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Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

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Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#31

Post by cultus »

leppr wrote: post #12
coldpie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but like, what's it valuable for ? It seems like commodity trading, except the commodity that is being traded is who gets stuck holding the bag when it all collapses. There's no real value there.

It's money not controlled by any single government or entity. It can be exchanged almost as easily as cash. If you don't see the use in that, then good for you, your needs must be met by the existing financial services. Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to vari…

Each bitcoin transaction costs about $50 now. They're quite a bit more onerous to use than cash, thus people use "exchanges" which are controlled by for-profit private interests.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#32

Post by pjkundert »

coldpie wrote: post #2

So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.

As a Canadian consultant working for US clients, I can assure you — the worst Cryptocurrency usability problems are better than the typical Canada/US wire transfer Banking experience.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#33

Post by cryptica »

coldpie wrote: post #2

So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.

The idea that the financial system works seems to be a contradiction when you consider that cryptocurrencies (which exist within that system) have been performing extremely well for over a decade. If scams can thrive so well in our system (to the point of becoming worth hundreds of billions of dollars), then how do we know that the biggest corporations are not scams too? How do we know they're not all empty shells? Their earnings (P/E ratios) are very low... And on top of that, I would question the source and legitimacy of these modest earnings.

What kind of system allows scams of this scale to thrive for over a decade? What kind of system supports bailouts of big corporations every few years? Corruption of the media? Corruption of politics? I don't think any of these fit the description of a 'working system'.

EDIT And what kind of system supports downvoting (thus trying to censor) such a logical comment as this one?

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#34

Post by leppr »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #23
leppr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's money not controlled by any single government or entity. It can be exchanged almost as easily as cash. If you don't see the use in that, then good for you, your needs must be met by the existing financial services. Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to vari…

Every single one of those things is easier with the existing money system.

Except no, the exact reason I do/did these things with crypto is that I couldn't as easily do it with the existing infrastructure.

Buying at a Bitpay PoS in Japan is just scanning a QR code, instant confirmation (Wechat easy but even foreigners can use it). A P2P sale for a non-insignificant amount of money (~$1.5k): rejected by Paypal, inter-bank transfer would take days to go through. BTC was 5 minutes to wait for a confirmation. Donations through Patreon or other require you to sign-up, go through convoluted systems that sometimes require sending your identity documents, crypto is just copy an address/scan a QR code and confirm in your usual, familiar wallet.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#35

Post by flotzam »

cultus wrote: post #31
leppr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's money not controlled by any single government or entity. It can be exchanged almost as easily as cash. If you don't see the use in that, then good for you, your needs must be met by the existing financial services. Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to vari…

Each bitcoin transaction costs about $50 now. They're quite a bit more onerous to use than cash, thus people use "exchanges" which are controlled by for-profit private interests.

> Each bitcoin transaction costs about $50 now.

That's off by a factor of 18 even if you want it to be fast, according to https://bitcoinfees.earn.com

"The fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 110 satoshis/byte, shown in green at the top. For the median transaction size of 224 bytes, this results in a fee of 24,640 satoshis." = .0002464 BTC = $2.81

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#36

Post by SkyMarshal »

jand wrote: post #27
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like magic the gathering card econ. Which is super fun! But personally, I definitely don't consider specing into Embercleave a meaningful societal mover

Funny detail: Magic the gathering hits very close to home by accident. One of the (back then) dominating bitcoin exchanges used the domain mtgox.com which was an acronym for "magic the gathering online exchange".

Yeah, it was previously a Magic The Gathering exchange, and then converted to a Bitcoin exchange.

They learned the hard way you need a higher standard of engineering for a financial exchange.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#37

Post by aeternum »

jwcrux wrote: post #9

This is a scam that has been going on for years that has adapted its techniques over time. We used this botnet as a case study back in 2018 when doing analysis on finding Twitter bots at a large scale. You can find the paper here [0] - the cryptocurrency scam botnet starts on page 28. You can also find the talk here [1] where we go into a little more detail. In full irony, someone tried sharing our research on Twitte…

It's very disappointing that Twitter has allowed this to go on for so long. The scam is so successful that it is now attached to pretty much every prominent tweet and drowns out actual replies.

All it really takes to solve this is better UI. This is costing some users money and making the experience worse for everyone. Sad that Twitter isn't willing to take this seriously.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#38

Post by banachtarski »

Passthepeas wrote: post #30
MichaelBurge wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 72.61 terawatt-hours/year and an average electricity cost of 13.19 cents/kilowatt-hour, that's an asset that loses 9.6 billion per year. And if you ever stop wasting electricity, your bitcoin become less valuable. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

Vast majority of crypto currency mining is done with excess green energy that would otherwise be rejected by the grid and wasted, as high as 78% by some estimates. https://medium.com/value-of-bitcoin/bitcoins-energy-consumpt...

Sorry but this reeks of nonsense to me. Even if true, surely the compute power could be used for protein folding or something actually useful instead of hashing bits only to throw the results away the majority of the time. Crypto needs to die.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#39

Post by Wheaties466 »

cultus wrote: post #31
leppr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's money not controlled by any single government or entity. It can be exchanged almost as easily as cash. If you don't see the use in that, then good for you, your needs must be met by the existing financial services. Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to vari…

Each bitcoin transaction costs about $50 now. They're quite a bit more onerous to use than cash, thus people use "exchanges" which are controlled by for-profit private interests.

I just processed a bitcoin transaction and paid ~1.52 in fees. That was this morning.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#40

Post by SQueeeeeL »

trident1000 wrote: post #25
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just talked about Twitter buying BTC as important news showing it's viability though... It's mostly a popularity/buzz game. Also yeah, stock buybacks were illegal up until 1982 and since there legalization we've seen large trades in companies from R&D spending towards buyback spending...

I mentioned several noteworthy people and institutions making an investment to demonstrate a trend. "its mostly a popularity/buzz game" yeah thats how value networks work. From gold to cash to facebook.

Yeah, I don't think we're in disagreement. Buying a commodity personally, and then using an institution under your control to buy that commodity and create publicity/network effects is just great business (for personal enrichment). It probably isn't even illegal!
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