07086aDdDe5eA67196fAC3DcD7 (backup wallet)

0x628140c58E0fABCa9d02d600E1938f6ffFd49a05 (backup wallet)

Notice that this wallet was erroneously thought to be the ‘hacker wallet I funded’. Even a perfunctory analysis of this clears the air. People like Molly shoot first, shoot second and never ask questions later. That calls for action. Stay tuned.

Attacker addresses of note:

0xEaf0f8ba50d1c0C6bb397Cff978C81cc26eba353

0x19130a2dC1ec331DD4eaF8F8fFFEc5a0d4969762 --116 eth

0x6b11a8c2CEe6247ca8d274b2f1f688e76368a7BE - 66 eth

0x9576acEaE7fC19CdfcABE89C8fd4368875E48648 - 15eth

0x5fc4b67F5F8E8fc879ec66F3E92900A7eB7f219e