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Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

bbc.co.uk

31–40 of 166 posts

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#31
post #29
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and the government is paying all its employees salaries with that money, and it accepts paiements with that currency too. It’s what all the crypto currency people completely misunderstand whenever they’re bringing the « every currency is a matter of trust ». Indeed, ultimately paper is just paper, but the guarantees and legal bindings behind that paper are what makes it easier to grant « trust » and thus value.

The constitution allowed for the government to coin currency. Literally out of metals. That was gamed with tickets for gold, aka dollars. That was gamed even further by removing it from the gold standard. That causes weird things like the metal value of the coin being worth more than the face value and a bunch of news stories about how it is illegal to melt down your worth less coins. We now effectively have communis…

Real GDP per capita in 1950 was around the $2k mark, and things like cars and televisions were still out of the reach of the average person, never mind those on minimum wage. You have to be incredibly stupid, or more likely trolling, to believe that generation - which was an inch shorter than ours due to poorer nutrition and had an average lifespan a decade shorter - enjoyed four times our average wealth.

A lot of the investment that got us here depended on people actually having some incentive not to bury their dollars in the ground.

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#32
a week ago I passed in front the One Coin shop in Sofia. It was open.

I was surprised as It had been closed for a long time.

I had listened to the BBC podcast and was curious so I tried to enter.

It was locked and a lady came to open. There were a couple of people, maybe customers. There were books, CDs and other material.

I stayed two minutes and head to the exit. The door was locked and the lady came to open.

That's all.

It felt weird.

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#33
post #4

Everything else aside, this article has an unbelievable amount of typos for a mainstream publication

Seems to be common with BBC articles lately. I read their tennis pages often, and it amazes me how often they get the winner of a match wrong! It's almost as if the reviewer has no context when checking through the article.

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#36
post #6

Bitcoin is no different. It's just a scam on a much longer timescale.

Faith is the only difference between scam and valuable. USD/CAD is also just paper blessed by a central bank..

Not exactly. Money used to be backed by something valuable like gold (while the gold itself was mostly faith-based valueable).

These days, it is backed by debt. Money comes into existence in some federal bank/central bank out of thin air, and is then put into circulation by granting loans i.e. creating debt. So money was and is really an IOU. And governments guarantee that you will be able to collect on it, one way or another.

crypto on the other hand comes into existence either by proof of work (work that cannot be recovered and it lost forever and therefore worthless) or blind faith, with not even an IOU backing it.

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#37
post #33
post #4

Everything else aside, this article has an unbelievable amount of typos for a mainstream publication

Seems to be common with BBC articles lately. I read their tennis pages often, and it amazes me how often they get the winner of a match wrong! It's almost as if the reviewer has no context when checking through the article.

Probably AI written content.

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#38
post #32

a week ago I passed in front the One Coin shop in Sofia. It was open. I was surprised as It had been closed for a long time. I had listened to the BBC podcast and was curious so I tried to enter. It was locked and a lady came to open. There were a couple of people, maybe customers. There were books, CDs and other material. I stayed two minutes and head to the exit. The door was locked and the lady came to open. That'…

this is how people die in fires, fyi.

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#39
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The constitution allowed for the government to coin currency. Literally out of metals. That was gamed with tickets for gold, aka dollars. That was gamed even further by removing it from the gold standard. That causes weird things like the metal value of the coin being worth more than the face value and a bunch of news stories about how it is illegal to melt down your worth less coins. We now effectively have communis…

Real GDP per capita in 1950 was around the $2k mark, and things like cars and televisions were still out of the reach of the average person, never mind those on minimum wage. You have to be incredibly stupid, or more likely trolling, to believe that generation - which was an inch shorter than ours due to poorer nutrition and had an average lifespan a decade shorter - enjoyed four times our average wealth. A lot of th…

U.S. GDP per capita in 1950 was $9573, according to a web search.

In 1953 or so my parents rented their first house as newlyweds. For $10 per month. Minimum wage was 75 cents/hour. My parents definitely had a used car...

So 14 hours labor at minimum wage, paid the rent...compare that to today.

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#40
post #9

Why, with all that money, didn't they simply buy a Blockchain? It's not hard, fork bitcoin, build something on Ethereum. Or did it simply not matter for the pyramid scheme? If in the end they had a crappy Blockchain and the investors would have gotten their coins, would they've been guilty of anything?

It seems like they tried, but no blockchain expert would go near it because it was so clearly a Ponzi-type scheme. Just look at the website: http://web.archive.org/web/20150302021347/http://www.onecoin...

They’re all Ponzi schemes (haha) what about this one in particular made them find God?
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