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Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

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Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#161

Post by philipwhiuk »

jezzamon wrote: post #24
leashless wrote: post #9

I've crossed swords with Molly a couple of times. I was the release coordinator for Ethereum, and I've been active in the space a long long time. Here's what it boils down to: freedom is messy. The early days of the dotcom space were filled with carnage of a type which makes crypto look pretty normal. Amazon stock dropped >90% and a trillion and a half in value vanished from the market overall. https://en.wikipedia.o…

"messy" meaning like, oh people try business ideas and they fail, or "messy" as in many people are actively scamming other people with no intent of actually providing value?

Both.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#162

Post by AnonCoward42 »

ninepoints wrote: post #126
AnonCoward42 wrote: post #121

What difference does the currency make in terms of scams? I do not see the point here. For me it makes no difference if I am being scammed in BTC, LTC, or USD or Rouble. Then there are the obvious scam coins, but these are not the primary argument here (would've made more sense when attacking crypto). FTX is the primary argument and FTX is not crypto. You could basically make the same thing with fiat money. Crypto is…

What difference you mean, aside from the lack of a regulatory framework, pseudonymity (and paradoxically, lack of privacy), lack of recourse in the face of user error, and custodial issues? The "not your keys not your coins" take is hilariously dumb in light of how much "value" has evaporated in personal custodial failure. The currency and its supporting infrastructure has everything to do with it, and crypto fails b…

> What difference you mean, aside from the lack of a regulatory framework, pseudonymity (and paradoxically, lack of privacy), lack of recourse in the face of user error, and custodial issues?

Is anonymity the issue? Cash is anonymous, but you also say that crypto is not private, which makes it now good or bad in your eyes? The opportunity for recourse has nothing to do with a currency. A currency cannot give you recourse in the face of user error (or basically any). Neither fiat can do that nor crypto can.

> The "not your keys not your coins" take is hilariously dumb in light of how much "value" has evaporated in personal custodial failure.

Do you want to tell me this cannot happen with fiat? The (partly rhetorical) question also aims at both sides custodial and non-custodial fiat.

> The currency and its supporting infrastructure has everything to do with it, and crypto fails basic litmus tests to even attempt to go mainstream.

What exactly does it fail?

edit: replace one "it" with "crypto" to remove ambiguity.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#163

Post by philipwhiuk »

tomr75 wrote: post #91
phailhaus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I send money across borders to friends an organizations via blockchain. And that transaction is completely public, and can be traced back to both of you.

can send private transactions on ZK rollups https://railgun.org/ https://app.umbra.cash/ https://spillways.finance/ https://mystiko.network/ https://cyclone.xyz/ https://www.privacypools.com/

And how do you get the money out. At the end of the days there's a magic internet money to real money transaction and that will get hit with KYC and suddenly the entire house of cards collapses.

Or you never get the money out, but suddenly have a bunch of stuff and you get hit with taxes you can't pay because you didn't take the money out.

Countries aren't just going to let people evade AML because it finances stuff much worse than Johnny buying weed from a guy in Mexico, it finances terrorism and it's infinitely easier to follow the money than anything else.

Anything that gets big will get sued to hell and it's ridiculous to think otherwise.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#164

Post by philipwhiuk »

mattdesl wrote: post #149
colesantiago wrote: post #5

And too right the critics like Molly are about crypto. There is no need to kid ourselves here anymore to even entertain crypto. Crypto is a complete scam, with no legitimate or legal use case and nothing else to offer anybody. I only wish crypto died sooner and that nobody uses it. We have other systems that are more robust than crypto that is used in the order of hundreds of millions such as UPI, PIX, Wise, Mpesa, S…

All of these proposed alternatives are centrally owned either by a private company or state central bank, and only work in and between specific countries. Crypto lies in stark contrast as a shared and open source protocol across the globe, that is not as easily centrally owned. Whether that is worth the pains of self custody, throughput and volatility is going to depend on who you ask.

Rubbish, there's already big companies set up to re-centralise it. What wallet are you using.

You don't have to use a regular bank either you know, cash is way less traceable than Bitcoin.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#165

Post by philipwhiuk »

bertil wrote: post #70
colesantiago wrote: post #5

And too right the critics like Molly are about crypto. There is no need to kid ourselves here anymore to even entertain crypto. Crypto is a complete scam, with no legitimate or legal use case and nothing else to offer anybody. I only wish crypto died sooner and that nobody uses it. We have other systems that are more robust than crypto that is used in the order of hundreds of millions such as UPI, PIX, Wise, Mpesa, S…

“Crypto” was started by a paper that suggested solving the two-general problem, a question of coordination without trust, with a very expensive solution and sensitive to a Sybil attack. For every technology, if you ask “What problem does it solve?” and take into account what limits it has, you can backtrack where it’s useful. Something autonomous, expensive, rugged? Talk to the Army. Something that allows no recourse…

> So not support terrorism, but possibly extracting currency from a controlled regime

We have controls on regimes normally because the two are highly correlated.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#166

Post by philipwhiuk »

rlt wrote: post #55
DannyBee wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt most of tech would appreciate being lumped in with crypto, which should be the first sign that your take is a little off. IE if you think you are just "tech being tech" but lots and lots of tech is like "uh, no, we aren't like you at all, please don't lump us in with you", that should tell you something. Beyond that, your take seems so divorced from reality i'm not even sure where to begin. I don't agree at a…

Of course “tech” isn’t a monolith, and neither is “crypto”. Many people into Bitcoin or crypto don’t appreciate being lumped into the very long tail of scams that are an inherent byproduct of permissionless money. It would be a bit like pre-internet engineers dismissing the internet because it’s the world’s best porn distribution mechanism.

> Many people into Bitcoin

Can these many people in Bitcoin doing legitimate stuff speak up, because I'm yet to see an actual implemented use case that isn't "evade financial regulations and hope governments don't care enough"

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#167

Post by themagician »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #142
themagician wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only "goal" of crypto is to make money. Anything else is just worn as a mask for promotion because, "Lie, cheat, steal" isn't a great set of principles for a new economic universal ledger. What crypto has become has showed just how wrong Satoshi was about people. Crypto COULD have been everything he hoped for. It could have been a system where everyone participated, with millions of nodes. Instead it became somet…

> The only "goal" of crypto is to make money. Anything else is just worn as a mask for promotion because, "Lie, cheat, steal" isn't a great set of principles for a new economic universal ledger. This is exactly why generalizing doesn't work. The most visible parts of the crypto space (exchanges, VC-funded blockchain, etc...) are there simply to make money. If you meet some of the longer-term devs, you'll see a comple…

Once you get the money, then you want the power. I suppose you’re right in that respect. He’s chooses to keep working because he’s dedicated to the scam.

None of the people in crypto are trying to make the world a better place. The harm done outweighs the benefits by such a ridiculous ratio it’s really not worth it to even trying to compute. I mean, that's what Molly White is trying to do here but it's just not necessary. We all know. Doubly so for the advocates.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#168

Post by justin_oaks »

quickthrowman wrote: post #145
molly0x57 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1513695569528692738 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1516610542588284931

‘Possibly once in a generation levels of transformative intelligence’ (lol) Here’s the genius of our time backpedaling, lying, and disappearing when he is clearly caught lying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878584 Keep fighting the good fight, Molly.

"Smart people don't tell you how smart the are."

and

"If you have to tell everyone how smart you are, you probably aren’t"

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#169

Post by mattdesl »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #164
mattdesl wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these proposed alternatives are centrally owned either by a private company or state central bank, and only work in and between specific countries. Crypto lies in stark contrast as a shared and open source protocol across the globe, that is not as easily centrally owned. Whether that is worth the pains of self custody, throughput and volatility is going to depend on who you ask.

Rubbish, there's already big companies set up to re-centralise it. What wallet are you using. You don't have to use a regular bank either you know, cash is way less traceable than Bitcoin.

> What wallet are you using.

There are hundreds of wallets, some of them OSS, some of them closed source, some of them homebrew. I have used several different wallets, including some that I have coded myself from lower level cryptographic APIs. This is the beauty of it: users are not limited to MetaMask, just like users are not limited to browsing the web in Chrome - despite it obviously having major market share.

And cash is a poor substitute.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#170

Post by [deleted] »

quickthrowman wrote: post #157
p4bl0 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't get how people can believe a single second that this kind of projects can make any sense. What is the purpose of a blockchain for this? You cannot get rid of a central authority, because the transmission of land or really anything that exists outside of the blockchain you're planning to use cannot be transferred by simply writing something on the said blockchain. That only works for crypto-tokens becau…

> I really don't get how people can believe a single second that this kind of projects can make any sense. I don’t either, given that > writing anything else on a given blockchain only guarantees that this something else is written on this given blockchain, and if you don't have any external authority that can make it true (for example, the justice system to which you can go if the person to whom you have paid for a…

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