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 | "Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” |
Thursday links: movies, peptides, and insiders
The makers of the to-be-released Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi describe it as the first “fully-generated, studio-quality AI feature film.”
Starring Gal Gadot, Pete Davidson, and Casey Affleck, the “globe-trotting thriller” was filmed “in a gray box that could have passed for a storage facility,” The Wrap reports.
“We budgeted out what it would be to do it practically and it was over $300 million,” the producer said. “It has about 200 distinct locations, from Antarctica to Antigua to Vegas, which is obviously unproducible.”
(Why a film about Satoshi would include Antarctica is unfortunately not explained.)
Generating all 200 of those locations with AI allowed the film to be made for just $70 million.
The performances, however, remain human — perhaps even more so than usual.
With their surroundings left to AI, “the entire focus on set was on our performances,” Affleck told The Wrap. “It was much more like acting in a Broadway play than in the giant event film that Doug’s final product will actually be.”
Affleck thinks director Doug Liman’s method of doing everything other than the acting with AI could “reinvent cinema itself.”
It’s important to note that no jobs were killed in the making of this AI movie. “Killing Satoshi” employed 107 cast members, 100 shoot crew, and 54 non-shoot crew.
Post-production will employ 55 “AI artists.”
As for the movie itself, it sounds bananas.
The official synopsis describes Killing Satoshi as a “a high-stakes conspiracy thriller that asks the question no one in power wants answered: Why have the world’s most powerful and wealthiest people — Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Visa and virtually every major crypto organization — poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a single mega-organization called COPA, with one sole purpose: to destroy one man?”
I’m not sure how many moviegoers will want that question answered, either. Because it’s ridiculous.
COPA is a nonprofit consortium with a stated mission to encourage open-source innovation in crypto. The man the film accuses COPA of trying to destroy — assassinate, even — is Dr. Craig Wright (played by Affleck), who the film presumes is Satoshi.
In real life, COPA once sued Wright after he used his claim to be Satoshi as the basis for lawsuits against Bitcoin developers and others. It asked a UK court to decide whether he really was Bitcoin's creator.
The court ruled that he was not.
“It is clear that Dr. Wright engaged in the deliberate production of false documents to support false claims and use the Courts as a vehicle for fraud,” the ruling found. “All his lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.”
The official synopsis of Killing Satoshi nonetheless asks, “If Craig Wright didn’t invent Bitcoin, why is a coalition controlling trillions in global wealth spending hundreds of millions and risking everything to destroy him?”
It’s a question that’s best answered with a question: if Craig Wright did invent Bitcoin, why hasn’t he moved one of Satoshi’s coins to prove it?
But that wouldn’t make for much of a movie, I guess, even with AI.
Chinese chemical suppliers previously selling precursor chemicals for fentanyl and amphetamines to international drug cartels have pivoted to selling peptides directly to consumers instead.
They prefer to be paid in crypto: “The top players in the space rely almost exclusively on bitcoin and stablecoins to run their operations,” Chainalysis reports.
Chainalysis’s on-chain forensics finds that gray-market peptide sellers received $32 million in cryptocurrency in the first quarter of the year — up 159% from the previous quarter.
The rapid increase represents the rapidly growing popularity of unbranded weight-loss injections like GLP-1s and 'looksmaxxing' compounds that go viral online.
One seller, Sigma Audley, advertised weight-loss peptides using the same +86 Chinese phone number it had previously used for its illicit fentanyl business, Chainalysis found.
The pivot to peptides has allowed these manufacturers to sell directly to consumers, cutting out the cartel middlemen who once captured much of the profit.
(And what is crypto for if not cutting out middlemen?)
It feels a lot like Bitcoin’s original use case on the Silk Road — but for looksmaxxing peptides instead of Molly and cocaine.
Progress, I guess.
Vox reports that Kalshi and Polymarket are breaking reality TV because their markets on season winners and other plot points have become spoilers: they’re correct more than 90% of the time.
What could account for this uncanny level of precision? Vox offers the obvious explanation: “people are trading on these prediction markets with insider information, which is easy to do when shows like Survivor and its results are taped months in advance.”
Months is a long time for something to remain secret.
Vox believes the insiders are likely in the clear. “Thanks to the gambling regulation gray area that prediction markets currently occupy and the limits of NDAs, there’s plenty of money to be made with very little consequence for anyone who knows how a season of Survivor played out.”
Still, they might want to earmark some of their winnings for legal fees, because I think they may have committed wire fraud.
The networks that own Survivor have a financial interest in keeping the outcome of the show secret until it’s been aired. This should be clear to the shows’ participants, because they sign NDAs that reportedly include a $5 million penalty for leaking information about the show.
One way to leak information — to everyone — is betting on prediction markets.
The information has value to the networks. If someone entrusted with it uses it to make money, it’s misappropriated. If it’s misappropriated, it’s probably wire fraud.
(Not legal advice.)
Still, betting on things that already happened is surely tempting. Aubrey Bracco to win Season 50 of Survivor was trading at just 68.6% on Kalshi as little as a month before the season finale declaring her the winner was aired.
$32 million was bet on the outcome.
The best thing about prediction markets — for someone who writes about markets, at least — is all the quirky things that happen when seemingly everything becomes tradeable.
My new favorite is the mental image of the President’s longtime teleprompter operator, Gabriel Perez, checking Kalshi on his phone while running the teleprompter.
“In certain instances,” ABC News reports, “investigators uncovered times when Perez would back out of certain bets mid-speech when Trump skipped over a portion of the speech that included a word he had previously bet would be mentioned.”
Given the President’s habit of going off script, that must have happened a lot. But Perez still managed to make more than $100,000 betting on what would be said. Unfortunately, he’s now on unpaid leave.
There are probably a number of lessons to be learned here, but the most important one is this: if you are going to trade on inside information, don’t use Kalshi, which knows who you are. Use a pseudonymous crypto wallet on Polymarket instead.
(Not legal advice.)
— Byron Gilliam