251–260 of 463 posts
Did the author get permission for this attempted Good Samaritan deed? Or did he go out on his own and screw up the implementation without the contract owner's knowledge? If it's the latter, that's kind of a shit move.
Writing this sort of bot seems like a legitimately fun and interesting thing to work on, but somehow I have less than zero interest in actually doing it. There's just something intrinsically repulsive about the entire blockchain world to me where I just don't want to touch it. I don't mean to offend people who do love blockchain tech, in many ways I don't blame you. But is this feeling I have somewhat common? I'm not…
I can attest that I have a distrust of Brave Browser purely due to it's use of blockchain tech. I don't even have that much against Brendan Eich. I just think any use of blockchain technology for fiscal purposes is a way of financially incentivizing spam.
Perhaps due to a certain naivete I enjoy almost all discussions on HN. There are few exceptions and discussions under blockchain-related posts are the a prime example. I will disclose right away that I wholeheartedly think that blockchains are here to stay and to solve many problems. The general sentiment on HN, and this thread so far is an example, seems to be animosity toward the idea in general lightly veiled by p…
I won’t dare to speak for anyone but me, but personally the issue I have with blockchain is that is a solution looking for a problem. If you’ve ever done any business (sales/purchasing), you’ll soon see that trust is not really a problem . Trust is only a problem in single-transaction deals (two entities trade once and expect to never trade again), which is pretty rare. Even in that weird case, branding and reputatio…
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Exactly. There is no way I'd ever want to anything remotely important, or remotely high value, on a system that isn't run by humans and with transactions reversible in courts. Who is it that uses these smart contracts, and for what? Is it mostly a gadget for research and speculation (still)?
For all the scams, ponzi schemes and outright theft that has happened in the blockchain space, I can bet a good amount of money that we as a society lose more every year to corrupt officials, subverted institutions and petty theft than we will ever lose on a system that is not run by humans.
Have a friend who lost more than $12k in the process of buying a house. Scammers sent the wiring instructions a few hours before the legit closing attorney sent the real instructions. The email looked exactly right except for a minor change to the domain name from address. After one hour, wire transfers sent in error are no more recoverable than crypto. How the thieves knew so much about the process and timing is sup…
When we bought our house last year, the packet came with a big, bright red page (as well as a verbal warning from our loan officer) to look out for these scams.
Have a friend who lost more than $12k in the process of buying a house. Scammers sent the wiring instructions a few hours before the legit closing attorney sent the real instructions. The email looked exactly right except for a minor change to the domain name from address. After one hour, wire transfers sent in error are no more recoverable than crypto. How the thieves knew so much about the process and timing is sup…
Is it just me or is there fantastically more fraud these days than a decade or two ago? Any transaction feels like walking around in northern Canada during black fly season. I receive several cold scam calls per day and I’ve known people who have done things like purchase a home and been inundated by fake calls from “the underwriter” and other scams. Is there no mail and telemarketing fraud enforcement any more?
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> Does the endless stream of point-of-sale and credit card hacks make you question the security of dollars, euros and yen? No, because my credit card company gives me my money back when there is fraud. Crypto promoters always paint the irreversibility of blockchains as a feature, but it always seems like a risk to me.
It's just a different approach with different tradeoffs. Credit cards push the fraud risk and fees on the merchant. Crypto can push it to the user (and in the process reduce the fees incurred). I would be happy to have a way to pay merchants I trust online with and remove the ability to reverse the charge if I was financially incentivized to do this (with the money the merchant saves on fees).
Sure, you might be happy to give up your ability to get a chargebacks against a particular merchant.... but what about against a thief?
Have a friend who lost more than $12k in the process of buying a house. Scammers sent the wiring instructions a few hours before the legit closing attorney sent the real instructions. The email looked exactly right except for a minor change to the domain name from address. After one hour, wire transfers sent in error are no more recoverable than crypto. How the thieves knew so much about the process and timing is sup…
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/05/homebuyers-are-falling-for-t... > Here’s how these scams usually go down: A thief hacks into a real estate or title company’s computer system and then studies the transactions, from the language used to the format of the wiring instructions. When the scammer strikes, he or she will often pose as someone from the real estate or titling company to instruct the buyer to wire funds to them…
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> basically unusable for everyday transactions Why is this the acid test? Buying a coffee is a solved problem so why is blockchain tech expected to address this use case? > the endless stream of wallet provider hacks is not convincing anyone that it's secure Does the endless stream of point-of-sale and credit card hacks make you question the security of dollars, euros and yen?
> Why is this the acid test? Buying a coffee is a solved problem so why is blockchain tech expected to address this use case? Wait. If everyday transactions are not the use-case, then (excluding speculation and money laundering), what exactly is it?
Then there's the NFT/Unique items section which is for gaming (God's Unchained/Magic the Gathering where each card is owned digitally and can be traded freely with others or used as collateral for a loan), media (You own a movie but can use it on any service), and art (Tokenized art is a big craze right now).
The big ones down the line are new methods of organizing and collaborating. DAOs allow for decentralized corporations and governments. There's a lot of cool stuff here.
There's more but payments are really just a tiny use case of crypto. The big stuff like decentralized applications which might replace Google and Facebook with privacy preserving neutral platforms built for everyone to use.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/05/homebuyers-are-falling-for-t... > Here’s how these scams usually go down: A thief hacks into a real estate or title company’s computer system and then studies the transactions, from the language used to the format of the wiring instructions. When the scammer strikes, he or she will often pose as someone from the real estate or titling company to instruct the buyer to wire funds to them…
Can't this be avoided simply by making sure the property owner gives you wiring instructions in person?