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We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution

arstechnica.com

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Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution

#81

Post by ajb »

This was apparently reached in Russia a while back, and became very advanced: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579124072390463488.html

"In contrast, Russian cryptobros that I know tend to act very, very lowkey. The fewer people know about your activities, the better. Posting about dealing with crypto in social media is absolutely unthinkable. Why? Because that makes you too easy and lucrative prey "

"Most likely explanation:

Russian federal prison officer built an underground prison as an exact copy of a real prison. There he persuaded kidnapped ppl they are in a real prison. They'd give him wants he wanted, then he'd kill & burn them. In 2018 he died, prison was abandoned"

Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution

#82

Post by ramesh31 »

eru wrote: post #2

Stealing most crypto money is about the dumbest thing ever, because all transactions (for most such currencies) are open to the public to scrutinise and de-anonymous at their leisure. And the police is included in 'the public'.

>Stealing most crypto money is about the dumbest thing ever, because all transactions (for most such currencies) are open to the public to scrutinise and de-anonymous at their leisure. And the police is included in 'the public'.

People keep saying this, and yet it keeps happening. You seem to have far more faith in the police than is warranted. Exactly how many investigations have ended in an arrest and recovery of funds from these actions? I'm guessing somewhere near zero for anything not directly involving government or corporate interests.

Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution

#84

Post by reaperducer »

dgrr19 wrote: post #52
satanfirst wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching how it is working. That the laundering can be tracked is just an expense to the process of recruiting suckers to be the visible parties who eventually do time and don't know about anything but the other visible parties.

But that also happens in the fiat system, so where's the flaw in crypto?

But that also happens in the fiat system, so where's the flaw in crypto?

The flaw is that crypto was supposed to be better than fiat.

Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution

#85

Post by Gigachad »

onion2k wrote: post #39
danaos wrote: post #15

I went from early bitcoin adopter to early bitcoin skeptic and despite missing most of the gains I have no regrets. During the early days the crypto space was concentrated to small online communities. People were mostly interested about the technology and the talk of price was limited, in the context "mass adoption". Nowadays it's about the price and the memes. Add to that the money laundering, energy waste and these…

Too many smart people work on these pointless projects instead of useful tech that benefits society. Hindsight is 20/20. In the early days of crypto the promise of decentralized finance outside of the scrutiny of governments and financial institutions was seen as far from pointless. It only went awry when speculators turned up trying to make a profit from an ostensibly useful idea, and they took it so far that the or…

It only highlighted why all these laws and regulations exist in the first place.

Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution

#86

Post by flmontpetit »

cakealert wrote: post #12
tetha wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always found the idea of a free, unregulated financial market being a positive thing amusing. Many of these regulations were made because more or less complex loopholes got exploited and many less wealthy people lost their money. And quite a few of these people with practical experience in these various exploits are still around.

You can always opt into security by being the customer of a bank.

And that's only because of deposit insurance and heavy regulations on fractional banking.

There is no reason to trust any bank implicitly. As a matter fact that have proven not to be deserving of it as recently as 2008.

Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution

#87

Post by tromp »

dgrr19 wrote: post #75
tromp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

requiring much higher resources to run a node and making them much less decentralized.

Which one are you referring to? What do you want to get all the freedom in the world and no effort for running a decentralized node? Staking blockchains don't require much resources.

The ones that allow hundreds of txs per second, making verification of the entire tx history orders of magnitude harder. The limited tx throughput of bitcoin is a feature, not a bug.

Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution

#88

Post by AndrewKemendo »

danaos wrote: post #15

I went from early bitcoin adopter to early bitcoin skeptic and despite missing most of the gains I have no regrets. During the early days the crypto space was concentrated to small online communities. People were mostly interested about the technology and the talk of price was limited, in the context "mass adoption". Nowadays it's about the price and the memes. Add to that the money laundering, energy waste and these…

I had a similar experience and lost I think like one coin to mtgox - thinking nothing of it, it’s on a hard drive in a landfill somewhere.

I think more crucially though is that crypto people just have absolutely zero understanding of the concept of money in a political sense.

Money is not real - it’s a social experience - and the fact is monetary sovereignty is by far the most important thing for any state to maintain.

If bitcoin or any other of the cryptocurrencies were actually useful, they would be immediately outlawed because they would subvert the control the state has over economics

Even if they didn’t or couldn’t make it illegal, they would make it dollar parity, and then tax it such that it just gets absorbed into the local financial system

Fully realized cryptocurrency would destabilize the entire economic system of intermediaries and that’s entirely the purpose of it - per the white paper

So anybody who has an undergraduate or masters degree in economics (me) or rather somebody who had a holistic view of economics in the political and monetary sense - immediately understood that there was a limit to how far this could go before state intervention

The reality is, it never actually took off as a medium of exchange - and so never challenged the domination of the US dollar or any other reserve currency. That itself has proof that it doesn’t actually have the social momentum necessary to do what it intended to do.

Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution

#89

Post by lostmsu »

buran77 wrote: post #80
dgrr19 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell third-world countries that centralization is good :) Centralization could be good, sometimes (if it works idk). The problem is that the financial world has been monopolized by certain entities and the barrier of entry is enormous. It is never fair to not play by the same rules when regulation favors big institutions, etc... Access to credit is difficult sometimes and unfair. But that is just a reason you could g…

> Decentralization (I have in mind something like Hyperliquid or even BTC) ensures that everybody in the world have access to the same economy without intermediaries asking for a fee. Which means, a person in Indian can access to income the same way a person in the US would. And do they? In practice? The theory is always sweet, but in practice once you take away "crime" and "hold to sell high" you'll be hard pressed…

Some do, in practice.

Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution

#90

Post by Dlemo »

dgrr19 wrote: post #51
noosphr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The surest way to get flamed out of any crypto mailing list was to ask what the effective clearance rate for the coin was, then following it up with how it could be sped up. Today the bitcoin network is still stuck at ~7 transactions a second. This is not what the white paper promised.

Thus, other blockchains emerged

And adding more confusion and more problems.

Btw. Criss chain transaction is the major problem this strategy added.

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