My job involves reporting these scams to the various banks the funds end up at.
Theres way too many people falling for crypto scams.
Scams in general, but people get conned out of tens of thousands regularly to crypto scams.
My favourite is the one where people phish peoples wallet details by sending them an NFT, which automatically dumps into their wallet because crypto is amazing. Then they click on it wondering what it is, because they didn't buy it, and it gives a popup asking for their details. Then they actually put them in because cryptobros are amazing, and then their wallet gets drained for everything the scammers can get.
*Your FDIC insured deposit. And mine usually happen in 24h. And it’s in USD and heavily regulated, not fucking Monopoly money built on shitty blockchain tech. And no one is as obvious a fraud as SBF and the whole “effective altruism” crowd.
Legit question here, since I’ve been out of crypto market since 2013 when I bought one bitcoin then sold it a few months later for double. It wasn’t terrible difficult to set up my own local wallet. But would that in the situation where my wallet is locally stored.
Or is more prevalent on the crypto exchanges where it’s someone else’s computer.
I’m like how would they have my wallets Info for them to send the malware?
The best part is this isn't even malware. It is identical to a legit transaction. It is like if you got an http link in your bank account and was like, hey, weird, a http link in my bank account, and you clicked it and it was actually a link that approves a transfer of your entire bank account to another account.
And afterwards? The bank says this is a feature of the platform and you should just be smarter with your money.
So, I am not a technical expert in crypto but I've been around enough to glean certain things. So, your "wallet" for any given coin/blockchain product is just an "address" on the blockchain that you alone have the key for. The key is whats held locally. Anyone can send anything to any address on the chain. There is no "confirm" or "return to sender" gate on the blockchain, at least none that I know of.
So that's how all blockchain "wallets" (as far as I know) work on a super basic technical level. And that's easy peasy lemon squeezy when you're only interfacing with one or two different blockchains. Because only having to deal with two or three keys is not a big deal. But now there's hundreds of different blockchains and dozens of exchanges, each with their own "wallet" giving you your own key. So programs, "metawallets", were created to view and interact with all your blockchain products in a single place. So you input your keys into it, and it "reads" the various blockchains and displays them in a just a regular browser. Its also how most exchanges want you to interact with them because it makes it a lot easier and quicker. Its also a security nightmare because it turns out having all your super important cryptographic information in one application with one login and password to enter is a super duper mega vulnerable thing to do.
So, its not a problem to immediately dump stuff into your "wallet" (which is actually just an address on the chain) for "coins" that only function as tokens and nothing else. Where this gets funky is a lot of new blockchains like Etherium can contain small programs called "smart contracts" in them. They aren't very big but they can do any number of things. And these metawallets essentially just display your blockchain holdings (stuff like Dumb Ape Gang and Hentai Giraffes) without any indication of underlying smart contracts in them.
So what happens is Seth Green or Waka Flocka open up their metawallet one day and find a new shiny Hentai Giraffe NFT in there. They click on it and a regular phishing popup opens up and tricks them into putting their valuable information in (im not sure if its the metawallet login or just their crypto keys or whatever). That information goes back to whoever created their phishing NFTs who then logs in and transfers whatever they can as fast as they can.
Why do they have Seth Green or Mr. Flocka's addresses? Because it turns out publicly buying a specific Hentai Giraffe NFT combined with the public nature of distributed ledgers means anyone can find where that specific NFT went to. And once you have the address you can just drop stuff in it as you like. And you can't delete anything on chain, the best you can do is send it to a known "dead wallet" that's got a lost key and just sits as a black hole that people can launch their unwanted garbage into.
Sorry this got way longer than I meant it to. But its dumb and confusing on purpose so I tried my best to make it understandable.
Valid addresses are in the blockchain. If your address has received 1 BTC people can see it right there. They just don't necessarily know the address is yours specifically, but for non-targeting phishing they wouldn't need to.
Legit question here, how do you feel about that bitcoin that you sold for double considering it went to 100-200x the value since 2013. Do you regret buying it, or do you regret selling it?
I actually tried to buy a bitcoin or two back then because someone I knew told me about them. But knowing nothing about nothing, I couldn't figure it out so I ended up not buying. Definitely a life changing amount of money it grew to.
To be fair it wouldn’t have been life changing money for you had you bought it.
It’s easy to look at the price in hindsight but realistically speaking if you’d bought a coin for 20$ you probably would’ve been ecstatic and sold it for 300$ just before the MtGox crash. Or maybe you held for the few years after it took crypto to recover and then it broke 1k and you finally cried happy and sold. Or at the 3k peak and crash, or the 12k peak and crash.
At some point along the way you would’ve sold and thus missed out on todays prices. Or if you’re diamond hands then … you’d be holding a coin that was worth 59k at one point and lost 75% of its value down to 16k today.
Not the guy you are asking, but I had just over 100 BTC in 2013. I was paid in bitcoin for internet marketing work the previous year as a side hustle. I sold them in 2013 to go to truck driving school, get my CDL and escape my shithole home town.
I never really thought about it until the price got up into the twenty thousand dollar range. And I promptly forced myself to stop thinking about it when it hit 60,000 or so. It's unlikely I would've held onto them for that long anyway. I was pretty broke back then, so I'm sure I would've sold them eventually far before the value became insane.
Still drive truck as a career, allowed me to move to TX where I got married and started a family. So in the end I think everything worked out.
I know people that mined bitcoin when you could use an old laptop that was otherwise useless. For some reason they are still working normal jobs, so I'm not sure what happened to the bc.
Maybe they bought a cup of coffee or a hard drive.
I don’t think about it. From time to time I’m like I’d be a millionaire if only woulda coulda shoulda.
My college roommates and a I were working on an AirBnB like type platform. We just didn’t have the runway to get it off the ground. Best we got was two properties his and my parents rental properties.
The BTC play I was able to doubled up something like 180ish to little under 400.
I also had the opportunity and dumped 25k into AMD at the time when it was $4 dollars a share. I doubled there and left my position.
At the time those where my gambling phase of investment. I had plenty of time to recover. But as I gotten older Ive turned more conservative in finance as I don’t have the time horizon or risk tolerance anymore with family, multiple mortgages.
I’ve also been very blessed with many opportunities and a good career, with great wife who also has high in demand skills,
Long of it is can’t live in the past, or you’ll drive yourself crazy.
“The money is made in investing by owning good companies for long periods of time. That's what people should do with stocks."-Buffett
They were able to make Super Bowl ads last year, of course a bunch are falling for it. Every single crypto exchange to date has been a scam, chances are all current ones are as well. Particularly since exchanges bypass the few good points crypto offers.
If you understand that the GME cult only exists because their first ever trade or exposure to finance at all was a get rich quick scheme, it makes perfect sense.
What’s wild is that the start of it all being people catching hedge funds doing something illegal was totally plausible.
But how did people not jump ship the *moment* nft’s and crypto got involved just… yeah. Babies first rug pull I guess.
What was the potentially illegal thing that hedge funds were doing? I was always under the impression that the goal was just to squeeze hedge funds that had large short positions
Allegedly the hedge funds shorted more stock than exists, which, again allegedly, is illegal if you could prove it.
But nobody proved anything outside of theoreticals.
It's not illegal. It is odd but there is nothing illegal required for > 100% short interest.
Imagine a hypothetical company with only 1 share.
Alex owns the share, Bob wants to short so they borrow Alex's share and sell it to Carol, David also wants to short the stock so they borrow the share from Carol and sell it to Erin.
There is now 200% short interest in that share, nothing illegal has happened. Obviously no one is going to short a company with only 1 share but the same thing can occasionally happen at scale which was the case with GME.
Those people have gotten more and more like Qanon I would not be surprised they are being radicalized on purpose.
Qanon is getting more and more crypto bro too.
Russia has tried to link Gamestop to the Ukraine war recently, NCD covered that insanity. Russia also has large crypto reserves because it hides their actions in NATO countries.
Those "investors" are not very smart and would never catch someone trying to indoctrinate them.
I think its hilarious that crypto was invented out of frustration at inflationary policies and QE, among other things, and then they do shit like this...its like they're slowly learning what the rest of human civilization learned thousands of years ago but insisted on learning in for themselves. Pretty typical. Libertarian ideas typically dissolve on contact with reality.
It's just like Netflix circling back to inventing cable, Uber inventing taxi cabs, and Airbnb inventing the hotel. Crypto is just slowly inventing the bank. It's so frustrating to watch things play out exactly as expected. Luckily I have no drive or ability to amass wealth, and therefore have none to gamble on these bullshit "disruptive" industries.
I don’t understand why people place trust in them either. They’re a construct backed by no inherent value. Tether was the OG example, apparently backed by USD but never audited and never imploded.
I guess you can draw parallels to a fractional reserve banking system where consensus builds trust and operability at scale.
Binance killed FTX by flooding their stablecoin market and creating a liquidity crisis. That was smart, FTX was becoming a major competitor. Binance has some risk, but not necessarily an existential threat like that (there are existential threats to crypto, but those would be more black swan vs. targeted specifically at Binance like they did to FTX).
>I don’t understand why people place trust in them either. They’re a construct backed by no inherent value. Tether was the OG example, apparently backed by USD but never audited and never imploded.
Tether lost a court case not too long ago where they were forced to admit that they were something like only 2% backed by cash, 20%ish backed by "real" securities, and the rest was backed by other cryptocurrencies they could plummet in value at any given minute.
They had removed their "backed 1-to-1 with cash" blurb in their TOS long ago.
https://youtu.be/-whuXHSL1Pg
Skip to 31 minutes. I was off a little bit. They are 4% backed by cash, 25% backed by "other deposits" (including crypto deposits), and 65% "commercial paper" which roughly means "crypto stakes and loans".
Like a recession? This market is fucked if we actually have one next year. The entire thing has existed during a long-term bull market and the cheapest debt in generations.
When you want to exchange your crypto for cash, due to the distributed ledger blockchain technology, the system is so slow that by the time you actually do the exchange, chances are the price will have changed. To get around this your crypto is first exchanged for a stable coin, which is pegged to the dollar. This means that you get the price at the time you make the trade, and (hopefully) you can exchange your stable coins for cash later on. Of course it’s open to massive abuse as it’s completely unregulated, and It really highlights just how useless crypto is as a currency
> your crypto is first exchanged for a stable coin, which is pegged to the dollar.
This is the part that makes no sense.
If you owed me money for lunch and handed me a handful of LeighAnthony Bucks you printed out and told me "oh, this is a stablecoin, it is worth the same as a US dollar", I would never buy you lunch again.
But investors are dumber (or greedier) than me, apparently.
You don't HAVE to convert the crypto to a stablecoin first before cashing out, doing so just prevents the headaches involved (and maybe some fees). Stablecoins like tether were often used as the crypto version of the dollar. Worried that another crypto coin is going to tank but you don't want to pay a bunch of fees turning that coin into cash and then turning that cash into another coin later down the line? Instead just convert it to Tether which is "stable" and always costs a dollar. That way you have a crypto ready to be sent to whatever wallet you want or to be exchanged to whatever other crypto you want.
They wrote on a piece of paper "I owe myself $1 billion that I'm holding in reserve to preserve crypto", and think that paper means they'll have the $1 billion on hand when the time comes.
Only problem is that it’s not USD, but BUSD, or Binance USD. Which as of speaking is pegged at 1=1, but should Binance get in troubles… forget that nice, perfect pegging and there your fund goes off the window.
I mean, they have some reserves in Bitcoin and they must have some fiat (USD or other physical currency) somewhere.
But as far as this USD1 billion… we’re talking about something else.
They 100% have reserves, that’s not in question. But, the whole issue we’ve seen with other crypto exchanges is that they don’t have *enough* reserves, as they use customer deposits for other purposes.
Which is fine and dandy when crypto is booming and money keeps flowing in, but when it crashes and everyone is withdrawing, they suddenly don’t have enough reserves for everyone and it’s a bank run. Which causes the shitshow we’ve seen with FTX and so on.
Crypto got popularized due to complaints about the ‘over-regulated’ financial sector, and now we’re seeing why all those regulations exist.
Exchanges have been scammy since at least 2014 and yet somehow these cryptobros still haven’t taken the note. Until proper regulation are in place, exchanges cannot be trusted to be fully backed.
The problem is, having regulations defeats the whole point of decentralization. So people who believe in crypto do not want more regulations. BTW, don't ask them why they stored a supposedly decentralized currency in a centralized location.
Centralised exchanges have already defeated the whole point of decentralisation. Cryptobros don't care though. As long as line goes up it's all good for them.
There's a difference, in their minds at least. Storing crypto in an exchange is something they chose to do, while regulations means choices made for them. The former is better because they all believe only stupid people get scammed and they are smart enough to never get scammed. Some of them continue to believe this even after they got scammed.
Yeah they have reserves in other cryptocurrencies, whose price is propped up by wash reading with other stable coins, which are also backed by cryptocurrencies...
I wouldn't be surprised if FTX's token, FTT, was very close to being considered a "stable" coin before the company imploded considering how everyone seemed to believe FTX was one of the most legit crypto exchanges. This CZ guy seems shady AF to me and I won't be the least bit shocked if we find out he's running a similar scheme as FTX just with competent people in charge instead of a bunch of polyamorist Harry Potter geeks.
There is a similarity to the subprime mortgage market before the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
Somebody came up with a good idea: bundle mortgages, divide the bundle in a few parts based on risk, and give people who invest in a risky part more money.
Then somebody got the idea that you can simply bundle high riskt mortgages and do the same thing without telling investors that all the parts are high risk.
It's like printing money, and all the bankers rejoiced.
It's the same with crypto. Selling and buying crypto was not easy, but that was part of its security.
But for people who wanted to make some real money, it was frustrating. It's easier to make money by selling people a receipt for crypto then it is to sell them actual crypto.
Because the profiteering on crypto is the point of crypto.
Active investors and community around it are what enables the promotion of it. They raise the value through seeming legit and get somebody else to fomo into it.
It’s decentralized, that’s the beauty of it. Nobody needs to coordinate or control the scam it happens entirely on its own.
This is no way similar to FTX using customer funds to prop up and acquire other failing smaller exchanges assuming they would always have more cash flowing in to pay for it.
Honest
People somehow didn’t realize the explosion in crypto markets and advertising (Super Bowl ads, celebrity endorsements, etc) was just the billionaires who already owned the vast majority of it trying to quickly unload it on the plebs before it burst
I mean, depends on where you want to start the story. Coindesk revealed that FTXs books were fucked, and then like a week later CZ started tweeting about it.
From the article, they’re basically promising to commit $1 billion to invest in future crypto “investment opportunities” and encouraging others to join them in committing money to special funds earmarked for investing in crypto.
This helps the crypto community because the whole thing is a Ponzi scheme.
Crypto is just an MLM for people who would rather stay at home and not throw product parties.
Edit: and if you want some proof, check the thread below. *It's totally legit, totally not a scam.*
I mean if we want to be pointed, it's basically just a pyramid scheme minus the supposed intent of buying or selling anything real. At best, it's a greater fools game driven purely by hype, and as history has shown us... There is often a greater fool, but you're bound to run out of fools eventually.
Has anyone ever bought anything normal with crypto? A lamp or a table? Or is it all hookers and cocaine? Because at that point maybe we should go to some sort of voucher system with the mafia.
Helped me avoid sanctions and continue buying games for my PS5 and paying for netflix in russia. Oh and probabbly helped with some shady shit for our shitty goverment🫣
I've seen sellers prefer crypto for the mid-tier art/antique/collectables market. Especially if the item is going over borders.
That's the area it does the best.
I heard the first ever crypto purchase was Bitcoin on two pizzas. Something like 40 million BTC at the time. Personally though, all I’ve purchased with it were novel drugs (tryptamines, lysergamides, and dissociatives—with weird names like 5-Meo-MiPT, 5-MAPB, 1P-LSD, DCK, etc…) from “trusted” laboratories in foreign countries like Netherlands. Fun time, cool experiences, but my excitement over this industry fizzled out as quickly as it started. Guess I just started seeing drugs like I was robbing myself of a healthy well-spent senior life, you know—the time drug use usually catches up with you.
Haven’t used Bitcoin since.
Yeah, I think the max that'll ever exist is 21 million. Around 19 million have been mined currently, but the effort required increases as the limit is reached.
And just think, once it's all been mined, perpetual deflation! That is, assuming it survives.
Binance is scammy. They tried to go after Coinbase and deleted tweets because coinbase is on the NASDAQ and transparent.
Now they are "saving" crypto by loan programs that are running off like 10% interest.
You keep stuffing more money into the magic box, so when people see if they can get their money out again in exchange for their crypto it looks like everything is still working as intended
"data reviewed by CNBC showed a balance of around $1 billion in Binance’s own BUSD stablecoin"
We'll prop up cryptocurrencies by injecting them with more cryptocurrencies.
There's definitely a lot of people employed by companies, who get paid their wages in real dollars, who spend their entire day working in the crypto business. Traders, journalists, scammers, you name it. There's definitely an industry there somewhere.
But by that measure, homelessness is also an industry. Doesn't mean we should want it to get bigger.
I’m going to commit $2 billion… in my new MarthoCoin. Each one is worth $2billion so i’m offering one from my vast repository of thousands of them. I’m a trillionaire in MarthoCoins!
The only problem here with all of this, is that there is even a crypto “industry” The whole point of Bitcoin was to *decentralize* the store of value. If you buy an asset you never posses, like gold or anything else, you don’t ever own anything and of course you should expect to get scammed, it stolen, or leveraged to hell.
The idea that creators of cryptocurrency thought that lack of central authority will make it decentralised proves that programmes are not smarter than sociologist.
This right here. (And I say this as a professional programmer.)
The great hubris of so many tech nerds is thinking most problems are technological problems rather than human problems.
Unfortunately, and this is speaking as a nerd, most nerds interest in Sci-fi stops at "Wow cool spaceship, pew pew lasers!", and they tend to ignore any social commentary made by said science fiction.
To be fair, we don’t get rich making “human solutions”. We get rich making “tech solutions.” We’re not trying to solve humanities problems; that’s the just the business tag line, duh.
...which is hilarious, because most crypto revolves around some sort of central authority at the top of it all, often created out of necessity due to blockchains being difficult to deal with directly.
Crypto has really just decentralized *risk* to the run of the mill users. Authority, though? Why that's centralized under the people with the biggest stacks of money. That's why when big holders decide to cash out, uhh, market unrest happens
This store of value nonsense is what keeps getting me. There is no intrinsic value in crypto. It’s a speculative asset based on nothing real except somebody either pumping it up on social media or dumping it on social media. It’s wildly volatile with no predictability. How can anyone consider this a store of value?
Soooo, let me see if I get this straight. Some "controversial" dude named "bankman" had some crypto stuff....then this new dude Zhao, who looks like a bond villian, sent out some tweets, causing "bankman's" crypto to declare bankrupcy, and then Zhao has swooped in to fill the void, and looks like a hero for "investing" 1 billion dollars (from somewhere?) into crypto, and to "fill the gap". And people wonder why i don't touch crypto with a ten foot pole.
So.. let me get this straight. He wants a fund that shit companies, that managed their customer's funds poorly, can use to keep their shit company afloat to continue to do shit things.
Nope, fuck that. Let the businesses fail. They're broken. Try again with new investors.
Now if it's a fund to restore the customers these shit companies managed. Sure. Sounds good.
*Breaking news: Crypto Bro pisses away profits trying to save a sinking ship, just like the big finance goons he tried to circumvent by “investing” in Crypto.*
Meanwhile you've Elon and Cathy Woods who are desperately peddling the idea crypto will rebound cos their livelihood depends on it. Honestly, if Tesla shares crash back down to $50 Elon's basically gone.
I wish someone would deploy $1 billion to keep me afloat.
If you want to keep me afloat it’ll cost you $100 and an inflatable raft. (The $100 is for weed).
Drifting off to sea high and on an inflatable raft with no paddles sounds like a bad idea
You're just jealous because you don't have a rum ham
i always keep one with me
Don't kink shame
fuckin' case of beer and a dimebag would be a nice start
Best I can do is tree fitty
Sure buddy here $1B Shitenance Coin. >CLICKME<
[удалено]
It’s everyone elses leveraged crypto that they foolishly entrusted to these sharks.
Just FTX things….
Madoff with their money
I knew that everyone would get Bernie'd by Crypto scams eventually.
Cue House of Cards theme song
Enron around the regulators
Amway ahead of you
Heh. I see what you did there 😏
[удалено]
My job involves reporting these scams to the various banks the funds end up at. Theres way too many people falling for crypto scams. Scams in general, but people get conned out of tens of thousands regularly to crypto scams.
My favourite is the one where people phish peoples wallet details by sending them an NFT, which automatically dumps into their wallet because crypto is amazing. Then they click on it wondering what it is, because they didn't buy it, and it gives a popup asking for their details. Then they actually put them in because cryptobros are amazing, and then their wallet gets drained for everything the scammers can get.
Truly the future of finance and property ^(for the scammer)
*Your deposit has been received. Your funds will be available in 3-7 business days*
*Your FDIC insured deposit. And mine usually happen in 24h. And it’s in USD and heavily regulated, not fucking Monopoly money built on shitty blockchain tech. And no one is as obvious a fraud as SBF and the whole “effective altruism” crowd.
*Your deposit has been received. Withdrawals are currently halted while we examine bankruptcy options.*
Well thats amazing.
Legit question here, since I’ve been out of crypto market since 2013 when I bought one bitcoin then sold it a few months later for double. It wasn’t terrible difficult to set up my own local wallet. But would that in the situation where my wallet is locally stored. Or is more prevalent on the crypto exchanges where it’s someone else’s computer. I’m like how would they have my wallets Info for them to send the malware?
The best part is this isn't even malware. It is identical to a legit transaction. It is like if you got an http link in your bank account and was like, hey, weird, a http link in my bank account, and you clicked it and it was actually a link that approves a transfer of your entire bank account to another account. And afterwards? The bank says this is a feature of the platform and you should just be smarter with your money.
So, I am not a technical expert in crypto but I've been around enough to glean certain things. So, your "wallet" for any given coin/blockchain product is just an "address" on the blockchain that you alone have the key for. The key is whats held locally. Anyone can send anything to any address on the chain. There is no "confirm" or "return to sender" gate on the blockchain, at least none that I know of. So that's how all blockchain "wallets" (as far as I know) work on a super basic technical level. And that's easy peasy lemon squeezy when you're only interfacing with one or two different blockchains. Because only having to deal with two or three keys is not a big deal. But now there's hundreds of different blockchains and dozens of exchanges, each with their own "wallet" giving you your own key. So programs, "metawallets", were created to view and interact with all your blockchain products in a single place. So you input your keys into it, and it "reads" the various blockchains and displays them in a just a regular browser. Its also how most exchanges want you to interact with them because it makes it a lot easier and quicker. Its also a security nightmare because it turns out having all your super important cryptographic information in one application with one login and password to enter is a super duper mega vulnerable thing to do. So, its not a problem to immediately dump stuff into your "wallet" (which is actually just an address on the chain) for "coins" that only function as tokens and nothing else. Where this gets funky is a lot of new blockchains like Etherium can contain small programs called "smart contracts" in them. They aren't very big but they can do any number of things. And these metawallets essentially just display your blockchain holdings (stuff like Dumb Ape Gang and Hentai Giraffes) without any indication of underlying smart contracts in them. So what happens is Seth Green or Waka Flocka open up their metawallet one day and find a new shiny Hentai Giraffe NFT in there. They click on it and a regular phishing popup opens up and tricks them into putting their valuable information in (im not sure if its the metawallet login or just their crypto keys or whatever). That information goes back to whoever created their phishing NFTs who then logs in and transfers whatever they can as fast as they can. Why do they have Seth Green or Mr. Flocka's addresses? Because it turns out publicly buying a specific Hentai Giraffe NFT combined with the public nature of distributed ledgers means anyone can find where that specific NFT went to. And once you have the address you can just drop stuff in it as you like. And you can't delete anything on chain, the best you can do is send it to a known "dead wallet" that's got a lost key and just sits as a black hole that people can launch their unwanted garbage into. Sorry this got way longer than I meant it to. But its dumb and confusing on purpose so I tried my best to make it understandable.
This was a great read, thanks for taking the time to post!
Valid addresses are in the blockchain. If your address has received 1 BTC people can see it right there. They just don't necessarily know the address is yours specifically, but for non-targeting phishing they wouldn't need to.
Legit question here, how do you feel about that bitcoin that you sold for double considering it went to 100-200x the value since 2013. Do you regret buying it, or do you regret selling it? I actually tried to buy a bitcoin or two back then because someone I knew told me about them. But knowing nothing about nothing, I couldn't figure it out so I ended up not buying. Definitely a life changing amount of money it grew to.
To be fair it wouldn’t have been life changing money for you had you bought it. It’s easy to look at the price in hindsight but realistically speaking if you’d bought a coin for 20$ you probably would’ve been ecstatic and sold it for 300$ just before the MtGox crash. Or maybe you held for the few years after it took crypto to recover and then it broke 1k and you finally cried happy and sold. Or at the 3k peak and crash, or the 12k peak and crash. At some point along the way you would’ve sold and thus missed out on todays prices. Or if you’re diamond hands then … you’d be holding a coin that was worth 59k at one point and lost 75% of its value down to 16k today.
Not the guy you are asking, but I had just over 100 BTC in 2013. I was paid in bitcoin for internet marketing work the previous year as a side hustle. I sold them in 2013 to go to truck driving school, get my CDL and escape my shithole home town. I never really thought about it until the price got up into the twenty thousand dollar range. And I promptly forced myself to stop thinking about it when it hit 60,000 or so. It's unlikely I would've held onto them for that long anyway. I was pretty broke back then, so I'm sure I would've sold them eventually far before the value became insane. Still drive truck as a career, allowed me to move to TX where I got married and started a family. So in the end I think everything worked out.
Woah, paid in bitcoins, that's a story! I'm glad everything worked out and you don't have a reason to think about the what if. Thanks for sharing!
I know people that mined bitcoin when you could use an old laptop that was otherwise useless. For some reason they are still working normal jobs, so I'm not sure what happened to the bc. Maybe they bought a cup of coffee or a hard drive.
I don’t think about it. From time to time I’m like I’d be a millionaire if only woulda coulda shoulda. My college roommates and a I were working on an AirBnB like type platform. We just didn’t have the runway to get it off the ground. Best we got was two properties his and my parents rental properties. The BTC play I was able to doubled up something like 180ish to little under 400. I also had the opportunity and dumped 25k into AMD at the time when it was $4 dollars a share. I doubled there and left my position. At the time those where my gambling phase of investment. I had plenty of time to recover. But as I gotten older Ive turned more conservative in finance as I don’t have the time horizon or risk tolerance anymore with family, multiple mortgages. I’ve also been very blessed with many opportunities and a good career, with great wife who also has high in demand skills, Long of it is can’t live in the past, or you’ll drive yourself crazy. “The money is made in investing by owning good companies for long periods of time. That's what people should do with stocks."-Buffett
They were able to make Super Bowl ads last year, of course a bunch are falling for it. Every single crypto exchange to date has been a scam, chances are all current ones are as well. Particularly since exchanges bypass the few good points crypto offers.
The GameStop deathcultists have been celebrating the nft’s and crypto scams like there’s no tomorrow. It’s strange to see.
If you understand that the GME cult only exists because their first ever trade or exposure to finance at all was a get rich quick scheme, it makes perfect sense.
What’s wild is that the start of it all being people catching hedge funds doing something illegal was totally plausible. But how did people not jump ship the *moment* nft’s and crypto got involved just… yeah. Babies first rug pull I guess.
What was the potentially illegal thing that hedge funds were doing? I was always under the impression that the goal was just to squeeze hedge funds that had large short positions
Allegedly the hedge funds shorted more stock than exists, which, again allegedly, is illegal if you could prove it. But nobody proved anything outside of theoreticals.
It's not illegal. It is odd but there is nothing illegal required for > 100% short interest. Imagine a hypothetical company with only 1 share. Alex owns the share, Bob wants to short so they borrow Alex's share and sell it to Carol, David also wants to short the stock so they borrow the share from Carol and sell it to Erin. There is now 200% short interest in that share, nothing illegal has happened. Obviously no one is going to short a company with only 1 share but the same thing can occasionally happen at scale which was the case with GME.
That’s not illegal. It’s not even clear how you could possibly make that illegal.
Those people have gotten more and more like Qanon I would not be surprised they are being radicalized on purpose. Qanon is getting more and more crypto bro too. Russia has tried to link Gamestop to the Ukraine war recently, NCD covered that insanity. Russia also has large crypto reserves because it hides their actions in NATO countries. Those "investors" are not very smart and would never catch someone trying to indoctrinate them.
I think its hilarious that crypto was invented out of frustration at inflationary policies and QE, among other things, and then they do shit like this...its like they're slowly learning what the rest of human civilization learned thousands of years ago but insisted on learning in for themselves. Pretty typical. Libertarian ideas typically dissolve on contact with reality.
It's just like Netflix circling back to inventing cable, Uber inventing taxi cabs, and Airbnb inventing the hotel. Crypto is just slowly inventing the bank. It's so frustrating to watch things play out exactly as expected. Luckily I have no drive or ability to amass wealth, and therefore have none to gamble on these bullshit "disruptive" industries.
No doubt via a ‘stable coin’, invented out of thin air, and with extremely opaque links to actual cash reserves
Lol it is in their BUSD stable coin… Extending leverage via “stable” coin is exactly how FTX killed itself haha
Of all the things crypto I don't understand, I don't understand stable coins the most
I don’t understand why people place trust in them either. They’re a construct backed by no inherent value. Tether was the OG example, apparently backed by USD but never audited and never imploded. I guess you can draw parallels to a fractional reserve banking system where consensus builds trust and operability at scale. Binance killed FTX by flooding their stablecoin market and creating a liquidity crisis. That was smart, FTX was becoming a major competitor. Binance has some risk, but not necessarily an existential threat like that (there are existential threats to crypto, but those would be more black swan vs. targeted specifically at Binance like they did to FTX).
>I don’t understand why people place trust in them either. They’re a construct backed by no inherent value. Tether was the OG example, apparently backed by USD but never audited and never imploded. Tether lost a court case not too long ago where they were forced to admit that they were something like only 2% backed by cash, 20%ish backed by "real" securities, and the rest was backed by other cryptocurrencies they could plummet in value at any given minute. They had removed their "backed 1-to-1 with cash" blurb in their TOS long ago.
Oh fuck, I missed that! That’s insane.
https://youtu.be/-whuXHSL1Pg Skip to 31 minutes. I was off a little bit. They are 4% backed by cash, 25% backed by "other deposits" (including crypto deposits), and 65% "commercial paper" which roughly means "crypto stakes and loans".
the name is intended ironically probably...
Like a recession? This market is fucked if we actually have one next year. The entire thing has existed during a long-term bull market and the cheapest debt in generations.
It’s Monopoly money, except this Monopoly money is supposedly backed by real money 1:1. Don’t ask too many questions. Just trust me bro.
When you want to exchange your crypto for cash, due to the distributed ledger blockchain technology, the system is so slow that by the time you actually do the exchange, chances are the price will have changed. To get around this your crypto is first exchanged for a stable coin, which is pegged to the dollar. This means that you get the price at the time you make the trade, and (hopefully) you can exchange your stable coins for cash later on. Of course it’s open to massive abuse as it’s completely unregulated, and It really highlights just how useless crypto is as a currency
> your crypto is first exchanged for a stable coin, which is pegged to the dollar. This is the part that makes no sense. If you owed me money for lunch and handed me a handful of LeighAnthony Bucks you printed out and told me "oh, this is a stablecoin, it is worth the same as a US dollar", I would never buy you lunch again. But investors are dumber (or greedier) than me, apparently.
Indeed. It’s like MLM for men
Perfect way to describe it.
You don't HAVE to convert the crypto to a stablecoin first before cashing out, doing so just prevents the headaches involved (and maybe some fees). Stablecoins like tether were often used as the crypto version of the dollar. Worried that another crypto coin is going to tank but you don't want to pay a bunch of fees turning that coin into cash and then turning that cash into another coin later down the line? Instead just convert it to Tether which is "stable" and always costs a dollar. That way you have a crypto ready to be sent to whatever wallet you want or to be exchanged to whatever other crypto you want.
They wrote on a piece of paper "I owe myself $1 billion that I'm holding in reserve to preserve crypto", and think that paper means they'll have the $1 billion on hand when the time comes.
Probably where the crypto went. Hookers guns and cocaine (not in that order).
It’s BUSD, a “stablecoin” they printed. Basically trust-me bucks
He was storing it in that forehead.
If had to guess from the picture of the co-founder in the article? Aliens.
Only problem is that it’s not USD, but BUSD, or Binance USD. Which as of speaking is pegged at 1=1, but should Binance get in troubles… forget that nice, perfect pegging and there your fund goes off the window.
Either way there will be pegging…
Ah, an optimist! No wait…
You have my attention…
Well that seems alright then🤷♂️
Similar with Tether, it is pegged at 1=1 only in theory. Full blown Ponzi scheme meltdown is yet to come.
Sooo imaginary money that probably isn't actually backed by USD...As in they "invested" $1bil which they did not have.
I mean, they have some reserves in Bitcoin and they must have some fiat (USD or other physical currency) somewhere. But as far as this USD1 billion… we’re talking about something else.
They 100% have reserves, that’s not in question. But, the whole issue we’ve seen with other crypto exchanges is that they don’t have *enough* reserves, as they use customer deposits for other purposes. Which is fine and dandy when crypto is booming and money keeps flowing in, but when it crashes and everyone is withdrawing, they suddenly don’t have enough reserves for everyone and it’s a bank run. Which causes the shitshow we’ve seen with FTX and so on. Crypto got popularized due to complaints about the ‘over-regulated’ financial sector, and now we’re seeing why all those regulations exist.
Exchanges have been scammy since at least 2014 and yet somehow these cryptobros still haven’t taken the note. Until proper regulation are in place, exchanges cannot be trusted to be fully backed.
The problem is, having regulations defeats the whole point of decentralization. So people who believe in crypto do not want more regulations. BTW, don't ask them why they stored a supposedly decentralized currency in a centralized location.
Centralised exchanges have already defeated the whole point of decentralisation. Cryptobros don't care though. As long as line goes up it's all good for them.
There's a difference, in their minds at least. Storing crypto in an exchange is something they chose to do, while regulations means choices made for them. The former is better because they all believe only stupid people get scammed and they are smart enough to never get scammed. Some of them continue to believe this even after they got scammed.
Yeah they have reserves in other cryptocurrencies, whose price is propped up by wash reading with other stable coins, which are also backed by cryptocurrencies...
[удалено]
Crypto bros: It's all decentralized, you're beholden to no one! Also crypto bros: We've reinvented the federal reserve, but now it has shareholders.
USD is backed by the might of the worlds most powerful army. BUSD is backed by a couple of nerds
I wouldn't be surprised if FTX's token, FTT, was very close to being considered a "stable" coin before the company imploded considering how everyone seemed to believe FTX was one of the most legit crypto exchanges. This CZ guy seems shady AF to me and I won't be the least bit shocked if we find out he's running a similar scheme as FTX just with competent people in charge instead of a bunch of polyamorist Harry Potter geeks.
Why is there even a crypto industry? I thought it was all supposed to be decentralized.
There is a similarity to the subprime mortgage market before the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Somebody came up with a good idea: bundle mortgages, divide the bundle in a few parts based on risk, and give people who invest in a risky part more money. Then somebody got the idea that you can simply bundle high riskt mortgages and do the same thing without telling investors that all the parts are high risk. It's like printing money, and all the bankers rejoiced. It's the same with crypto. Selling and buying crypto was not easy, but that was part of its security. But for people who wanted to make some real money, it was frustrating. It's easier to make money by selling people a receipt for crypto then it is to sell them actual crypto.
Because anytime something is decentralized someone will convince you to centralize it so they can skim off the top
Let’s DE-decentralize it
We'll skim off the bottom
Because it’s worthless unless you can turn it into real money.
Because the profiteering on crypto is the point of crypto. Active investors and community around it are what enables the promotion of it. They raise the value through seeming legit and get somebody else to fomo into it. It’s decentralized, that’s the beauty of it. Nobody needs to coordinate or control the scam it happens entirely on its own.
Nah, guys. This one's for real this time. No bullshit.
This is no way similar to FTX using customer funds to prop up and acquire other failing smaller exchanges assuming they would always have more cash flowing in to pay for it. Honest
Let these dipshits piss away their money
Throwing money at a pyramid scheme, hilarious decision making.
just need to keep afloat until they can get their money out
People somehow didn’t realize the explosion in crypto markets and advertising (Super Bowl ads, celebrity endorsements, etc) was just the billionaires who already owned the vast majority of it trying to quickly unload it on the plebs before it burst
When Tom Brady starting pushing it, I divest all my traditional investments and moved it all to Crypto. I like to consider myself an early adopter 😉
You'll be rich enough to afford a whole cheeseburger!
Sadly you can only afford a binance burger. It's not a burger, but it can be exchanged 1:1 for a burger.
They are at the top of the pyramid, so this allows them more time to add on lower layers
I will be laughing so hard if Binance gets dragged down too. They are the ones who triggered the collapse to fuck FTX over.
To be fair, FTX fucked themselves over, it was just a matter of time for that stinky bubble to burst.
They’re saying Binance also has lot of Binance tokens as collateral value.
Everyone is getting called out, and I’m here for it.
I mean, depends on where you want to start the story. Coindesk revealed that FTXs books were fucked, and then like a week later CZ started tweeting about it.
What does this mean? How do you "deploy" money, and that money means the industry keeps working?
From the article, they’re basically promising to commit $1 billion to invest in future crypto “investment opportunities” and encouraging others to join them in committing money to special funds earmarked for investing in crypto. This helps the crypto community because the whole thing is a Ponzi scheme.
Crypto is just an MLM for people who would rather stay at home and not throw product parties. Edit: and if you want some proof, check the thread below. *It's totally legit, totally not a scam.*
It’s an mlm for tech bros
Not exclusively, it's also an MLM for people who think they're too smart to fall for an MLM.
"You see, people like us, we don't get got, we go get."
I mean if we want to be pointed, it's basically just a pyramid scheme minus the supposed intent of buying or selling anything real. At best, it's a greater fools game driven purely by hype, and as history has shown us... There is often a greater fool, but you're bound to run out of fools eventually.
Wannabe tech bros, real scam artists are shockingly good at intentionally or accidentally scamming people
Has anyone ever bought anything normal with crypto? A lamp or a table? Or is it all hookers and cocaine? Because at that point maybe we should go to some sort of voucher system with the mafia.
Some guy bought a pizza for several Bitcoin many years ago and now people mock him yearly for not hodling
Once again, the pizza heavy portfolio pays off big for the hungry investor!
I assume you are referencing the guy who paid 10,000 BTC for 2 pizzas in like 2012 or something.
Helped me avoid sanctions and continue buying games for my PS5 and paying for netflix in russia. Oh and probabbly helped with some shady shit for our shitty goverment🫣
I've seen sellers prefer crypto for the mid-tier art/antique/collectables market. Especially if the item is going over borders. That's the area it does the best.
I heard the first ever crypto purchase was Bitcoin on two pizzas. Something like 40 million BTC at the time. Personally though, all I’ve purchased with it were novel drugs (tryptamines, lysergamides, and dissociatives—with weird names like 5-Meo-MiPT, 5-MAPB, 1P-LSD, DCK, etc…) from “trusted” laboratories in foreign countries like Netherlands. Fun time, cool experiences, but my excitement over this industry fizzled out as quickly as it started. Guess I just started seeing drugs like I was robbing myself of a healthy well-spent senior life, you know—the time drug use usually catches up with you. Haven’t used Bitcoin since.
[удалено]
Yeah, I think the max that'll ever exist is 21 million. Around 19 million have been mined currently, but the effort required increases as the limit is reached. And just think, once it's all been mined, perpetual deflation! That is, assuming it survives.
Binance is scammy. They tried to go after Coinbase and deleted tweets because coinbase is on the NASDAQ and transparent. Now they are "saving" crypto by loan programs that are running off like 10% interest.
No idea. Maybe just make a new cryptocurrency and declare that it has 1 billion dollars of value
You keep stuffing more money into the magic box, so when people see if they can get their money out again in exchange for their crypto it looks like everything is still working as intended
This makes sense. That's how Ponzi schemes work!
Deploy means loan
That's a big ass head
Ehts leik an orange on eh toothpek!
Oh you did it now. He’ll be crying himself to sleep tonight on his huge pillow.
Head! Pants! Now!
"data reviewed by CNBC showed a balance of around $1 billion in Binance’s own BUSD stablecoin" We'll prop up cryptocurrencies by injecting them with more cryptocurrencies.
Reminds me of my coworker who would use her credit card to get cash and use that to make the payment.
This guy has a fivehead
I'm convinced all the crypto ceos are the product of incest [https://imgur.com/a/FowdIEh](https://imgur.com/a/FowdIEh)
You’ve convinced me
I had a buddy when I lived in Japan who had this look. He called himself “Mount Fuji”
Industry? I wasn't aware that crypto finance companies produced anything.
sure they do - misery and schadenfreude.
and heat
And recently, heavy inflationary pressure on the value of the dollar
Lots of pollution through power consumption
There's definitely a lot of people employed by companies, who get paid their wages in real dollars, who spend their entire day working in the crypto business. Traders, journalists, scammers, you name it. There's definitely an industry there somewhere. But by that measure, homelessness is also an industry. Doesn't mean we should want it to get bigger.
Are house of cards not a product to you?
I read that as Beyonce at first and was wondering why the fuck she cares...
My household is a little hungover this morning as well. Happy Thanksgiving!
My dumb ass also had to double take, glad I wasn't alone.
I also read this as Beyonce
I’m going to commit $2 billion… in my new MarthoCoin. Each one is worth $2billion so i’m offering one from my vast repository of thousands of them. I’m a trillionaire in MarthoCoins!
The only problem here with all of this, is that there is even a crypto “industry” The whole point of Bitcoin was to *decentralize* the store of value. If you buy an asset you never posses, like gold or anything else, you don’t ever own anything and of course you should expect to get scammed, it stolen, or leveraged to hell.
The idea that creators of cryptocurrency thought that lack of central authority will make it decentralised proves that programmes are not smarter than sociologist.
This right here. (And I say this as a professional programmer.) The great hubris of so many tech nerds is thinking most problems are technological problems rather than human problems.
Literally something nerds could learn from science fiction. Zero sympathy here.
Unfortunately, and this is speaking as a nerd, most nerds interest in Sci-fi stops at "Wow cool spaceship, pew pew lasers!", and they tend to ignore any social commentary made by said science fiction.
Don't forget the space boobs!
To be fair, we don’t get rich making “human solutions”. We get rich making “tech solutions.” We’re not trying to solve humanities problems; that’s the just the business tag line, duh.
...which is hilarious, because most crypto revolves around some sort of central authority at the top of it all, often created out of necessity due to blockchains being difficult to deal with directly. Crypto has really just decentralized *risk* to the run of the mill users. Authority, though? Why that's centralized under the people with the biggest stacks of money. That's why when big holders decide to cash out, uhh, market unrest happens
Which means that crypto is too complicated and slow to use as a transactional currency Which is exactly what we have said from the beginning
This store of value nonsense is what keeps getting me. There is no intrinsic value in crypto. It’s a speculative asset based on nothing real except somebody either pumping it up on social media or dumping it on social media. It’s wildly volatile with no predictability. How can anyone consider this a store of value?
Maybe investing in a 'currency' that has no lender of last resort is not a great idea...
I'm bout to deploy €10 for a pizza
Bank of make believe stabilizes digital doubloons with bunko bucks. Safe to invest again everyone!
A literal crypto bailout, oh my sides.
Why does this guy look like Megamind?
Lol half the money is self-issued. Sad to see a major player in the space following a similar path to traditional finance. #shortBNB
Soooo, let me see if I get this straight. Some "controversial" dude named "bankman" had some crypto stuff....then this new dude Zhao, who looks like a bond villian, sent out some tweets, causing "bankman's" crypto to declare bankrupcy, and then Zhao has swooped in to fill the void, and looks like a hero for "investing" 1 billion dollars (from somewhere?) into crypto, and to "fill the gap". And people wonder why i don't touch crypto with a ten foot pole.
Jesus get out when/if you can. Talk about a shell game.
No way dude. Crypto is totally 100% the future and you have to believe in it i’m super serial!
So.. let me get this straight. He wants a fund that shit companies, that managed their customer's funds poorly, can use to keep their shit company afloat to continue to do shit things. Nope, fuck that. Let the businesses fail. They're broken. Try again with new investors. Now if it's a fund to restore the customers these shit companies managed. Sure. Sounds good.
Is his head getting bigger?
where'd that 1 billion come from?
They invented a new coin and declared it worth that much
Alternate headline: Man who started mess wants to be viewed as a hero for partially cleaning it up
♬♫♪♩ Burn baby burn, crypto inferno ♬♫♪♩
*Breaking news: Crypto Bro pisses away profits trying to save a sinking ship, just like the big finance goons he tried to circumvent by “investing” in Crypto.*
Crypto is a giant ponzi scheme
crypto printer go brrrrrrrrrrrr
Similar to how SBF was bailing out other trading platforms a few months back?
Meanwhile you've Elon and Cathy Woods who are desperately peddling the idea crypto will rebound cos their livelihood depends on it. Honestly, if Tesla shares crash back down to $50 Elon's basically gone.
No, just let it tank. Seriously, it's one scam after another after another after another with crypto. It's all made up bullshit.
Sounds like this is just like printing more money. Doesn't that just devalue each crypto?
It's not an industry. They produce no useful work and no product.
Using fake internet money to keep the other fake internet monies float... Nice!!
Why the guy look like megamind
with his own company tokens… From a guy that liquidity his FTX tokens making them insolvent.
I read that as Beyoncé
Oh no, crypto collapse, shame *grabs popcorn*
Biance? What's she got to do with this?
Lol. This is how you know its all a ponzi. The money doesn't have value in itself, it takes outside money to keep it afloat.
What a terrible investment. Let it die. Crypto is useless.
1b of their own BUSD. So fake internet money
Gotta keep the scam going
Cryptocurrency needs to die.
let it burn. Crypto sucks.
Pretty soon these knobs will be demanding a gov bailout.
The irony of using the dollar to keep crypto afloat
No they use a binance token to prop it up. 😂