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Coffeezilla, a YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams

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Re: Coffeezilla, a YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams

#161

Post by benreesman »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #118
bigbillheck wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don’t bitch and moan to the choir, profit from it! I'm not going to throw away whatever little dignity I have left in order to try and profit off of anything relating to cryptocurrency.

There is no dignity in watching your life savings evaporate from inflation caused by politicians and governments beyond your control. Inflation is the cruelest way to invalidate the fruit of the labor of a man’s life.

Cryptocurrency was a massive asset bubble two weeks ago. Also a year ago.

But if anyone took the time to read about the history of tech startups and the culture around them over the last 50-ish years, or ECNs over the last 25-ish years: it would become immediately apparent that there is nothing new here!

Most of “crypto” circa 2022 will wash out. Most of it is tulip-mania bullshit. And in fact, the well-traveled chestnuts (e.g. “when your shoe-shine boy starts asking for stock tips, hold, when he starts giving them: sell”) date from the last time the robber/renter class kicked out this many rungs on the prosperity ladder and tried to paper it over with expensive bonds. As a society: been there, done that.

But there is true innovation hiding in little corners: Parity has figured out how to roll an update to every nginx box in the world as the price of serving a web page via WASM! That would be huge news in any other context. And I wouldn’t count the IO-HK people out just yet on beating dumbass Algorand PBFT.

But just so the ground rules are clear: you want some inflation. Just ask the guy who bought a pizza for 1BTC in like 2013 or whatever. We used to kill each other and try to enslave continents over a limited supply of gold. The Spanish were especially good at this. Look at them now.

If your roll is maintaining or increasing in value you have no incentive to back some profitable venture with it.

Inflation out of control is a problem. Deflation is knights with swords fighting over mud.

God I wish people read books.

Re: Coffeezilla, a YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams

#162

Post by tromp »

8note wrote: post #158
tromp wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It produces objective immutability of the transaction history.

Isn't it subjective immutability? Your transaction might disappear from the history if the view changes to have some other branch be the accepted one

The PoW on top of a tx produces immutability in the sense of a minimum cost imposed on a rewriting of that tx. If no attacker is willing to bear that cost, then the objective longest chain rule (i.e. most cumulative difficulty) will preserve the history up to that tx. Without PoW you have no objective way to determine the true history.

Re: Coffeezilla, a YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams

#163

Post by [deleted] »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #134
paulpauper wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is not the same as the cryptography being broken losing crypto due to hardware failure or forgetting keys is not the same as someone taking it by breaking the cryptography . If this were possible, there is tons of crypto right now for the taking. It's a self-funding bug bounty.

Yes, but being cryptographically broken is not matter, does it? First rule of computer security is any system is no more strong than its weakest link. Relevant xkcd [1]: why worry about breaking advanced cryptography when you can just socially engineer the passphrase out of people? [1] https://xkcd.com/538/

[deleted]

Re: Coffeezilla, a YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams

#164

Post by Cannabat »

benreesman wrote: post #80

HN hasn’t been this rabidly, vocally mad at something since levels.fyi outed FAANG comp. Ads? Evil, useless, fuck those people making 10x me. Recommender systems? Evil, creepy, fuck those people making all that money. You can short this shit. You can short Google stock. You can short Bitcoin. So if it’s all one big phony ads tracking machine learning Ponzi scheme scam? Don’t bitch and moan to the choir, profit from i…

> profit from it!

Empathy for other humans guides us to not take advantage of others for our own benefit. People's lives are getting ruined by this stuff, and even if they are shortsighted or gullible, they are still people who we should care about.

Re: Coffeezilla, a YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams

#165

Post by skinnymuch »

paulpauper wrote: post #113
stouset wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You cannot confiscate crypto like you can other assets. You're correct. In most cases it's dramatically easier to confiscate the crypto. See: the horde of people who've had their cryptocurrency and NFTs stolen. To say nothing of the uncountable Bitcoin billionaires who've had a hard drive crash, lost their keys, forgotten a password, etc.

this is not the same as the cryptography being broken losing crypto due to hardware failure or forgetting keys is not the same as someone taking it by breaking the cryptography . If this were possible, there is tons of crypto right now for the taking. It's a self-funding bug bounty.

Why does that matter? People care if they do or don’t have their money. Not if their money was taken or screwed up for a whitelisted type of reason.

Re: Coffeezilla, a YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams

#166

Post by practice9 »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #64
syzygyhack wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unregulated stable coins have proven to be as stable as the titanic was unsinkable. When in the last five years have you had difficulty cashing out USDT, USDC, or DAI at dollar value?

Because past performance is _always_ indicative of future performance, am I right? > When in the last five years have you had difficulty cashing out USDT, USDC, or DAI at dollar value? You could have said the exact same thing about Terra/UST right until sometimes last week. It works until it doesn't.

Same could be said for US dollar as a world currency, couldn't it? Do you think its model is sustainable?

British pound has enjoyed a long history and was used as a currency for international trade until early 20st century. Then dollar took over.

One could argue it's because USA emerged from WW2 as a super-power.

But it would be foolish to say that only a major war or a fall of the empire will change what currency people use.

I'm not arguing for Terra as it was really a bad design. But it is odd that so many people just reject the idea of cryptocurrencies.

It's a big sandbox, big experiment with thousands of people working on the new primitives. Even if 80% projects are scam or failures, 20% might be revolutionary. The US dollar as it is today went through several iterations

It was kind of a stablecoin in the early days, pegged to the value of Spanish dollar which was more popular. There were also Continentals that failed and many colonial currencies that were outlawed IIRC.

Re: Coffeezilla, a YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams

#167

Post by jerriep »

A couple of years ago I watched a lot of Coffeezille, Spencer Cornelia and some others who exposed online scams. Initially, I found it entertaining but over time I came to the conclusion that their videos aren't really protecting anyone. They themselves (Coffee, Spencer, etc) admit on some of their videos do basically nothing to protect anyone from scams. You can literally shove tons of evidence in someone's face that guru X is a scammer, and they still won't believe it.

So, I have come to the conclusion that they (Coffee, Spencer, etc) are as much part of that whole ecosystem as the scammers themselves.

They don't do this to protect anyone - if they wanted to they can simply go with their evidence to the authorities. They depend on these scammers to make videos from which they can make money. And that is all it is about to them in the end - about making money. If the scammers went away tomorrow they'd be out of a career as well.

Re: Coffeezilla, a YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams

#168

Post by SilasX »

michael1999 wrote: post #160
SilasX wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inanimate things like mutual fund shares?

Mutual fund units are a claim on future production. They connect to the the animate. A gold coin can never pay you a dividend.

Great — then you agree that your original standard, animacy, was not quite what you meant as the distinguishing factor. I hope you’re more precise about that in the future.

Re: Coffeezilla, a YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams

#170

Post by polygamous_bat »

practice9 wrote: post #166
polygamous_bat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because past performance is _always_ indicative of future performance, am I right? > When in the last five years have you had difficulty cashing out USDT, USDC, or DAI at dollar value? You could have said the exact same thing about Terra/UST right until sometimes last week. It works until it doesn't.

Same could be said for US dollar as a world currency, couldn't it? Do you think its model is sustainable? British pound has enjoyed a long history and was used as a currency for international trade until early 20st century. Then dollar took over. One could argue it's because USA emerged from WW2 as a super-power. But it would be foolish to say that only a major war or a fall of the empire will change what currency pe…

Currencies rise and fall, and US dollar may as well get replaced by the Chinese yen as the world reserve currency by 2050. But that does not in any way merit cryptocurrencies, whose uselessness is independent of the failures of the US monetary policy.

Your argument reminds me of the Politician's fallacy, which goes like: "we should invest in an alternative asset in case the US dollar fails, cryptocurrency is something, thus we should invest in cryptocurrencies." Go read this thread to understand the numerous criticisms of cryptocurrencies and then think why any of the existing cryptocurrencies should be worth beyond $0 (or slightly more, I admit they are novel and thus could be a collectible).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

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