Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto
medium.com
medium.com
We used this botnet as a case study back in 2018 when doing analysis on finding Twitter bots at a large scale. You can find the paper here [0] - the cryptocurrency scam botnet starts on page 28. You can also find the talk here [1] where we go into a little more detail. In full irony, someone tried sharing our research on Twitter, and one of the bots replied to the thread trying to spread the scam.
[0] https://duo.com/assets/pdf/Duo-Labs-Dont-At-Me-Twitter-Bots....
All it really takes to solve this is better UI. This is costing some users money and making the experience worse for everyone. Sad that Twitter isn't willing to take this seriously.
From a technical standpoint these types of scam tweets should be easily identified as spam and the fact that they aren't is damning.
It’s even more maddening that there is no way to report that a YouTube channel has been compromised, there are only report options for inappropriate content of various sorts.
The problem is that for every successful weed and nudes sale there's a million ransomware attacks, scam calls, and absolutely fraudulent "investments".
One of the (back then) dominating bitcoin exchanges used the domain mtgox.com which was an acronym for "magic the gathering online exchange".
They learned the hard way you need a higher standard of engineering for a financial exchange.
Does this mean you can only make real money if you got in at the very beginning?
It's a pretty self-contained bubble of geeks building things for other geeks. Which isn't not interesting! But the expectations set by the cryptonauts was that this was all going to change the world.
And then ran face first into the reasons the existing systems work the way that they do, haven't communicated well to "average" people, can't tell a non-theoretical/ideological story of why what they build exists, etc.
There are some great people working on crypto projects, but I wouldn't say it is thriving. The only mainstream company is Coinbase and they make money based on trading, not any underlying tangible value of the coins.
So what?
"omg this ycombinator founder didn't change the world" said nobody ever
But mention crypto one time.... I guess it is nice that it is held up to a separate higher standard and captivates the minds of some people willing to help it get there.
Some people here mentioned a standard about merchant adoption, even to that, so what? thats the least interesting use case, the M0 money supply is small in exchange systems people choose to respect, its panned out the same way in crypto but people decide to make a separate standard of "hey a lot of this is used for speculation! I don't consider that a use case, is it because I'm ignorant of how fiat currencies work, no, can't be".
There are various services for merchants that shield the merchant from knowing crypto is being used, and various services for consumers (like debit cards) that shield them from needing to directly use crypto. That exists, not a lot of fanfare is needed, if you want to use that you can and don't need to write a whole blog post about it. Its not an interesting use case, no matter how much you felt you needed to quantify its use in that way in order to feel better about it.
It also works, shrug, onchain (+tx eventually settled onchain) transaction volume is at all time highs and it doesn't even make international news because its not news, as it should be.
And there remains plenty of interest in academia, there are still many fascinating areas of research in this space.
Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to various online creators with no fuss. It's really quite simple, no need to overthink it.
Sure, maybe one day the price will crash or the peg fail, but for most intents and purposes it works fine. Monitoring crypto prices and fundamentals is not so bad compared with traditional finance folks having to read through hundreds of all-caps tweets to know how much value the USD will lose this month, or sifting through reddit WSB troll posts to know which stock to buy.
USD is controlled by an entity which spends $680 billion / year along with countless lives and 270k barrels of oil a day in order to defend it.
Gold dug out of the ground, then put in high tech vaults which must be similarly actively defended.
Buying at a Bitpay PoS in Japan is just scanning a QR code, instant confirmation (Wechat easy but even foreigners can use it). A P2P sale for a non-insignificant amount of money (~$1.5k): rejected by Paypal, inter-bank transfer would take days to go through. BTC was 5 minutes to wait for a confirmation. Donations through Patreon or other require you to sign-up, go through convoluted systems that sometimes require sending your identity documents, crypto is just copy an address/scan a QR code and confirm in your usual, familiar wallet.
In the UK bank transfers are practically instantaneous. It's nuts that the US is so far behind on this.
(EDIT) Sorry for my rude reply. Your point about intra-national transfers stands.
That's off by a factor of 18 even if you want it to be fast, according to https://bitcoinfees.earn.com
"The fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 110 satoshis/byte, shown in green at the top. For the median transaction size of 224 bytes, this results in a fee of 24,640 satoshis." = .0002464 BTC = $2.81
No, you just have to worry about how much your crypto will change in value each day. Bitcoin's value changed by over 7% in just the past month, and in the past year has dropped in value by over 20% twice. That's so much better than worrying about the fraction of a percent in the monthly deltas for USD over the past several decades.
You have the exact same problem with gold, which has increased 30% over the last few months.
That has always been a caveat of new network-effect dependent technologies.
In the early days, the internet wasn't useful to communicate with other people. It was way easier to just call the person on their phone instead of hoping they had a particular messaging application installed on their PC and had it turned on when you were hoping to talk. Its only value propositions were downloading porn for free or finding communities of geeks, trolls and conspiracy theorists. It served those niches well though, and from there slowly grew to attract more and more people and usecases.
In the end, something like 3-5 percent of what you spend is going to be redirected. These are real costs you pay.
It's a deflationary store of value.
What is Gold valuable for? It's a deflationary store of value (though it does inflate slightly so it's not as good as Bitcoin in that sense).
Deflationary stores of value are valuable.
It's the same reason why a battery is valuable if you have solar panels. It captures excess energy from the system and allows you to store it for later use when you actually need it (like at night when the sun doesn't shine).
When the Fed is printing tons of money, the sun shining... You don't know what to do with all that excess energy. You could buy more electrical appliances to consume that excess electricity (e.g. invest in that hot new startup), but you already have more of them than you know what to do with... You may as well store that excess energy to use later for a rainy day.
Source? The link supplied uses 5 cents/kWh, which is also an assumption on their part that they do not explain either.
There are lots of reports of 'seasonal mining' occurring in China, where mining operations are occurring in areas with very cheap or completely free electric, generally because the costs of producing the electricity are fixed, rather than scaling up or down with demand (geothermal / hydro / other renewables).
No, not quite. Total new investment into the space is falling. But it’s nowhere close to zero.
It will probably never totally die. Instead, like baseball cards or beanie babies, it will atrophy into obscurity.
There are enough people who have sunk enough into the project—financially, reputationally—that, barring a depression, it will continue to have backers for at least another few decades. As long as Tether doesn’t overplay its hand, prices should keep the illusion going. It’s a cautionary tale regarding the staying power of purposeless institutions.
The vast majority of people are wrong. The financial system doesn't work; it's easy to exploit. It's no coincidence that many cryptocurrency enthusiasts are hackers; they found vulnerabilities in the system and are exploiting it. In the context of our corrupt, dysfunctional system, the value is solid and price will always go up in the long run.
Corporations are also exploiting the financial system using many of the same tricks, but cryptocurrencies have the advantage of being completely faceless and totally unaccountable. It's the next phase in the evolution of corporate personhood; which was a horrible but very successful idea. It's all about reducing liability. Whatever financial instrument is best at reducing its liability will win.
> but cryptocurrencies have the advantage of being completely faceless and totally unaccountable
Advantage, but also disadvantage. If a bank cheats you, you have options to complain to regulators, to the police, to the FBI, to you Congress representative finally. It won't work in all cases, but it's an option that's available to you. If a crypto scammer cheats you, well, nobody is accountable. For some people, it's a big issue, because it greatly increases the friction in transactions.
Also, politicians never answer my emails and I did try. I must be living on a different planet.
But there has never been more institutional and high net worth interest in BTC than now as a value store and adoption for a global reserve currency (we can see this from the institutional gateway inflows). Some recent examples: Microstrategy invested $425 million in BTC over treasuries. Twitter bought $50 million the other week (and Jack Dorsey owns BTC personally). Paul Tudor Jones bought in with about 2% of his total assets. Its gaining traction in this area as a value store.
Gg society, the fact that we're talking this up like it's a good thing means most of us deserve to be poor af
Also yeah, stock buybacks were illegal up until 1982 and since there legalization we've seen large trades in companies from R&D spending towards buyback spending...
I'm not suggesting that Twitter investing in BTC is or isn't a good thing, but the CEO having a personal stake should not prevent the company from investing if there's suitable expectation of positive returns for the business.
(Now this reminds me of Katrina when local New Orleans banks lost their primary and backup data centers and took weeks to recover account balances.)
With some banks, if you open a bank account at a branch in one time zone but later move to another time zone, your transactions will still be processed according to the business hours where the account was opened.
I know someone who is in this situation and they can't make transactions for several hours towards the end of the day (after midnight in the originating branch's timezone) because their bank's online banking front end can't agree with the bank's backend system about what day it is.
What kind of system allows scams of this scale to thrive for over a decade? What kind of system supports bailouts of big corporations every few years? Corruption of the media? Corruption of politics? I don't think any of these fit the description of a 'working system'.
EDIT And what kind of system supports downvoting (thus trying to censor) such a logical comment as this one?
OTOH, the regulators are getting quite serious in recognizing crypto - including reporting requirements and enforcement. The era where it was tiny enough the IRS basically didn't care except for tiny amount of outlier cases is gone.
Can someone help me here, how do these alarmist articles pop up occassionally as if this hasn't been happening for years.
Why does my twitter experience, logged out, consistently show me the fake crypto scams as the first response to any public figure, with heavy activity and evolving responses, while others get to act like they've never seen this before and must warn everyone.
Any theories?
One theory I have is that most people actually falling for these don't talk about it. Similar to most scams, people just feel too dumb.
https://www.tenable.com/blog/cryptocurrency-scams-fake-givea...