I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that there’s a subset of crypto people who engage in crypto gambling Ponzi “games.”
People stacked a Ponzi scheme on a Ponzi scheme and only got upset when somebody didn’t play by the “rules.” Of a Ponzi scheme. Because somebody took their money.
Am I missing something? Because there’s a multitude of these sites and it’s blowing my mind.
Basically, some of the people most vulnerable to scams are those trying to run scams on others.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that there’s a subset of crypto people who engage in crypto gambling Ponzi “games.”
People stacked a Ponzi scheme on a Ponzi scheme and only got upset when somebody didn’t play by the “rules.” Of a Ponzi scheme. Because somebody took their money.
Am I missing something? Because there’s a multitude of these sites and it’s blowing my mind.
It's like "Turtles All the Way Down!" except instead of turtles it's idiots.
There's an old saying that you can't con an honest man. There was a cracked article about a guy who used to sell counterfeit magic cards. He said that the easiest way to avoid suspicion was by strongly implying the cards were stolen, and therefore he needed to unload them very quick.
There's an old saying that you can't con an honest man. There was a cracked article about a guy who used to sell counterfeit magic cards. He said that the easiest way to avoid suspicion was by strongly implying the cards were stolen, and therefore he needed to unload them very quick.
OMG, so someone literally started a ponzi scheme, called it a ponzi scheme and then ran away with all the money. And this happened twice. And people still fell for it.
Cryptocurrency, I would love you if you weren't fucking up the environment and PC prices.
No, someone told a bunch of people that he was running a Ponzi scheme, when he was actually running an entirely different, much simpler scam.
To be fair, it is a ponzi scheme, but instead of a pyramid, it's one guy standing on a platform of suckers.
So it's like a Spanish Prisoner scam, but instead of a guy pretending to be injured, it's a guy claiming that he'll offer a large reward for something worthless?
A quick search suggests that Proof of Stake algorithms do not give miners rewards on block creation, but instead solely from the transaction fees.
Which implies that the miners can select transactions with the largest bribes attached to add into their block, and not others.
Omitted transactions do not prevent consensus, but instead live in unconfirmed-transaction-limbo until some miner adds them to a block.
There is no reason a miner ever needs to add a transaction to a block as far as I'm aware.
Consensus is just everyone agreeing that the next block added to the chain is indeed the next block added to the chain, and ensuring no chain-forking is going on.
Miners get block rewards in PoS or PoW. The amount and percentage of depends on the coin, but nobody would bother PoW or PoS mining a coin that gave 0% of block rewards to miners. Profit from transaction fees are usually negligible on anything but the top coins because barely anyone uses these things, they are just speculating.
I'm starting to think what you're describing isn't an attack but it just the software running as designed. Higher fee transactions will get processed first and very low fee transactions sit in limbo and never get confirmed. I believe in Bitcoin, unconfirmed transactions eventually expire and the users would need to try again with a higher (more fair) fee.
Miner's can't force fees to a certain level because users (or really their wallet software) decide what fees to attach to transactions. All miners can do is poach the most profitable transactions first. If they started not accepting fees below some artificial inflated level, then 1) user's transactions would stop going through and 2) the attack would become known, probably killing the whole project.
Trades, meaning exchanging a coin for something else, occur off the chain because the chain software has no knowledge of the off-chain thing you are buying with your coin. So miners are not involved and have no control over fees or the transaction going though. I mean, if your exchange is malicious you are just fucked. That has happened a bunch of times in crypto because almost all of the exchanges are shady. But if your miners turn malicious but your exchange is still good, you can sell the coins without the miners' behavior affecting that trade.
The issue with the rising transaction fees in PoS is that the exchange would only push everyone else's fees up.
So individual to individual coin trades would be screwed up, and individuals would be forced into an exchange to avoid the fees.
... Although this would already be happening with Bitcoin.
A quick search suggests that Proof of Stake algorithms do not give miners rewards on block creation, but instead solely from the transaction fees.
Which implies that the miners can select transactions with the largest bribes attached to add into their block, and not others.
Omitted transactions do not prevent consensus, but instead live in unconfirmed-transaction-limbo until some miner adds them to a block.
There is no reason a miner ever needs to add a transaction to a block as far as I'm aware.
Consensus is just everyone agreeing that the next block added to the chain is indeed the next block added to the chain, and ensuring no chain-forking is going on.
Miners get block rewards in PoS or PoW. The amount and percentage of depends on the coin, but nobody would bother PoW or PoS mining a coin that gave 0% of block rewards to miners. Profit from transaction fees are usually negligible on anything but the top coins because barely anyone uses these things, they are just speculating.
I'm starting to think what you're describing isn't an attack but it just the software running as designed. Higher fee transactions will get processed first and very low fee transactions sit in limbo and never get confirmed. I believe in Bitcoin, unconfirmed transactions eventually expire and the users would need to try again with a higher (more fair) fee.
Miner's can't force fees to a certain level because users (or really their wallet software) decide what fees to attach to transactions. All miners can do is poach the most profitable transactions first. If they started not accepting fees below some artificial inflated level, then 1) user's transactions would stop going through and 2) the attack would become known, probably killing the whole project.
Trades, meaning exchanging a coin for something else, occur off the chain because the chain software has no knowledge of the off-chain thing you are buying with your coin. So miners are not involved and have no control over fees or the transaction going though. I mean, if your exchange is malicious you are just fucked. That has happened a bunch of times in crypto because almost all of the exchanges are shady. But if your miners turn malicious but your exchange is still good, you can sell the coins without the miners' behavior affecting that trade.
The issue with the rising transaction fees in PoS is that the exchange would only push everyone else's fees up.
So individual to individual coin trades would be screwed up, and individuals would be forced into an exchange to avoid the fees.
... Although this would already be happening with Bitcoin.
...
Decentralised ledger indeed.
I assume that the inevitable result is that coins are only going to be held by a few large exchanges, with most transactions just involving shuffling numbers on an exchange's database. Actual cryptocurrency transactions will be rare, and will only be used to balance net transfers across exchanges.
A quick search suggests that Proof of Stake algorithms do not give miners rewards on block creation, but instead solely from the transaction fees.
Which implies that the miners can select transactions with the largest bribes attached to add into their block, and not others.
Omitted transactions do not prevent consensus, but instead live in unconfirmed-transaction-limbo until some miner adds them to a block.
There is no reason a miner ever needs to add a transaction to a block as far as I'm aware.
Consensus is just everyone agreeing that the next block added to the chain is indeed the next block added to the chain, and ensuring no chain-forking is going on.
Miners get block rewards in PoS or PoW. The amount and percentage of depends on the coin, but nobody would bother PoW or PoS mining a coin that gave 0% of block rewards to miners. Profit from transaction fees are usually negligible on anything but the top coins because barely anyone uses these things, they are just speculating.
I'm starting to think what you're describing isn't an attack but it just the software running as designed. Higher fee transactions will get processed first and very low fee transactions sit in limbo and never get confirmed. I believe in Bitcoin, unconfirmed transactions eventually expire and the users would need to try again with a higher (more fair) fee.
Miner's can't force fees to a certain level because users (or really their wallet software) decide what fees to attach to transactions. All miners can do is poach the most profitable transactions first. If they started not accepting fees below some artificial inflated level, then 1) user's transactions would stop going through and 2) the attack would become known, probably killing the whole project.
Trades, meaning exchanging a coin for something else, occur off the chain because the chain software has no knowledge of the off-chain thing you are buying with your coin. So miners are not involved and have no control over fees or the transaction going though. I mean, if your exchange is malicious you are just fucked. That has happened a bunch of times in crypto because almost all of the exchanges are shady. But if your miners turn malicious but your exchange is still good, you can sell the coins without the miners' behavior affecting that trade.
The issue with the rising transaction fees in PoS is that the exchange would only push everyone else's fees up.
So individual to individual coin trades would be screwed up, and individuals would be forced into an exchange to avoid the fees.
... Although this would already be happening with Bitcoin.
...
Decentralised ledger indeed.
I assume that the inevitable result is that coins are only going to be held by a few large exchanges, with most transactions just involving shuffling numbers on an exchange's database. Actual cryptocurrency transactions will be rare, and will only be used to balance net transfers across exchanges.
The exchanges will then be able to produce money by adding accounts creating a fractional reserve system with no regulation... its foolproof!
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Exactly. This goes back to my point about paying taxes. They are literally paying taxes under the guise of fees to a different, private entity which owes them absolutely nothing. And whose actions they expect a government to check when those actors inevitably screw them. That same government that these jackholes are refusing to pay their fair share of taxes to.
Anyone who has been to a country other than the United States sees something similar in action with regards to how credit and debit are regulated. If you go to Europe you will have ubiquitous access to purchase things with debit with no additional fees. Nobody buys things they can afford with credit. They just use debit instead. Because it is mandated to banks that they must support debit transactions. In the United States the bank and credit company (often the same thing) will fuck you over by preventing you from having access to your money and charging you to spend funds directly while incentivizing you to use a credit card instead. Which means they get a cut of the action from both the buyer and the seller for doing something they should be doing in the first place.
"Support your traditional financial system because it better enables you to pay your fair share of taxes" is not a populist argument that will get you very far
"Support your traditional financial system because it better enables you to pay your fair share of taxes" is not a populist argument that will get you very far
1) I'm pretty sure it resonates with pretty much everyone who isn't getting scammed by Dunning-Krugerrands. Which is the vast majority of the actual population.
2) Who said anything about trying to appeal to these people in the first place? The only thing they will learn from is failure. The rest of us will be left to pick up the pieces in terms of paying for their litigation, punishing the offenders, and increased safety net support because they lost all of their money. Anyone want to take a bet on how many of these idiots have unironically used the term "welfare queen"?
"Support your traditional financial system because it better enables you to pay your fair share of taxes" is not a populist argument that will get you very far
1) I'm pretty sure it resonates with pretty much everyone who isn't getting scammed by Dunning-Krugerrands. Which is the vast majority of the actual population.
2) Who said anything about trying to appeal to these people in the first place? The only thing they will learn from is failure. The rest of us will be left to pick up the pieces in terms of paying for their litigation, punishing the offenders, and increased safety net support because they lost all of their money. Anyone want to take a bet on how many of these idiots have unironically used the term "welfare queen"?
If you're in on the cryptocurrency train, aren't you pretty much going to be Dunning-Krugered implicitly?
"Support your traditional financial system because it better enables youeveryone to pay yourtheir fair share of taxes" is not a populist argument that will get you very far
Taxes not being paid hurts everyone, supporting a system that enables people to avoid taxes only hurts yourself.
+12
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TetraNitroCubaneThe DjinneratorAt the bottom of a bottleRegistered Userregular
So, Prodeum! It was a cryptocurrency designed on the Ethereum blockchain. There was a pitch about this cryptocurrency using the blockchain to track fruits and vegetables somehow, in addition to having value as a currency? It's not entirely clear at the moment, because... Uh, well, after taking a lot of money from people, this happened:
Prodium is a drug to treat urinary tract infections
Edit: so in running through the Buttcoin reddit I came across this book. I will be reading over the excerpts in the next week or so but it looked interesting on its face so thought I would let you all know. If I can find a copy I will read the whole thing
Prodium is a drug to treat urinary tract infections
Edit: so in running through the Buttcoin reddit I came across this book. I will be reading over the excerpts in the next week or so but it looked interesting on its face so thought I would let you all know. If I can find a copy I will read the whole thing
Reading the excerpts it’s more a history and less a lesson on bitcoin. Though there are interesting lessons in there. If you want something more straightforwardly technical the blog posts look better
Prodium is a drug to treat urinary tract infections
Edit: so in running through the Buttcoin reddit I came across this book. I will be reading over the excerpts in the next week or so but it looked interesting on its face so thought I would let you all know. If I can find a copy I will read the whole thing
The chapter titles of this book, at least, are excellent.
Hahaha, reading the excerpt:
(Mullins was also famous for his anti-Semitism; every time Mullins said “banker” he meant “Jew,” but this mostly isn’t consciously the case amongst Bitcoiners, who only occasionally rant about Zionists.)
Malicious seed generation website steals $4 million of IOTA. I highly recommended you need the blog post, it's an interesting explanation of the technical attack. It's amazing how many malicious people you can end up trusting in your system that's supposed to require you to trust nobody.
the Reply all podcast did an ep about tracking someone's bitcoins years after they were though to be lost. goes into some of the interesting stuff about how "anonymous" blockchains really are.
At one point they brought in a guy who tracks bitcoin transactions as a profession. It took him about 45 seconds to figure out who things were getting transfers to and from just from the data.
I just love that the inherent flaws in cryptocurrency have led to the rise of "banks" that get robbed or rip their customers off regularly and have no regulation.
I'm trying to write something constructive to say, but at this point, I'm more interested in watching the undulations of crypto as it tries to legitimize itself. It's almost as if transactions need to be regulated so as to protect people's "worth" in them.
I just love that the inherent flaws in cryptocurrency have led to the rise of "banks" that get robbed or rip their customers off regularly and have no regulation.
like most libertarian ideas it's been tried before and failed miserably
Wildcat banks used to pull that crap constantly before we stopped them
The essence of cryptocurrencies is to demonstrate the reasons for the existence of the rules and regulations it's creators demonize so much.
It's the guy screaming about how the law forcing you to wear seatbelts is the government trying to control everything in your life dying in a car crash because he wasn't wearing his seatbelt.
Bitfinex is a big crypto exchange. At one point they lost their relationship with their bank for being generally shady. So they started a company and coin called Tether that is theoretically pegged to $1. You, an honest person who has gone through KYC processing, can deposit USD in your Tether account, they give you Tether coins, and you trade those on Bitfinex for whatever crypto. Theoretically you could someday get USD back from Tether, but there is fine print to say that they are under no obligation to exchange USD for Tether coins(!). So the end result is Bitifnex the exchange no longer handles any USD, and no longer has any KYC responsibility. Those are all handled by Tether.
This is already shady as hell, but in the last month or so two things have happened:
Tether has added almost a billion new USDT to the market. Which implies someone gave this shady ass company a billion actual dollars, or they are making up pretend money.
Tether has cut off ties with the accounting firm that was supposed to audit it. People have been wanting an audit of Tether since it started for obvious reasons, and this is Tether saying "Fuck off" to those people. Tether also refuses to divulge what bank they are using to store any real USD they may have.
So either Tether has been accepting loads of real money from illicit sources that they don't want auditors to see, or, in a much more likely scenario, they are just printing fake money whenever they want to in order to increase volume on their exchange.
Bitfinex is a big crypto exchange. At one point they lost their relationship with their bank for being generally shady. So they started a company and coin called Tether that is theoretically pegged to $1. You, an honest person who has gone through KYC processing, can deposit USD in your Tether account, they give you Tether coins, and you trade those on Bitfinex for whatever crypto. Theoretically you could someday get USD back from Tether, but there is fine print to say that they are under no obligation to exchange USD for Tether coins(!). So the end result is Bitifnex the exchange no longer handles any USD, and no longer has any KYC responsibility. Those are all handled by Tether.
This is already shady as hell, but in the last month or so two things have happened:
Tether has added almost a billion new USDT to the market. Which implies someone gave this shady ass company a billion actual dollars, or they are making up pretend money.
Tether has cut off ties with the accounting firm that was supposed to audit it. People have been wanting an audit of Tether since it started for obvious reasons, and this is Tether saying "Fuck off" to those people. Tether also refuses to divulge what bank they are using to store any real USD they may have.
So either Tether has been accepting loads of real money from illicit sources that they don't want auditors to see, or, in a much more likely scenario, they are just printing fake money whenever they want to in order to increase volume on their exchange.
Is this the “a wizard did it” wealth creation strategy?
Bitfinex is a big crypto exchange. At one point they lost their relationship with their bank for being generally shady. So they started a company and coin called Tether that is theoretically pegged to $1. You, an honest person who has gone through KYC processing, can deposit USD in your Tether account, they give you Tether coins, and you trade those on Bitfinex for whatever crypto. Theoretically you could someday get USD back from Tether, but there is fine print to say that they are under no obligation to exchange USD for Tether coins(!). So the end result is Bitifnex the exchange no longer handles any USD, and no longer has any KYC responsibility. Those are all handled by Tether.
This is already shady as hell, but in the last month or so two things have happened:
Tether has added almost a billion new USDT to the market. Which implies someone gave this shady ass company a billion actual dollars, or they are making up pretend money.
Tether has cut off ties with the accounting firm that was supposed to audit it. People have been wanting an audit of Tether since it started for obvious reasons, and this is Tether saying "Fuck off" to those people. Tether also refuses to divulge what bank they are using to store any real USD they may have.
So either Tether has been accepting loads of real money from illicit sources that they don't want auditors to see, or, in a much more likely scenario, they are just printing fake money whenever they want to in order to increase volume on their exchange.
Is this the “a wizard did it” wealth creation strategy?
This is "secret service up your ass" wealth creation.
Bitfinex is a big crypto exchange. At one point they lost their relationship with their bank for being generally shady. So they started a company and coin called Tether that is theoretically pegged to $1. You, an honest person who has gone through KYC processing, can deposit USD in your Tether account, they give you Tether coins, and you trade those on Bitfinex for whatever crypto. Theoretically you could someday get USD back from Tether, but there is fine print to say that they are under no obligation to exchange USD for Tether coins(!). So the end result is Bitifnex the exchange no longer handles any USD, and no longer has any KYC responsibility. Those are all handled by Tether.
This is already shady as hell, but in the last month or so two things have happened:
Tether has added almost a billion new USDT to the market. Which implies someone gave this shady ass company a billion actual dollars, or they are making up pretend money.
Tether has cut off ties with the accounting firm that was supposed to audit it. People have been wanting an audit of Tether since it started for obvious reasons, and this is Tether saying "Fuck off" to those people. Tether also refuses to divulge what bank they are using to store any real USD they may have.
So either Tether has been accepting loads of real money from illicit sources that they don't want auditors to see, or, in a much more likely scenario, they are just printing fake money whenever they want to in order to increase volume on their exchange.
Posts
Basically, some of the people most vulnerable to scams are those trying to run scams on others.
It's like "Turtles All the Way Down!" except instead of turtles it's idiots.
That article was super fake btw.
So it's like a Spanish Prisoner scam, but instead of a guy pretending to be injured, it's a guy claiming that he'll offer a large reward for something worthless?
The issue with the rising transaction fees in PoS is that the exchange would only push everyone else's fees up.
So individual to individual coin trades would be screwed up, and individuals would be forced into an exchange to avoid the fees.
... Although this would already be happening with Bitcoin.
...
Decentralised ledger indeed.
I assume that the inevitable result is that coins are only going to be held by a few large exchanges, with most transactions just involving shuffling numbers on an exchange's database. Actual cryptocurrency transactions will be rare, and will only be used to balance net transfers across exchanges.
So banks...without the Fed or assets of any kind.
Anyone who has been to a country other than the United States sees something similar in action with regards to how credit and debit are regulated. If you go to Europe you will have ubiquitous access to purchase things with debit with no additional fees. Nobody buys things they can afford with credit. They just use debit instead. Because it is mandated to banks that they must support debit transactions. In the United States the bank and credit company (often the same thing) will fuck you over by preventing you from having access to your money and charging you to spend funds directly while incentivizing you to use a credit card instead. Which means they get a cut of the action from both the buyer and the seller for doing something they should be doing in the first place.
...I'm probably on a list now.
1) I'm pretty sure it resonates with pretty much everyone who isn't getting scammed by Dunning-Krugerrands. Which is the vast majority of the actual population.
2) Who said anything about trying to appeal to these people in the first place? The only thing they will learn from is failure. The rest of us will be left to pick up the pieces in terms of paying for their litigation, punishing the offenders, and increased safety net support because they lost all of their money. Anyone want to take a bet on how many of these idiots have unironically used the term "welfare queen"?
If you're in on the cryptocurrency train, aren't you pretty much going to be Dunning-Krugered implicitly?
I guess to be fair, that's more than most people who get scammed this way receive.
Prodium is a drug to treat urinary tract infections
Edit: so in running through the Buttcoin reddit I came across this book. I will be reading over the excerpts in the next week or so but it looked interesting on its face so thought I would let you all know. If I can find a copy I will read the whole thing
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/table-of-contents/
The chapter titles of this book, at least, are excellent.
Hahaha, reading the excerpt:
At one point they brought in a guy who tracks bitcoin transactions as a profession. It took him about 45 seconds to figure out who things were getting transfers to and from just from the data.
The libertarian dream!
Wildcat banks used to pull that crap constantly before we stopped them
Also it pains me that "exitscam" is a term.
The essence of cryptocurrencies is to demonstrate the reasons for the existence of the rules and regulations it's creators demonize so much.
It's the guy screaming about how the law forcing you to wear seatbelts is the government trying to control everything in your life dying in a car crash because he wasn't wearing his seatbelt.
Some background
Bitfinex is a big crypto exchange. At one point they lost their relationship with their bank for being generally shady. So they started a company and coin called Tether that is theoretically pegged to $1. You, an honest person who has gone through KYC processing, can deposit USD in your Tether account, they give you Tether coins, and you trade those on Bitfinex for whatever crypto. Theoretically you could someday get USD back from Tether, but there is fine print to say that they are under no obligation to exchange USD for Tether coins(!). So the end result is Bitifnex the exchange no longer handles any USD, and no longer has any KYC responsibility. Those are all handled by Tether.
This is already shady as hell, but in the last month or so two things have happened:
Tether has added almost a billion new USDT to the market. Which implies someone gave this shady ass company a billion actual dollars, or they are making up pretend money.
Tether has cut off ties with the accounting firm that was supposed to audit it. People have been wanting an audit of Tether since it started for obvious reasons, and this is Tether saying "Fuck off" to those people. Tether also refuses to divulge what bank they are using to store any real USD they may have.
So either Tether has been accepting loads of real money from illicit sources that they don't want auditors to see, or, in a much more likely scenario, they are just printing fake money whenever they want to in order to increase volume on their exchange.
Is this the “a wizard did it” wealth creation strategy?
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/now-even-youtube-serves-ads-with-cpu-draining-cryptocurrency-miners/
This is "secret service up your ass" wealth creation.
Is KYC Know Your Customer or something else?
Basic identification to prove they are real and not on an OFAC list
Just another reason why cryptocurrencies should be banned. Nuke this shit from orbit and crack down on everyone trying to run one.
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-bans-bitcoin-cryptocurrency-ico-ads-2018-1
And people wonder while I adblock everything, no exceptions.
I haven't had a browser hijacker, trojan, or malware burrow inside my OS since I've done it.
This is also why I won't disable my blocker for sites I like.