I'd be willing to bet that a) his parents aren't going anywhere and b) they will be glad he left, finally.
A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
121–130 of 139 posts
Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't send baseball cards instantly across the world and you have no guarantee of their authenticity.
You can sell ownership across the world instantly, and you can use a centralized authority for authenticity and grading. Done. All for less cost than crypto and without enabling DPRK to steal your card with no recourse. This is exactly what happened with gold, and then people realized that basing money on gold was stupid, so now we have the system we have today. Cryptofools are two financial revolutions behind modern…
I hear what you are saying and you're putting an awful lot of trust in that centralized authority.
We used to back our money with precious metals, but no longer do so. The dollar is now backed by aircraft carriers, jets, and military might.
Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
[flagged]
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. We want curious conversation here.
Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are attracted to things based on their personality traits. The average software engineer is not the same as the average person, because the average person is not attracted to software engineering. In my observations, the average software engineer is more likely to be persnickety, caught up in small details, and obsessive than the average person. We're more likely to split hairs than most people would care to,…
> In my observations, the average software engineer is more likely to be persnickety, caught up in small details, and obsessive than the average person. We're more likely to split hairs than most people would care to, and proper labeling and categorization is much more important to us than average person. It sounds like a fancy way of saying that people on the spectrum are more likely to become software engineers tha…
It had occurred to me, but I didn't want to say it that way because I'm not a psychological professional and it seems out of my area of expertise to make that assumption based on my passive observations.
Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
#125[flagged]
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
We want curious conversation here. That can only happen when people say new things. Generic denunciations like what you posted here not only are nothing new, they're as repetitive as it gets.
Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
#126How 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.
To calculate market cap, you take the most recent trade and multiply it by the total number of coins/shares/etc that exist. Since the number of coins is decided by the coin's creator, all they need to do is sell a single coin for a single cent to get whatever market cap they want.
Furthermore, scammers often do "wash trades" where they set up two accounts and have one purchase from the other, for whatever price they feel like. So now they're making up both of the numbers that get multiplied to determine the market cap.
Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Criminals that are caught are stupid. Survivorship bias because you can only observe the ones that are caught. I'm sure plenty of criminals have successfully faked their deaths.
Lots of criminals that are smart get caught, because even smart people fuck up sometime. When some smart guy fucks up at his e-commerce site probably there just has to be a code rollback and maybe a talking to, if a smart criminal fucks up it's probably the cops come calling.
A cop once told me "Criminals almost always get caught because of probability. The vast majority of criminals don't commit just one crime, so chances are, they will eventually get caught. To never get caught, they have to get lucky every time. I only need to get lucky once."
Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can sell ownership across the world instantly, and you can use a centralized authority for authenticity and grading. Done. All for less cost than crypto and without enabling DPRK to steal your card with no recourse. This is exactly what happened with gold, and then people realized that basing money on gold was stupid, so now we have the system we have today. Cryptofools are two financial revolutions behind modern…
I hear what you are saying and you're putting an awful lot of trust in that centralized authority. We used to back our money with precious metals, but no longer do so. The dollar is now backed by aircraft carriers, jets, and military might.
> you're putting an awful lot of trust in that centralized authority.
No, I'm putting my trust in the rule of law.
> The dollar is now backed by aircraft carriers, jets, and military might.
It is mainly backed by trust in government monetary policy. Otherwise, what is the GBP backed by? The Royal Navy isn't what it used to be.
Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
#129Jeffy's story is a cautionary tale for our times - apparently thus: young talented programmer makes something that hits the zeitgeist but quickly unravels as the lure of riches of corrupts.
Zerebro was building an AI agent framework (+ the obligatory coin) and also released AI-generated music. The music is lowest common denominator AI pop with cringe lyrics [1] but at one point achieved a respectable ~40k monthly listeners on Spotify.
Jeffy hit the crypto podcast scene (see his Blocmates interview [2]) and comes across as quite earnest, but there was a lot of hype too, for sure.
One thing that these thread comments are maybe overlooking is that Jeffy may have been genuinely frightened of being harmed, like kidnapped. Hence the fake death. Crypto kidnappings are more prevalent in Europe, so maybe they're going to take off in the USA now too ...
[1] https://youtu.be/5JTgWQq0who?feature=shared
[2] https://youtu.be/A-_cd7Ze8mE?feature=shared
The lyrics to the music video betray a very shallow copycat misogyny.
Re: A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
#130I had a look at the community feed thingy on the right-hand side of https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zerebro/ , oh boy, never have I seen such a high concentration of scammers scamming each other in broad daylight. You'll find real gems like "Amazon" (shown as "Amazon" with Amazon logo, with the handle @nk1dfpb3fmjp conveniently hidden) announcing "the next era of digital transactions with the Amazon Token (AM…
That's 100% legit. Source: I *am* Amazon. In all seriousness, when the topic of crypto is brought up, I feel angry at myself. Back at the peak of crypto-hype, and NFT mania i had the gut feeling that this is all bullshit — even though I couldn't put my finger on why. (And do you remember ICOs?? What was wrong with us??!!) But seeing a lot of people around me — who are much more knowledgeable, and had way more experie…
> Seeing now that the US government itself getting involved is very worrisome, and sad.
One reason this is worrisome is that crypto mining is 40% in the US and 45% between authoritarian countries of Russia, China, and North Korea. If they collaborate and get another 5% of the mining capacity, then they can destroy all of the value wrapped up in a given crypto. Wait until the US invests significant funds then make the investment worthless. Seems like US adversaries would be happy to invest many billions of dollars to have financial control of the US. And they only need the threat. The US investing in crypto cedes financial control of US currency to outside actors. And now they have the dipshit helping too.