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Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how posting a "wallet code" is dangerous. Is it mining coins while you are browsing the code? Then it just a minor annoyance. Also, browsers should block cryptominers when they are in the background tab.

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I don’t think it’s mining code, I think it’s wallet addresses posted by scammers. Here’s an example of the scam I think this is intended to curb: https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-website-staticfiles-25g9k/elon_...

I don't understand how someone could be tech-savvy enough to know about ETH and actually own some, while at the same time falling for such scams.

I would wager most of the people dealing in crypto currencies are actually precisely the kind of people that would fall for pretty much anything. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the fact that they deal in crypto currencies is actually a pretty good indication that they would.

I think you're conflating categories. Here's what I think: https://i.imgur.com/d4ocNXa.png

That is to say, gullible people are found everywhere but I don't think people inclined to fall for fraud are the same as get-rich-quick tech-heads.

Responding by a Venn diagram, love it.

More to the point - there is a significant number of people who started learning about computer security precisely because they got some cryptocurrencies. And frankly, if someone wants to really understand the details, it's hard to miss all the frequent warnings and examples of scams, hacks, leaks.

"Dunning-Krugerrands"

The people speaking at events as experts on crypto mostly don’t know what they are doing.

Avoiding scams requires being people-savvy. Tech-savvy is unrelated.

I saw one of those fake Elon Musk posts in my stream and my first thought was "Wow! Is Elon pushing shady blockchain money things now?" It wasn't until a few seconds later that I realized there was no blue-check and it wasn't him....

Almost all people who know about bitcoin and ETH are looking for that cheap buck.

It is a numbers game. It is basically free and if you get 1 in a million than hey that's money. Same with Nigerian email spam I suppose.

These are probably the people who jumped on the hype train and bought at the previous peak.

holy shit Jita scammers have come out into the real world now.

"send me 1,000 isk and i'll send you 2,000 isk back!"

Oldest scam in the book. o7

o7 same thought occured to me m8. Fly safe!

Eh, at least it's not CODE

ok sent.

Paul is your Resume template open sourced anywhere , I like that time-line style?

I visited that page. I didn't check but I don't think any of my satoshis were stolen. Don't see what's dangerous there.

The page itself is not the scam. It's a page showing tweets where somebody is scamming people on Twitter, pretending to be Elon Musk giving out ETH.

Blocking cryptominers or other script isn't possible because of JavaScript's nature as Turing-complete language, much less with new shiny WebWorkers/PWAs. It's also not just a minor annoyance when miners, trackers, and all kinds of other nefarious or just plain garbage scripts drain your batteries and consume power/bandwidth for no other reason than browser vendors being busy to develop webapp platforms and world domination schemes rather than declarative and privacy-focussed content consumption/authoring ... browsers.

You can detect crypto miners pretty easily by their behavior.

I think Digital Ocean shared your view, until recently, when false positives caused them to shutdown a customer business, and a broken support procedure caused them to keep it down. Search HN archives for Digital Ocean from the last week or two and you should be able to find that story.

I don't know the terminology well, but further down in the discussion, it looks like it was some kind of scam rather than "just" mining.

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