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A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house

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Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house

#11

I remember being called to a dinner which was paid for (figures). A couple well-dressed but fashionable guys tried to sell a crypto that ask you play a mobile game or something to earn coins which can be converted into real crypto? or something like that. There were a couple people at the dinner I know being constantly fallen into this kind of traps, including MLM, despite their success in their businesses. Well, the…

Let me guess, Axie Infinity?

It is indeed MLM at its worst, because in this case you don't even walk away with any useless (but at least tangible) goods.

Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house

#12
post #9

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Not sure if all crypto is a scam necessarily, but sure that world is chock full of scammers trying to out-scam each other.

I don't think that it's all a scam, but I do think that it gives scammers a vehicle to con people without oversight or regulation. They also end up with "real" money which can be spent.

Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house

#13
post #9

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Not sure if all crypto is a scam necessarily, but sure that world is chock full of scammers trying to out-scam each other.

And if you give the scammers a platform that's not useful for anything else than building endless variations of memecoins and productless fake-tech penny stocks, what is the expected output?

Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house

#14

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Somehow yes, and it's quite sad.

The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

But these scammers. So many of them... Easy to smell though, but the problem we need to fix is these scammers get most of the online traction/attention, taking it from truer builders.

Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house

#15
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if all crypto is a scam necessarily, but sure that world is chock full of scammers trying to out-scam each other.

I don't think that it's all a scam, but I do think that it gives scammers a vehicle to con people without oversight or regulation. They also end up with "real" money which can be spent.

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Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house

#17

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When I studied political science and economics in college we had a lot of really intriguing discussions around the rise of fiat currency, its pros and cons, its effect on global trade, etc. Some really well thought out opinions on both sides, from "nothing is real, who cares what this piece of paper means" to people who thought it was all a "globalist" scam and that we should be giving the grocer tiny pieces of gold in exchange for bread. This was before bitcoin existed.

Post-BTC it seems like anyone who uses the term "fiat" to describe currency in any non-academic setting is about to launch into some nonsensical "bitcoin fixes this" tirade, they think everything is some jewish space laser pyramid scheme, and you wonder if they have a sovereign citizen paper license plate on their car.

"Fiat is a pyramid scheme" is a dog whistle except the person blowing it doesn't know.

Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house

#18
post #4

How do these scammers generate such big market caps for their coins? Offloading $1.4MM is a huge sum of money, more than 99.9% of people in the world would ever see at once.

Market cap doesn't equal what people have purchased.

See this classic from 2015:

https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/press-release-basecamp-val...

Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house

#19
post #14

[flagged]

Somehow yes, and it's quite sad. The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc. But these scammers. So many of them... Easy to smell though, but the problem we need to fix is these scammers get most of the online tra…

> The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

These are all scams, too. No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO serves as a nice concrete example. "Code is law" fell apart as soon as the code resulted in a large enough bad outcome for enough people.

Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house

#20
> “You can see the PTSD in my eyes, right?” he said before telling this reporter to leave.

He was dead, with an obituary even and now back to being alive. Why the PTSD?! He should be rejoicing! /s

But I wonder, is faking your death on social media a crime? If he still paid taxes I guess he might be legally out of the woods, just based on the faking part, not related to the scamming thing.

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