Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidlee1435 | Hacker News Reader

Kudos to Coinbase- I tried sending a small amount to the account after seeing Elon Musk's tweet, and Coinbase prevented the transaction from occurring.

View on HN

In time you may come to view this as a bug, not a feature.

This is exactly what I was thinking. This has made me lose a lot of faith in crypto, not that I had a ton of faith to begin with. But I keep hearing people talk about blacklisting addresses and blocking transactions. That's scary stuff. How can people ever feel comfortable storing large amounts of money in crypto if the big players can simply block their address and make it near impossible to liquidize their money? I feel like this incident is showing Bitcoin's (at least what Bitcoin has grown to become) true colors.

That is not what's going on here. This is a company protecting its users from a scam. If you don't want that protection, it's quite feasible to not use that company and use one that doesn't do that, or manage your own wallet, or whatever.

If you’re a fan of crypto for its independence and decentralisation, you aren’t going to be storing your coins on coinbase. You will store them on your own hardware.

Moving coins between wallets is simple, it would not be possible to simply block an address to prevent cashing out.

I'm betting Gemini also blacklisted that BTC address, especially considering that they were in the first wave of fake tweets.

Now I'm wondering how much BTC the attacker effectively left on the table by reusing the same wallet address, especially considering that lots of people who deal in crypto use just a handful of exchanges to send it.

What was that about decentralized systems being immune to censorship again?

Coinbase is not decentralized.

Why would you do that?

curiosity value > fractional bitcoin value

It's also validates the scam for other users. When they see BTC being sent they are more likely to think it is genuine. I can see sending dust to track the coins but other than that it's a damn foolish idea.

You can't stop stupid.

I imagine there’s only a small overlap between users that know how to track transactions, and those that would fall for this.

I'm actually kind of interested in exactly what sort of overlap that would be.

Curiosity, mostly. This was very soon after the tweet was posted, and it was less than a dollar.

They're well aware of this scam.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com