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Penny Arcade - Comic - Semantics
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Semantics
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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They did this to have a bunch of rich people post "Send me bitcoin and I'll send you back twice as much!" and raked in an estimated $120k based on transaction analysis of the blockchain.
They could have created any level of political or economic confusion. Have Trump declare war on Canada. Have Biden go on a thirty five tweet rant about black people. Have McDonalds announce they're closing their stores at midnight and free food until then.
Hell, they had Elon Musk's account - they could have used it to manipulate Tesla stock prices and made way more than $120k shorting or pump-and-dumping it. And as a bonus, nobody would have believed it was a hack because he's done that shit himself.
But thankfully, with all the power at their fingertips, they chose to scam a few dozen people for internet funbux.
They're a hero, frankly.
Not worth it. Trump because it's not much worse than what he's already posting and Biden because he could go pedophile now and still win with respectable margin.
-Tycho Brahe
Oddly enough, Trump's twitter wasn't hacked, possibly because because they have extra protections on it.
I'm sure they had them in place for Obama, too, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the likelihood of our current POTUS to fall for a phishing attempt...
I shouted this line near the West Freeport gate a few times back in EverQuest in '99. I don't think I heard of it before but I thought it sounded like an obvious scam, so of course I was subverting expectations by actually giving folks double their platinum. One newb doubled his 5 platinum up to 80 platinum off of me, but very few people actually trusted me enough to try it. Actually, only two people gave me anything in that first round - the newb who gave me 5p and another random person who gave me 9p. When I messaged the 9p guy to meet up and give him his 18p, he was two zones away and told me to keep it.
Someone must have reported me though because after a few rounds of it, 4 zombies spawned right at the gate and attacked me. The guards standing at the entrance wouldn't attack the zombies, but other players took care of them. I don't remember if I did it again after that.
It seems hard to imagine now but in my mind at the time, MMORPGs were actually just chat rooms with some game distraction added to provide fuel for the conversation so I didn't really care about losing the money and enjoyed the exercise of rewarding people by pay-matching their level of trust in a stranger.
Honestly, doing stuff like that sounds like a lot of risk though. Manipulating the stock market is a serious crime, hence why Musk got in trouble just for joking about $420. Posting libelous tweets that could cause an international incident is probably a war crime. Scamming people out of bitcoin is both relatively easy to get away with and hard to track. And honestly, $120k from a scam like that isn't a bad haul at all. It's not "fuck you" money, but it's definitely more money than any person could earn legally in the amount of time it likely took to set up the scam.