Why have I not received GPT generated spam yet? Something that looks like a genuine email, but is fundamentally nonsense but with a link to click?
Fake Books
341–350 of 371 posts
Re: Fake Books
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the techniques don't work, and when people are conned once they are likely to fall for the next con artist selling fundamentally the same thing but with different branding. A lot of the marketing behind these scams is that they're different than everything you've tried before - the point being is that the number of people who fall for these scams isn't enormous, but they will fall for scams over and over agai…
But if you know that, then — as a cult leader — why not come up with a scalable approach to founding cults , that all share underlying infrastructure (marketing, accounting, etc) but just use different figure-head cult-leaders, different language, and different outreach techniques; and so form distinct isolated cult communities? Different marques of the same company, in other words — like how every "competing" soap o…
Being a scammer doesn’t mean you’re a criminal mastermind.
It takes capital, time, and work to become “the EA of scams”, at which point you’re inviting further scrutiny on yourself, meaning even more work (and staff, who you’ll have to trust) to not be in hot water with the law.
Scammers, like the people they scam, are mostly after a quick easy buck. You’re posing “why not” questions as if there’re straightforward to accomplish. They’re not. They take effort and risk without a guarantee of success. Most scammers don’t become “the EA of scams” for the same reasons most game companies don’t become EA.
Re: Fake Books
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You wouldn't believe how rare it is for me to meet someone who agrees with this. I'm in leadership at a web3 company and I need to reiterate this point over and over again. NFTs don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. ERC20s don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. If it doesn't tie back into user psychology, it's not worth anything. I came to a similar conclusion: The sole criterion for the viability…
> USD is accepted worldwide, even though its based on less than even a shitcoin The full faith and credit of the the United States government is pretty solid. > and 90% of it doesn't physically exist according to the Fed themselves. That's how debt works
What does "The full faith and credit of the the United States government" mean? You can't redeem dollars bills for anything from the govt as far as I know.
Re: Fake Books
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm hoping that eventually we'll get around the idea of a crowd-sourced search engine (mostly manually curated) maintained in the manner of Wikipedia, backed by a solid user reputation system to dissuade spammers. This will import Wikipedia's serious flaws. But I'm hopefully that they can gradually be mitigated.
A lot of the underpinnings of such a manually-curated knowledge base did exist in the early 2000s, in the form of Yahoo! Directory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory
Yeah, that's actually related to what I'm thinking of. The idea is a crowd-sourced and well-executed iteration on the old Yahoo! directory.
https://blog.digraph.app/2020-06-13-democratization-of-searc...
Re: Fake Books
#345One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it…
If you make up what people say and then argue with them it's pretty easy to win. The "classic goldbug" insists that gold has properties that are good for a currency (does not degrade, can be divided, does not rely on a trusted third party, has scarcity) and it has been used as currency for a long time in civilisation. I take "intrinsic value" for commodities to mean "has use aside from being a currency", for example…
I'm actually way closer to a goldbug than a cryptocurrency advocate, and generally agree with you with what you said!
But I have definitely encountered goldbugs who just know that gold has intrinsic value, if you ask them what that is, it's just like, intrinsic dude, if you ask them what that even means they just sort of get a blank look on their face (metaphorically, since this is the internet).
Gold is super good at storing what value it has... but it is not intrinsically valuable. If society were to collapse to two people, and one had gold and the other had cows, the one with cows would have little reason to trade for the gold. This is not likely to happen, but is a good mathematical sort of way of considering the question. Food and water have much better "intrinsic" value if you really get down to it... where they go wrong as the basis for an economy is all the other attributes we want money to have.
(Personally as one "way closer to a goldbug", I favor things that are actually used. Gold freaks me out a bit because the world still treats it as very valuable even now, but it isn't actually used for much. I feel much better about things that are used because they are the best solution to some problem; see platinum and palladium for catalytic converters, for instance. On the flip side, the reason why gold isn't used much is precisely that it's considered very valuable; if the value did suddenly collapse because the general agreement about its value deteriorated, there are a lot more things we'd use it industrially for, so that might be enough to keep it valuable.)
Re: Fake Books
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is completely possible to demolish entire massive argument edifices in 10-20 of the correct words, and the fact that the "other side" has deployed literally hundreds of thousands of words does not make them right if the foundation is rotten. See also the "Gish gallop" [1], a strategy that relies on spewing out a huge number of specious arguments and half-truths that are each individually time-consuming to refute…
I had a Bitcoin fan in his 40s tell me IRL that BTC, not blockchain, mind you, is an improvement over the gene. Something about passing information between generations. I could not follow the argument. All this time, banks have been hoarding details about our deposits, withdrawals, balances, transfers, payment and purchase histories that could have been "inherited" like genetic information by our descendents. Even wo…
This sounds related to the observation that one of the powers of human civilization is move evolution out of the DNA genes and into culture. We use electricity not because we have electricity-using genes, but because we have the genes that allow us to support a culture that knows how to use electricity.
However it is beyond me to translate that into the blockchain specifically. This seems like yet another case where in the phrase "distributed ledger", the "ledger" is doing all the work and the "distributed" isn't doing much. And there isn't much work being done either; most of our "culture" isn't in ledgers. Even if you take the broad view that I do that a lot of things like our technology are actually embedded in human relationships ("Hmmm, I remember Bob knows how to solve this problem... ah yes, I bet Sally knows the solution to this... I bet Ramash could hook me up with the right part for this problem...") and things beyond just formal transfer mechanisms like "books" and "classes", ledgers still aren't carrying much of that water.
Re: Fake Books
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
> USD is accepted worldwide, even though its based on less than even a shitcoin The full faith and credit of the the United States government is pretty solid. > and 90% of it doesn't physically exist according to the Fed themselves. That's how debt works
What does "The full faith and credit of the the United States government" mean? You can't redeem dollars bills for anything from the govt as far as I know.
You can only buy bonds from the government in dollars, the government only pays interest on those bonds in dollars, and the bonds are only redeemed for dollars when they mature.
Re: Fake Books
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole point of currency is to use it. If you are buying a currency to hold on to it, then it is a terrible currency and there is a disincentive to use it as one, thus making it useful only for speculation. I know that there was a pivot when people realized Bitcoin and Ether are not practical for their purported use as currencies, where they are now claimed to 'hold value', but that is ridiculous. They were design…
ON the international currency market, one traditional role of the US dollar is exactly "store value". You trade your currencies on the FX market during your day, and comes close to "close of your trading", you exchange all your positions for US dollars, to keep in store for your quiet period. Comes the following day, you trade out your dollars for other currencies. Then the cycle continues. Does this mean that the US…
> ON the international currency market, one traditional role of the US dollar is exactly "store value". You trade your currencies on the FX market during your day, and comes close to "close of your trading", you exchange all your positions for US dollars, to keep in store for your quiet period.
Come again? The international currency market doesn’t really close overnight, and the people who store value in USD are generally Americans or other people or entities who generally store value as USD.
And that latter part is the whole point. When you save up for retirement, or plan your business, or prepare a balance sheet, or plan for a college education, everything is denominated in dollars (or your local currency).
If you want to store money for any future use, you want an asset that has a somewhat predictable return relative to the dollar. If you are a drug dealer who collected $1M (in USD or its equivalent in Bitcoin, Monero, casino chips, whatever), you may well launder or mix it through something else, but your goal is to end up with approximately $1M for when you want to buy more wholesale drugs, pay employees, buy a fancy yacht, etc. Storing $1M as Monero is making a huge bet that it will still be worth $1M when it’s needed.
Re: Fake Books
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that holding Monero is of rather less clear value. Sure, the ability to take $100, turn it into Monero, and turn it back into almost $100 that cannot be trivially traced to the original $100 is of some value. But this value is there for people who have no particular interest in Monero-the—asset. They want Monero-the-mixer. If I put $100 into Monero and hold it, I’m betting that Monero is still worth something…
The whole point of currency is to use it. If you are buying a currency to hold on to it, then it is a terrible currency and there is a disincentive to use it as one, thus making it useful only for speculation. I know that there was a pivot when people realized Bitcoin and Ether are not practical for their purported use as currencies, where they are now claimed to 'hold value', but that is ridiculous. They were design…
> The whole point of currency is to use it. If you are buying a currency to hold on to it, then it is a terrible currency and there is a disincentive to use it as one, thus making it useful only for speculation.
Tell that to anyone who saves money for any purpose. They may not literally hold USD in their private Fed account or as cash under a pillow, but they are nonetheless storing dollars (as bonds, money markets, savings accounts, etc).
Re: Fake Books
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin is the first (and most stable) theoretically unseizable currency. You can store bitcoin in your brain, get persecuted by your national government for criticizing their actions, travel across a border, get kidnapped, offer up a decoy wallet, get released 3 years later, wander into a town with an internet cafe, and theoretically, you could have access to your funds within hours, without the consent of or depend…
>Bitcoin is the first (and most stable) theoretically unseizable currency This is an absolute farce. Maybe talk to us when there are no longer reports of being able to easily scam someone out of all of their money with a non-reversable transaction just by sending them an image with a script in it.
Name a currency that scammers don't get fools to part with.