I simply can not have any sympathy for idiots so greedy they fall for the "I'll double your cryptos" scam. None.
The best way of fighting scams is intelligent, critically thinking people. If this wasn't so deliberately undesired by politics, the world as a whole would be a better place.
My personal belief is that the best way I can set myself up to fall for a scam is by incorrectly believing that I would never fall for one. "Pride goeth before the fall." That's why I try to remind myself I'm as fallible as the next human.
Told the police, they said, they can't do a thing, because the scammer stole the bank account and probably lives in Estonia or somewhere.
So, while I use banks on a daily basis, simply because I have to, I don't believe they are much safer.
In any case, sorry it happened to you.
Also, depending on how it was possible for the scammer to "steal the bank account" in the first place you might be entitled to damages or something, though that heavily depends on your legislation and where your bank is located of course.
I got packages stolen in front of my porch and got my money back from Amazon. Did Amazon go find the thief? Probably not. Will this always work? Probably not. But I had someone to talk to. In blockchain nobody can change the past.
This sounds like "if everyone was a good driver, we'd have less auto related deaths". C'mon - that's not how the world works, this is just wishful thinking.
The problem with crypto scams is there is no clawback. If someone commits wire fraud and I accidentally send the wire for my $100k down payment for my new house to <insert imposter> the bank can potentially reconcile it. With crypto? Nope, you're f'd. Sorry there's no trace.
> intelligent, critically thinking people
Like the Winklevoss twins who store their wallet keys in....BANKS so they don't get scammed. The irony is hilarious.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/technology/bitcoin-winkle...
Victim blaming is a bad idea.
Regulators exist for a reason.
> This is especially true among younger people who are digitally savvy but less financially literate.
> People ages 18-to-39 were more than twice as likely to report losing money to social media scams as older adults last year.
Seems like maybe we should be protecting the "young know-it-alls" from themselves?
If publicly traded companies started putting their treasuries into Caesar’s chips, you bet we’d see more regulation.
This isn’t an argument that I think is particularly worth entertaining. People should exercise due caution at all times appropriate to their surroundings. However if a criminal robs them it’s the criminals fault.
Our reaction wouldn’t be, well, let’s arrest the criminals but leave those tunnels, the tunnels did nothing wrong!!
Doing so would simply give the next criminal a head start.
This is a great analogy for crypto. Sure once in a while an asymlum seeker may get through too, but overwhelmingly it’s narcos and Bolivian marching powder. So we blow up the tunnels.
It's not about the main thing an infrastructure enables, it's about what the infrastructure is designed for. Tunnels under the border are specifically there to smuggle. Highways are there to do move anything you want, including illegal activity, which is policed separately.
And the asylum seekers and Bolivian marching powder examples are good to address the main point here as well. Does the cokehead share any blame in using coke? Is that victim blaming? Should asylum seeking be illegal?
Was bitcoin created to break the law? In some ways. But it was designed to facilitate commerce without regard for legality. It's not like a smuggling tunnel, it's like a highway. And it's like that because sometimes you want to smuggle something, like asylum seekers, but you want it to serve legitimate purposes also. So not a very good analogy at all.
> It's not about the main thing an infrastructure enables, it's about what the infrastructure is designed for.
It's not at all, what it was originally designed for is irrelevant, the question is what it's being used for.
> Does the cokehead share any blame in using coke? Is that victim blaming? Should asylum seeking be illegal?
These are all utterly aside the point. These are matters of law. Law governs. Infrastructure which facilitates that is better than infrastructure which does not. Infrastructure that makes breaking the law easy is worse than one that does not.
> Was bitcoin created to break the law? In some ways.
Again intent is completely irrelevant except for the prosecution of those doing the creation.
Because cryptocurrency is slower, less efficient, more volatile, and incorporates dramatically more counter-party risk than classic payment methods it self-selects primarily for the criminal activity. It's useful as a payments system of last resort in certain cases but that's dwarfed by the illicit use which is in turn dwarfed by speculative use. It actually creates roughly zero value.
Then surely you should be able to demonstrate your point with some analogy other than "a smuggling tunnel."
> These are all utterly aside the point.
No, they are the point. This thread was about victim blaming. And you brought up asylum seekers, broadening the discussion to include whether legality should apply at all, or whether we should consider ethical use of a tool regardless of legality. I'm not bringing anything new up in this discussion, I'm only replying directly to points made.
> Infrastructure that makes breaking the law easy is worse than one that does not.
Even if that infrastructure primarily serves (or was created to serve, you choose) the purpose of smuggling, for example, asylum seekers?
Your entire point in this comment seems to be "everything you bring up is irrelevant" which begs the question, why are we even having this discussion at all?
I don't feel I need to. I think it's pretty apt.
> ...broadening the discussion to include whether legality should apply at all...
I didn't do that, you did. I maintain legality is society's decision to make, and that infrastructure should serve society's goals. Infrastructure that makes it dead easy to undermine societies goals is not something I want to encourage.
> Even if that infrastructure primarily serves (or was created to serve, you choose) the purpose of smuggling, for example, asylum seekers?
This is why I suggested it was a tortured reading.
Again, it only really matters what it's actually used for. Asylum seekers need not be smuggled through tunnels because it is lawful to apply for asylum at a port of entry. You show up and ask for it.
Except we know that at scale very large organizations, i.e. Google, cannot 100% stop phishing attacks just by user training. Humans are always fallible in a large enough group. The solution for phishing protection is to take the human out of the equation and rely on something like U2F to perform the authenticity check for you.
Their phishing incidents dropped to zero.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/07/google-security-keys-neu...
The problem, simplified: People are dumb.
The solution: Making people smarter.
Not a solution: Keeping people dumb and preventing them from making stupid mistakes.
To make sure that everyone, who will eventually read this, understand what this line actually means, is:
There's always an idiot falling through the cracks.
Yes. It's inevitable. It happens. Doesn't change the fact that if people were more rational and less driven by their feelings, less people would be falling for scams and thus less scams would exist.
Anyone who doesn't understand that scams solely exist because they work, is excused. Anyone who disagrees with the idea that people need to act in a rational, self responsible manner is a part of the problem.
The cause of scams is people, who aren't thinking things through, falling for them. If schools nowadays didn't raise people into mostly being thoughtless robots, the world would be a better place as a whole, scams included.
Of course there's always going to be one guy. Doesn't change the rest at all. You're making good the enemy of perfect and your solution in no way or form actually improves us, as humans, and instead removes even more responsibility away from us.
Once critical thinkers, now vulnerable and gullible.
I wouldn't be so harsh.
Doesn't change the rest, though.
Crypto is intentionally the opposite. Imposing artificial scarcity on a world without, leveraging inefficiency and complexity at every level to obscure what’s actually happening. It’s an ideology not a technology. It’s just a linked list but much slower. Anything that can be built on the blockchain can be built faster, cheaper and more efficient without.
Ask yourself why in 14 years no industries have been revolutionized, no businesses built (except for trading) and no value created. If there’s so many industries ripe and begging for the tech why hasn’t a single one of them gained any value from even one blockchain implementation?
Why exactly do you think the valuation of cryptocurrencies are so high? Certainly it's not an indicator that the business case for it is nil. Maybe not revolutionary, but it is disingenuous or delusional to suggest that there's no business use for this thing while staring point blank at a world getting eaten by it in real time.
> Why exactly do you think the valuation of cryptocurrencies are so high? Certainly it's not an indicator that the business case for it is nil.
Completely irrelevant. Prices are determined at the margin, its most recent price times supply. It’s got nothing to do with how much money is in the system or how useful any of it is. They’re all priced in USDT which has at numerous times been totally unbacked and issued on loans to institutions who use it to control the marginal price.
As for shared delusions, the entire economy of Albania collapsed into a civil war because 66% of the GDP got locked into MLM schemes in 1997. [1]
You must evaluate this from first principles not based on what the other lemmings are up to.
14 years in can you name a single business built on crypto that’s even remotely successful?
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.ht...
Built on crypto? By definition you can't name a single business that isn't an exchange built on it. That's like naming a business built on stock trading that isn't a stock exchange or investment fund. But ones that use crypto in some way? I can name a few, not counting black market businesses, overstock.com is one.
Overstock doesn’t use crypto, they use Coinbase who gives overstock good old American greenbacks. Like most of the world accepting crypto they don’t actually - it would be impossible due to the massive forex risk. They rely on third party MSBs like Coinbase and Bitpay to liquidate incoming crypto.
I’m thinking of the crowd with a list as long as their arm of ideas including replacing Ticketmaster, supply chain management, voting, all the other broad ideas.
I've never once claimed cryptocurrency would be useful for anything other than money, so I'd be the wrong person to argue with about that. I'm not a web3 evangelist.
Of course, the sheer inefficiency of the system makes it practically useless as money due to the transaction times, costs and volume capacity.
It's bad at being money too.
The philosophy behind it is a widely debunked model (Austrian economics) which isn't taken serious by ... anyone outside a fringe group of libertarians.
Also it's critical to note: it's market cap is not the quantity of value 'stored.' It's simply most recent price times supply. You couldn't get a fraction of a fraction of that back out without zeroing out the entire thing. Proof of work relies on wasting as much of the world's limited resources as you can within the budget allotted, and proof of stake is simply a perpetual wealth machine for the already wealthy.
Then of course the ability to reverse transactions is huge value-add for customers, the ability to block transactions to sanctioned countries is a huge value-add for the world.
The philosophy behind "it" is a pretty complex thing. You can design a currency using the tools used to make bitcoin and have any sort of economic philosophy as your guide. It isn't limited to Austrian economics. You can have a linear, predictable supply increase, a finite supply, a logarithmic debasement rate (percentage of supply increase rate), a complex algorithm to determine it, a democratic process, or even just some guy calling the shots if you want. It's a general purpose tool.
I'm aware of the huge flaw in the "market cap" metric and it's relative uselessness.
If reversible transactions are a value add, people will use currencies with that option, and where it's not, people won't.
I don't think bitcoin makes good money. But I do think you can make good money with the technology, I think it is good that this thing is driving people to make technology with which you can make potentially better money, I think we are finding the utility of this stuff by just letting people do what they want with it, and I personally find it useful in my life.
Disagree. You should do whatever you want so long as it doesn't negatively impact society more broadly. As I demonstrated in the Albanian example there is a real chance that allowing people to do as they please can lead to a complete implosion of the economy - and even war. Everything we do as a group is about balancing individual freedoms against their impacts on others. This is the "your right to swing your arms around wildly ends where my face begins" argument.
> You can design a currency using the tools used to make bitcoin and have any sort of economic philosophy as your guide. It isn't limited to Austrian economics. You can have a linear, predictable supply increase, a finite supply, a logarithmic debasement rate (percentage of supply increase rate), a complex algorithm to determine it, a democratic process, or even just some guy calling the shots if you want. It's a general purpose tool.
None of that is useful without the ability to step in and actively manage it during situations that weren't baked into the original design. Think the DAO.
> I'm aware of the huge flaw in the "market cap" metric and it's relative uselessness.
The argument I was responding to initially was your assertion that "surely there's something there because the number is so up! Check out that market cap!"
> If reversible transactions are a value add, people will use currencies with that option, and where it's not, people won't.
They do, everyone uses dollars.
> But I do think you can make good money with the technology.
I disagree fundamentally because it cannot handle edge cases and the edge cases are the only thing that really matters in the end.
Everyone who wants crypto can have it, now. And could have had it on day one.
This is obviously not true, given that there was a wealth of text-based internet applications well before image-based options were widely available.
It's not clear what cryptocurrencies have given us, apart from a (not very secure) way to buy drugs on the Internet and the occasional slower, power guzzling alternative to a service that already exists.
Then again, hopefully we'll never need to see a future where everyone values the decentralized nature of crypto more than its monetary value at any given moment. If that happens, it might be under a regime where sneezing in public or looking in the wrong direction would lose you enough social credit that your bank account gets terminated.
Uncensorable, except for all of the times that providers have refused service because of (very reasonable!) KYC laws.
Global, except for all of the countries that will throw you in prison for using cryptocurrencies.
Decentralized, except for the structured oligarchy of miners who prevent protocol evolution on any decentralized currency of sufficient value.
Hully gee.
- You cannot censor a Bitcoin transaction. You are talking about a completely unrelated issue and pretending this is an issue with Bitcoin.
- People in China are still mining Bitcoin and using crypto even with the ban. So it truly is global. Just like how drugs are global even though most countries have banned them: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/18/chinas-underground-bitcoin-m....
- Miners have tried to prevent changes to the Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol more than once and failed due to community consensus of the users. Miners don't get to decide which protocol is run, the users ultimately do. If the miners choose to mine an unpopular protocol, people can and will simply fork the chain to a more favorable protocol. This has happened plenty of times.
Or do you think criminals are using crypto because they're uninformed reddit HODLRS hoping to moon?
The criminals stayed though.
First, it was criminals, now it's the planet. You are all over the place my guy. I'm doing what's best for me economically speaking; the planet is just gonna have to figure out a way to survive because I'm for sure doing fine.
- my family
- my friends
- my country
- the rest of the world
I'm not going to restrict my own economic goals to save the planet at the expense of the things above.
There's flyover country, there's flyover countries, and ignoring the masses that make that up is equal parts condescending and ignorant.
El Salvador's wannabe dictator is pretty keen on it, though.
And we aren't going to get anywhere in this discussion if your only rebuttal is "the leader of a country using it voluntarily is a dictator so that settles it." Do you have a rebuttal to my point at all?
I actually prefer using the public ones when I want a paper trail. But I've got a stash of the private ones in case I ever need to relocate to a different country one day in my life.
That's victim blaming