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Newsfeed for Crypto/DeFi Scams

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Re: Newsfeed for Crypto/DeFi Scams

#41

Post by exdsq »

xwolfi wrote: post #32
exdsq wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I donate a lot of money to charity (>10% a year) - that’s my way of having an impact. If I can make that money working on cool tech problems and without scamming people then I am very happy. If the tech also becomes useful then that’s awesome, that’s just added to the upside. If it doesn’t, well I’ve done a lot more good with my career than if I took a lower paying job to make some web app slightly more performant fo…

Dude if you weren't busy scamming them, that'd be one less source of adversarial financial risk and you may not have to throw some crumbs at them. Charity is when the taxpayers failed :( And I'm glad at least you helped people buy clothes, that sounds more rewarding than selling them debt and misery :) And I've sold personal loans, I know :D

I don’t scam people and I don’t work for projects that scam people. No one I know scams people. Some projects and people might, sure, but I’m not part of that. If I knew of a scam I'd be very vocal about it.

Re: Newsfeed for Crypto/DeFi Scams

#42

Post by anon9001 »

edent wrote: post #38
anon9001 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll bite because you seem earnest. One killer feature that doesn't get nearly enough hype is uptime. Check out these stats: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ The last incident to cause downtime for bitcoin was in 2013. Ethereum has never had downtime. Another is speed. People like to talk about how slow web3 is, but even Ethereum is super fast compared to a traditional banking transfer. Traditi…

Speed? In the UK I can send money for free to any other UK bank account instantly. Not everywhere is as slow and expensive as the USA. Uptime is legitimately amazing. But when you look at the computational speed - a Raspberry Pi on a UPS is probably more powerful. Trust is great. How do you do a chargeback on a fraudulent transaction on Ethereum? There are some amazing theoretical gains for Blockchain technology. I h…

> Speed? In the UK I can send money for free to any other UK bank account instantly. Not everywhere is as slow and expensive as the USA.

If you believe that all the world is really the divine right of the queen, I suppose sending payments instantly within the UK is more than sufficient.

> Uptime is legitimately amazing. But when you look at the computational speed - a Raspberry Pi on a UPS is probably more powerful.

Way more powerful, but practically useless, as 100% uptime globally is the requirement.

> Trust is great. How do you do a chargeback on a fraudulent transaction on Ethereum?

Blockchains completely prevent chargeback fraud by simply not allowing for reversal of transactions. You might not want this feature if you're buying a cup of coffee, but it's very important if you're dealing with large sums.

Re: Newsfeed for Crypto/DeFi Scams

#43

Post by exdsq »

edent wrote: post #39
exdsq wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A third of GDP in Nepal is money sent by nationals working abroad and 1/4 of that is taken through high international banking fees. Use stable coins on a blockchain to get around those and you’ll see a 1/12 increase in GDP? Phone credit based economies still exist in Africa. They have internet but no banking infrastructure. Using a blockchain allows people to create accounts and build a credit history as opposed to p…

Are the "gas" fees and similar better or worse than international banking fees?

Use a proof-of-stake chain and they're a few dollars, so much cheaper. That's why Visa and JP Morgan are hiring to build a blockchain to run inter-bank transactions to get around them.

Re: Newsfeed for Crypto/DeFi Scams

#44

Post by 0x64 »

arcticbull wrote: post #11

Smart contracts are a pile of money exposed directly to the internet with no firewall in the way. And no recourse when things inevitably go pear shaped. They’re somewhere between self funding bug bounties and just straight up honeypots. It’s interesting the folks with piholes and boobie trapped routers are the first to get behind this idea.

What's bad about Pi-hole?

Re: Newsfeed for Crypto/DeFi Scams

#45

Post by arcticbull »

0x64 wrote: post #44
arcticbull wrote: post #11

Smart contracts are a pile of money exposed directly to the internet with no firewall in the way. And no recourse when things inevitably go pear shaped. They’re somewhere between self funding bug bounties and just straight up honeypots. It’s interesting the folks with piholes and boobie trapped routers are the first to get behind this idea.

What's bad about Pi-hole?

Nothing at all! It does its job very well.

Re: Newsfeed for Crypto/DeFi Scams

#46

Post by arcticbull »

anon9001 wrote: post #30
arcticbull wrote: post #11

Smart contracts are a pile of money exposed directly to the internet with no firewall in the way. And no recourse when things inevitably go pear shaped. They’re somewhere between self funding bug bounties and just straight up honeypots. It’s interesting the folks with piholes and boobie trapped routers are the first to get behind this idea.

> Smart contracts are a pile of money exposed directly to the internet with no firewall in the way. And no recourse when things inevitably go pear shaped. When you say it like that, it sounds like you're poking fun at the stupidity of defi and cryptocurrencies in general. But what if there were public contracts, with billions of dollars locked in them, with no firewalls, essentially a huge self funded bug bounty, wid…

> ...trustless decentralized computing.

That's a means, not an end, and has no intrinsic value. Any value it has is extrinsic - derived from its applications. Of which there are none that are better handled that way.

TCP/IP has no intrinsic value either. What's built on it has value.

> ...withdraw/transfer/borrow/lend with no possible downtime or fraud is extremely appealing.

Really? No possibility of fraud? Are you sure? Might want to click through the link at the top of the page. Didn't half of DeFi go down with AWS? Didn't Solana get DDOSd and also have to get rebooted recently? Can't you nuke any NFT on OpenSea from orbit by filing a DMCA complaint with Google? I suggest this position is aspirational... at best.

> If you really believe all of these contracts will inevitably go pear shaped, are the billions not enough incentive for you to go find the bugs yourself?

That's not my area of expertise, but there are plenty of folks for whom it is. I trust this task is in good hands already.

> Yes, these people are called "early adopters". They're excited by new technologies, even when they involve risk. You should try it sometime.

I do, when those new technologies have value. I've been daily-driving Rust since 2015. I've been following crypto since 2016, I've used a number of chains a number of times. I heated my condo mining ETH for a while on a 3090. Closed out the position via dex. It's pretty dang pointless. Not everything new is good.

Re: Newsfeed for Crypto/DeFi Scams

#47

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

ufo wrote: post #5
mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #2

All the more reason the code which controls money probably shouldn't be an object oriented language compiled to bytecode. Strict functional will be looked back on as the obvious choice.

Most of these are just plain old scams (phishing, inside jobs, etc), which aren't affected by the choice of programming language. There are also a bunch of hacks where off-blockchain software is compromised.

You must not understand the terminology. The first five are clear contract code bugs. Even if there are scams, I'm not sure what you want to conclude about how to improve contract code from that. What I stated is well accepted.

Re: Newsfeed for Crypto/DeFi Scams

#48

Post by xwolfi »

exdsq wrote: post #41
xwolfi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude if you weren't busy scamming them, that'd be one less source of adversarial financial risk and you may not have to throw some crumbs at them. Charity is when the taxpayers failed :( And I'm glad at least you helped people buy clothes, that sounds more rewarding than selling them debt and misery :) And I've sold personal loans, I know :D

I don’t scam people and I don’t work for projects that scam people. No one I know scams people. Some projects and people might, sure, but I’m not part of that. If I knew of a scam I'd be very vocal about it.

Well for instance you may work on an artificial means of exchange that derives value from marketing to its member that they'll get rich if only they convince more people to use it.

It's like working as a food expert at Herbalife. Sure it must be interesting to invent new receipe, but can you really Van Braun your way out of what misery you're helping produce just because it s fun to optimise the Haskell compiler ?

Another way to say it: project yourself 5/10 years in the future and the entire thing collapsed. Everyone knows where you work and what you contributed to: was it worth it, net? Did you learn more than the suicide rate of the people losing their savings cost ? You can leave now, imagine you're an employee of Theranos a year before Carreyrou.

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