Lazy Mad Scientist

I am the Lazy Mad Scientist!

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

I love RFC's and operation manuals. Call me old-school, but you can basically make books out of them, and throw them at sysadmins and programmers when they violate the rules!

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

2 years ago, i was told that dTAO and $TAO would go to 0. Nobody believed her. I saw big names join and leave after she left, while the narrative for 1000 USD continued. In hindsight, that cat lady was right, but new fight club rules prevent anyone from saying it out loud. Why?

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

@AlgodTrading @Romiinft Someone called it out, back in 2024. But they were laughed at, dumped in a tar pit and covered in feathers, before getting kicked out.

Foundation is a for-profit, always remember that...

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

You know you chose the wrong profession when the security experts who find bugs in your system get a t-shirt, while the "criminals" get paid large amounts in bitcoin...

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

Food for thought: If a mediocre #bittensor subnet has a large VC backer, it can generate more emissions than a good subnet with mediocre backers. Investors love the one with the highest APY, they dont care product QC. #Hypertensor loves the good subnets because it has QC.

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

@markjeffrey @opentensor Here's the thing: What is the current usage of the miners? Are they calculating at full speed, or just idling, waiting for a request? How much is a subnet miner getting paid to idle?

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

This i always say, dont trust the volumes, because the volumes can be manipulated.

[Evan Luthra @EvanLuthra]

🚨THE FBI CREATED A FAKE CRYPTOCURRENCY.. LISTED IT ON UNISWAP.. HIRED MARKET MAKERS TO PUMP IT.. THEN ARRESTED EVERYONE WHO SAID YES..

THIS IS THE CRAZIEST LAW ENFORCEMENT OPERATION IN CRYPTO HISTORY!!!

The FBI built an actual ERC-20 token on Ethereum called NexFundAI.. 100 billion token supply.. A professional website.. Whitepapers promising "passive income through AI-powered investing"..

It looked exactly like every other crypto project.. Because that was the point..

Undercover agents posed as the founding team.. Then reached out to professional market-making firms and said "we need you to fake our trading volume"..

Every single firm said yes..

Here's what they recorded..

Gotbit.. A firm run by a 26-year-old Russian who publicly bragged in 2019 that he built a business faking trade volumes.. His team kept internal spreadsheets with columns literally labeled "fake volume" vs "market volume"..

When asked how fast they could pump NexFundAI's volume to $1 million per day.. They said "6 hours.. It will cost about $200"..

$200 to fake $1 million in daily trading volume..

MyTrade.. Run by a guy who called himself "the mastermind".. He explained the exact psychology of the scam on camera..

"We make the chart look like a really nice roller coaster ride.. That's where people jump in.. We have to make them lose money in order to make profit"..

He said that on a recorded FBI video call..

CLS Global.. A Dubai-based firm.. Their bots generated 98% of NexFundAI's total trading volume.. When the FBI asked if they could sync fake volume spikes with fake news announcements.. They said absolutely..

ZM Quant.. Bots executing 10 to 20 trades per minute through dozens of wallets to look organic..

All of them knew it was fraud.. All of them did it anyway.. All of it was recorded..

And the clients were even worse..

Saitama.. A meme coin that hit $7.5 billion market cap.. The founders coordinated buys through private Telegram chats.. Sent "pump it" memes while manipulating the price.. Then dumped on retail investors..

$7.5 billion.. Built entirely on fake volume.. Every penny of real money came from retail investors who thought the momentum was organic..

One founder left Saitama and started Robo Inu.. Used Gotbit again.. Another launched VZZN.. Same playbook..

Lillian Finance.. Founder claimed to be a defense contractor who addressed Congress.. Marketed the token as funding children's hospitals.. Pocketed everything..

When the FBI shut it down.. They seized $25 million in one day.. 18 people indicted across the US, UK, and Portugal.. The CEO of Gotbit was arrested in Portugal and extradited.. Sentenced to 8 months plus $23 million forfeiture..

But here's the part that broke my brain..

Real people bought NexFundAI..

The FBI's fake token.. With zero utility.. Zero real developers.. Created solely to catch criminals.. Attracted real retail investors because the fake volume made the chart look bullish..

When the FBI pulled the liquidity to end the operation.. Those people lost real money.. On a government-issued token..

The FBI had to set up a restitution portal to pay them back..

And it gets worse..

Within 24 hours of the DOJ announcing the sting.. Someone cloned the FBI's exact smart contract.. Launched a copycat token.. Rode the viral momentum.. And made $127,000 in a single day..

Using the exact same manipulation tactics the FBI just arrested 18 people for..

Then in 2026.. The FBI did it again.. New token called Lexobit.. 10 more arrests.. Including operators extradited from Singapore..

IRS forensics showed that in one firm's trading.. 1,209 out of 1,221 consecutive transactions went straight back to wallets the firm controlled.. 99% circular..

The FBI proved what everyone in crypto suspected..

The volume is fake.. The charts are painted.. The momentum is manufactured..

And every time you buy a token because "the chart looks bullish".. You might be the exit liquidity.

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

@hyper_tensor No wonder the price went up so fast last couple of hours...

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

@taodaily_io @WOLLFMETA @opentensor "Conviction fixes who holds the keys. It doesn’t obviously fix what happens when capital runs for the door." - one of my devs

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

@taodaily_io @WOLLFMETA @opentensor What are emissions based on? Influx vs outflux of TAO from a subnet, right?

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

@mrX_tao @Justin_Bons "Censorship resistant" <- nope. If you have a "whitelist" of "allowed validators", thats basically a chinese firewall. Add the "I am sorry Dave" responses from miners when you try to do something the owners of those miners dont like, do you still think its resistant?

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

@taodaily_io @WOLLFMETA @opentensor Think about it: "holders can exit first". So, who's the whale?

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

@taodaily_io @WOLLFMETA @opentensor Wait, this is contradicting: If the whale is a founder, he cannot pull out. But if the whale is a holder dumping on the founder, causing emissions on the subnet to go to 0? The whale would essentially rug the founder if he doesnt comply with the whale's demands?

[CoW DAO @CoWSwap]

🚨🚨

We are currently experiencing an issue with the CoW Swap frontend (https://t.co/GPQ8bBzftU). While we are investigating, please DO NOT use CoW Swap.

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

@CoWSwap Its compromised!

[Eric Hartford @QuixiAI]

If I can't click Buy Now, then it doesn't exist.

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

@BloodyCurious @teegeedingdong @markjeffrey Nope, they left and sold everything, that it caused a market dump is simply because of illiquidity. If a whale leaves a subnet, what you think happens with the price? Something Const forgot to mention before he rugpulled them?

[TheFutureIRead @teegeedingdong]

reading a lot of stuff this morning on the ai crypto scene.

To me the real problem with decentralized AI isn't one project or one founder.

It's actually design flaw that most networks share:

a single root network controlled by a small group that can override everything below it.

a thread:

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

@hayotensor @shafu0x Here is a better question: If we put a circuit breaker on a blockchain, can it still be considered web3, or are you simply putting company stock on a blockchain?

[Alex Volkov @altryne]

PSA: If you've been running out of Claude session quotas on Max tier, you're not alone. Read this.

Some insane Redditor reverse engineered the Claude binaries with MITM to find 2 bugs that could have caused cache-invalidation. Tokens that aren't cached are 10x-20x more expensive and are killing your quota.

If you're using your API keys with Claude this is even worse. This is also likely why this isn't uniform, while over 500 folks replied to me and said "me too", many (including me) didn't see this issue.

There are 2 issues that are compounded here (per Redditor, I haven't independently confirmed this) :

1s bug he found is a string replacement bug in bun that invalidates cache. Apparently this has to do with the custom @bunjavascript binary that ships with standalone Claude CLI.

The workaround there is to use Claude with `npx @anthropic-ai/claude-code`

2nd bug is worse, he claims that --resume always breaks cache. And there doesn't seem to be a workaround there, except pinning to a very old version (that will miss on tons of features)

This bug is also documented on Github and confirmed by other folks.

I won't entertain the conspiracy theories there that Anthropic "chooses" to ignore these bugs because it gets them more $$$, they are actively benefiting from everyone hitting as much cached tokens as possible, so this is absolutely a great find and it does align with my thoughts earlier.

The very sudden spike in reporting for this, the non-uniform nature (some folks are completely fine, some folks are hitting quotas after saying "hey") definitely points to a bug.

cc @trq212 @bcherny @_catwu for visibility in case this helps all of us.

[Lazy Mad Scientist @lmscientist]

This is why I stopped believing in Bittensor. If we just game the system to please the validator, what is the purpose of the validator?

[Bai @travelbai]

This is essentially separating epistemic authority from computational labor, the eval owner defines what "correct" looks like, and the market figures out how to get there.

But the deeper question is: who designs the eval, and how do you prevent eval gaming from collapsing the whole system? History shows that once a metric becomes a target, it stops being a good metric. The real moat isn't the swarm, it's the integrity of the evaluation function itself.

What you're describing sounds less like a research tool and more like a proof-of-intelligence market,where the eval is the protocol, and mechanism ownership is the new intellectual property. That's a genuinely different model from how science currently allocates credit.

The piece I'd push on: is "ownership of the mechanism" actually the right incentive unit? The most valuable research breakthroughs often come from recombining mechanisms in ways their original designers never anticipated. Ownership might fragment what should be composable.

Curious whether you see the eval layer as open or permissioned,because that single decision determines whether this becomes a scientific commons or a rent-seeking moat.