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Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

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Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#271

Post by thebean11 »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #269
thebean11 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone in the world has access to a government that will uphold their ownership in a just way. Like I said it this likely isn't valuable for you personally, you are not looking past your specific situation.

But everyone in the world has access to a cryptocoin that will uphold their ownership in a just way? Is that the argument? Crypto is "more just" and "available globally" and affordably?

We're talking about domain name registration right? No reason why it would need to be more expensive than the current system. The argument is that ownership is upheld in a totally programmatic way. Just is a value judgement, not sure about that. It depends on what you value. Available globally yes.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#272

Post by Grustaf »

thebean11 wrote: post #253
Grustaf wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's literally whoever owns the keys listed as the registrant owns the domain. Sure, but even so, how is this implemented? Presumably some organisation needs to uphold this connection. Simply "owning" a domain, in the sense that you "own" an NFT, is not very helpful, you need some kind of actual control over it. Presumably a server is needed to forward the domain to your IP, and someone needs to run that server, ri…

There is a smart contract that supports features like domain name resolution and transfers. The data and code needed to resolve the domain to your IP would live on the blockchain, so effectively every node in the network is hosting it. The smart contract could be totally immutable; nobody would have special permissions. The resolution would work by executing some "lookup" smart contract function on a node (you could…

We all understand the first part. Storing information on the blockchain, that's easy. But where almost all use cases fall down is in interfacing with the real world.

In this case it sounds like that is solved though. I know very little about the structure of the internet, but it seems you are saying that instead of asking a DNS server, every computer would ask the blockchain to resolve the domain name, correct? But wouldn't that require every single device that connects to the internet to "update its firmware" or something? Or could this decentralised DNS somehow emulate the old fashioned kind?

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#273

Post by samarama »

djur wrote: post #221
samarama wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except beanie babies have no inherent value, but ETH has vast inherent value in numerous ways 1. Immutability 2. Decentralization 3. Cheap, fast, secure cross-country money transfers 4. Protection against inflation 5. Independence of banks or arbitrary freezes of your funds 6. Access to a vast variety of financials services 7. Is quite likely the replacement of money The fact that people still don’t get that in 2022…

1 is questionably valuable and arguably harmful, 2 is increasingly untrue, 3 and 6 aren't inherent benefits of Ethereum, 4 and 5 aren't true, and 7 is speculative and begs the question.

> 1 is questionably valuable and arguably harmful If it’s mutable, it’s centralized, so you’re wrong.

>2 is increasingly untrue

That’s also incorrect, Ethereum has become more decentralized every year

> 3 and 6 aren't inherent benefits of Ethereum and 5 aren't true Yes they are. Ethereum is deflationary and will became three times more inflationary later this year.

> 7 is speculative and begs the question.

No speculation here, check here yourself for just a small overview https://www.defipulse.com/

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#274

Post by bryans »

sofixa wrote: post #257
bryans wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> scammers are getting more creative and advanced in technique including standing up professional front end websites to give the appearance of legitimacy It seems like this is becoming the minimum standard for scam operations. For example, there is currently a BTC phishing scam going around that tries to convince the user they've accidentally received an email meant for someone else, which just happens to include a l…

Wow, that's a fairly elaborate scam.

It is quite elaborate, well-planned and a lot of time has surely been invested, so the very underwhelming results must be devastatingly demoralizing -- which I think is probably the best outcome of any scam.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#275

Post by samarama »

secabeen wrote: post #201
samarama wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except beanie babies have no inherent value, but ETH has vast inherent value in numerous ways 1. Immutability 2. Decentralization 3. Cheap, fast, secure cross-country money transfers 4. Protection against inflation 5. Independence of banks or arbitrary freezes of your funds 6. Access to a vast variety of financials services 7. Is quite likely the replacement of money The fact that people still don’t get that in 2022…

YMMV. I don't put any value on most of the above.

Probably because you are rich, but 99% of humanity aren’t.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#276

Post by samarama »

donmcronald wrote: post #252
samarama wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except beanie babies have no inherent value, but ETH has vast inherent value in numerous ways 1. Immutability 2. Decentralization 3. Cheap, fast, secure cross-country money transfers 4. Protection against inflation 5. Independence of banks or arbitrary freezes of your funds 6. Access to a vast variety of financials services 7. Is quite likely the replacement of money The fact that people still don’t get that in 2022…

1. Maybe. It's not so great if you publish something confidential. 2. No one is responsible for anything, you'll never get any support, and one day the decentralized consensus might be to abandon the whole system. 3. It takes 16 seconds for a transaction to post and the average transaction fee [a] is over $2. Cross-country money transfers (assuming you mean international) benefit money launderers and criminals a lot…

Your arguments are mostly usability. However, there are already many services that gives you additional utility such as insurance, backups etc.

Crypto already has replaced money in several countries, especially third world countries where it has replaced money for 30% of the population that have protected their funds against inflation thanks to the inherent scarcity of respective cryptos.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#277

Post by sunir »

dimgl wrote: post #238
chrisco255 wrote: post #11

This was a multi-week long social engineering scam targeted at Thomas. Thomas has a Discord for a drone transportation startup, and the scammers proceeded to embed themselves in the community and provide valuable labor such as web design and graphics design in order to earn his trust. Thomas's wallet is public and advertised on Twitter via his ENS domain. He had $100M+ in aETH, a derivative token provided by Aave whe…

I'm surprised anyone reading this story wouldn't conclude that the real takeaway is to just not engage with cryptocurrency at all. This ecosystem is so convoluted it just turns me off at every level.

I woke up this week to dozens of comments on a video from a speaker at SaaS Connect 2017 (previously known as The Small Business Web Summit) to learn she was arrested and charged by the DOJ this week for laundering $4.5 billion in crypto. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-alleged-conspira...

Billion!

Since this is an allegation, we must presume innocence. However I still cannot imagine what planet would entrust 10 figures to her control. Witness her rap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jlSHGAem6g

But I also realize reading this Twitter thread I do not understand the world of crypto at all.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#278

Post by thebean11 »

Grustaf wrote: post #272
thebean11 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a smart contract that supports features like domain name resolution and transfers. The data and code needed to resolve the domain to your IP would live on the blockchain, so effectively every node in the network is hosting it. The smart contract could be totally immutable; nobody would have special permissions. The resolution would work by executing some "lookup" smart contract function on a node (you could…

We all understand the first part. Storing information on the blockchain, that's easy. But where almost all use cases fall down is in interfacing with the real world. In this case it sounds like that is solved though. I know very little about the structure of the internet, but it seems you are saying that instead of asking a DNS server, every computer would ask the blockchain to resolve the domain name, correct? But w…

Right exactly. I think from the perspective of devices (say your laptop) it looks pretty similar to the current system. You give it the IP address of a "DNS server", but now it's hitting an Ethereum node who is doing the DNS lookup. There is danger there that the node could lie about the state of the blockchain, so it does need to be trusted. The paranoid can always run their own node and be 100% sure.

I do think you could expose the same interface as traditional DNS but backed by the registrations in the blockchain. There are browsers that will resolve Ethereum Name Service domains today, but I'm not sure how that's implemented (probably lookups on a public ETH node).

The important improvements IMO are on the registration, transfer, renting of the names rather than the lookup side which doesn't look dramatically different except that other code running on the blockchain could do the lookups too.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#279

Post by AYBABTME »

dimgl wrote: post #238
chrisco255 wrote: post #11

This was a multi-week long social engineering scam targeted at Thomas. Thomas has a Discord for a drone transportation startup, and the scammers proceeded to embed themselves in the community and provide valuable labor such as web design and graphics design in order to earn his trust. Thomas's wallet is public and advertised on Twitter via his ENS domain. He had $100M+ in aETH, a derivative token provided by Aave whe…

I'm surprised anyone reading this story wouldn't conclude that the real takeaway is to just not engage with cryptocurrency at all. This ecosystem is so convoluted it just turns me off at every level.

That's precisely my take away since I saw what ETH's instruction set looks like and what sort of languages these smart contracts are made of. It's a giant pile of flimsy garbage propped up by a frenetic gold rush.

To think that any of this would then be used to build a trustworthy ecosystem for non-developers to use, seems delusional to me. And building a VTOL taxi airline on top of it seems like it puts the cart 3 miles uphill from the horses.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#280

Post by sumedh »

herodotus wrote: post #224

So I don't know anything about crypto, but stories like this make me think that crypto can never become mainstream. I have been programming since 1970; I worked for major computer companies; I was a computer science professor; I have apps on the App Store. In spite of all of this, I have not the foggiest idea, even after reading the thread, how someone who offers to give me something can use the gift to steal from me…

> but stories like this make me think that crypto can never become mainstream.

We had illegal p2p sharing where you could download a virus from bad people and then Jobs came along and made iTunes which set the standard for streaming. I am sure someone will come along in the crypto space and make crypto easy for the rest of us.

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