We’ve only scratched the surface of how bad the crypto crime wave has gotten
latimes.com
latimes.com
Even as someone technical who understands a bit of the ecosystem I feel uncomfortable making transactions without double- and triple-checking everything, including looking at the contract code. I can't even imagine doing anything as a non-technical person in crypto.
A lot of friends of mine were "playing" it. Regular people.
I didn't play not because I was smarter then them, but because I didn't care and I didn't have much money to play around with, but in the end it's all about mixing:
- how you're introduced to the game by people you trust (like friends);
- the prospect of wins;
- naivety;
I'm sure the large majority of the people that bought NFTs didn't even thought about the technical part of the game. And you just need to attend some communities on discord and reddit to understand the level a lot of people were playing.
Some people actually believed that complex games were going to be created, that would bring NFTs ingame - similar to Ready Player One movie - and everything would interact with that world. Everyone was having fun, and some even made money, how can kids understand it was all a scam?
So the question might even be, how didn't more people get scammed? Like, what stopped people from hopping in this frenzy?
Maybe the reality was that they were just busy with other stuff.
Social engineering alone was enough to perform criminal activities with little to no repercussions.
People love free money and are bad at math.
Though - to be fair - that old pyramid scheme costed only little money[1], so it was "affordable" to many, when we are talking of NFT's (or of those people that get burned because they put all their savings in a cryptocurrency that goes down to 0 or similar) and of hundreds of thousands (or millions) it is perplexing (to me) how they can risk all that money.
[1] taking into acoount inflation and what not it could have been at the time the same as 100 or 200 Euro, or if you prefer a dinner or two at the restaurant.
Disagree with your use of the future tense here. NFTs were Nigerian prince emails from the beginning.
Take OpenSea. Assuming the NFT hype doesn’t suddenly resurrect itself, there’s no way the company can ever reach 2021 revenues and the lofty valuations it enjoyed in its Series C round. VCs won’t have endless patience for funding down rounds. But the sucker list can be monetized by less-than-scrupulous actors. Maybe we’ll see a special brand of private equity operators who buy these distressed former crypto high-fliers and milk the remaining user bases for years to come.
I suppose Masayoshi Son will be at the top of the sucker list?
I harbor a certain schadenfreude - a hope - that these folks burn out and develop a drug addiction, are forced derelict in the divorce, eventually succumbing to the horrors of the underclass that they struggled so hard to avoid.
:)
If only.
Aren't buyers the ones holding the bag over those losses?
Because that is one of the key traits of a scam.
If you are next positive in NFT world, you are either a scammer or profiting indirectly from the scam. The funds are coming from people getting scammed.
I had a lot of friends reaching out to understand more. A lot of them didn't really like the reality of how simple it would be to lift and mint a new thing. They were convinced they were holding a winning lottery ticket and I was a bad guy for saying it wasn't what they thought.
I've never encouraged people to buy crypto and if someone does, they are not as smart as you or they think. I personally invest in crypto because fundamentally I believe something deeper that I hope works.
Parasites live in the real world, the digital world, on the internet attached to whale buyers, and in the real ocean attached to real whales.
I've been burned so many times in crypto but I've been burned equally, if not more, by options offers, RSU bonuses and blackout periods, company mergers and subsequent outcomes of my shares, 401k/, etc etc.
We are constantly outrunning this wave and we are asking for transparency. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't but we need to be expecting this public nature of failure and not being able to hide the juggling of balance sheets to hide insolvency
> if someone does [buy crypto] they are not as smart as you or they think.
> I personally invest in crypto because fundamentally I believe [...]
> I've never encouraged people to buy crypto and if someone does [encourage people to buy crypto], they are not as smart as you or they think.
> I personally invest in crypto because fundamentally I believe something deeper that I hope works.
I've implemented my own blockchains, I have produced patents in the space, I have spoken and worked in this space for a significant amount of time.
Pumping and dumping is a get rich scheme which is destroying the perception with very real victims. I feel bad for people young and old that attempt to play in the stock market options space and lose it all because they are gambling thinking they will get rich.
I feel equally for those getting hurt in crypto despite the sad reality that they should have come in with questions not hope of a windfall.
These two things are more alike than different in my opinion
The fact we have currency that fluctuates on a day to day basis despite not being tied to anything beyond our trust in the system is not much better of an argument.
There was a point that the U.S. based it on the gold standard which locked in how much could be produced. This would be similar to how certain crypto lending exchanges claim they are backed 1:1 with dollars to create this concept of stablecoins.
The crypto is easy to determine, the dollars not so. Some are having audits to provide trust and transparency.
The clearing houses and financial levers are more complex than many understand. Our financial systems operate on trust, credit, and risk more than they do on having everything working in proper order.
I'm not saying crypto is THE solution and maybe in it's current state it isn't. I have learned a lot more about what exists today because I have something to contrast it too and I understand different pros/cons that I didn't see before.
I don't think we can use such excuses anymore. Luna was supposed to be backed by $3b worth of btc. We have absolutely no idea if this capital was actually used to defend its peg or if Mr Kwon pocketed it all. Crypto is just as hard to determine if not more so
Translation of what you wrote: "I've never really thought about economics for more than a couple of seconds, and therefore I cannot see the difference between the US dollar which literally supports a 21 trillion dollar economy and is guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the richest government in history, and a cryptocurrency backed by no one, which performs perhaps 0.01% of the transaction that the dollar does."
https://www.verywellmind.com/an-overview-of-the-dunning-krug...
I'm talking about the actual systems and physical infrastructure.
I have been fortunate to work with some of these larger institutions which carry the "full faith and credit of the richest country in the world".
Save Dunning-Krueger in your back pocket, I learned that quite some time ago in college, you may not be finished with it just yet.
If you are serious about learning look into FedNet. Bump that against the white and yellow papers and you'll have a better understanding of what I mean.
Mea culpa, although if anything this is an even more extreme example of attribution error:
(paraphrasing) “I invest in crypto for grand and philosophical reasons, and would never dream of promoting it to others (except by regularly claiming that it will save our supposedly broken financial system). Others who promote cryptocurrencies are opportunists or fools.”
Far from increasing your credibility, having been involved in cryptocurrency development more likely than not has hopelessly biased you towards this kind of messianic “crypto will save us” thinking.
> I'm not saying crypto is THE solution and maybe in it's current state it isn't.
Your quick admission and then doubling down is disappointing.
Ironically, you really are owning this attribution error with your textbook self-serving bias.
- BTC has fallen below $19k USD (from a peak of near $65k)
- ETH has fallen below $1k USD (from a peak of ~$4600)
Once you get into the altcoins ("shitcoins") it's even bleaker. NFTs by their nature are harder to get a picture of (that's the "non-fungible" part) but it seems to be a bloodbath.
This Seth Green story is particularly funny because on top of the price-crashing you're actually getting no utility. Why? Because copyright ownership still has to be enforced through the traditional IP and legal system.
And on top of that lack of utility you see how reversibility of transactions in the non-crypto financial system is a feature not a bug.
There's really no reason for any of this to exist. It's all a massive waste of energy that is driven by nothing other than speculative fervor. It's not belief in the technology. It's just greed.
More to the point, the only thing holding up the value of any of this is the collective belief in it and every day the price crashes again that belief is eroded. I really have no idea how low this can go but it'l be interesting to see.
This is the greater fool theory [1] in action and the best defense seems to be it isn't a pyramid scheme; it's a trapezoid [2].
[1]: https://www.altfi.com/article/9398_bill-gates-dismisses-nfts...
[2]: https://frinkiac.com/meme/S03E12/872714/m/VGhpcyBpcyBub3Qgb2...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it even worse. There is no transfer of any rights whatsoever on the common trading platforms so I assume copyright ownership is rare. Consequently in most cases there probably is nothing to be enforced. At least that is how I understand NFTs.
Even beanie babies have more utility.
The fact that the NFT platform does not provide a way to rollback such thefts does not mean it’s a scam either. Is a car made by a scammer if the manufacturer doesn’t provide a way to shut off the car remotely if it is stolen?
Maybe not a scam, but utterly useless for any true value store.
Reconciliation is ABSOLUTELY FOUNDATIONAL to a monetary system of value.
Literally some of the oldest writing we have is folks arguing over the details of a deal (~1750 BCE: Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir).
If you have a system where "Code is law" and trust can be violated and that violation literally cannot be addressed, then you don't have a system that works. Exchange literally requires some form of trust.
If you buy a painting in real life, how exactly do you roll it back if someone steals it from you?
"Green was planning to use his ape as a character in an upcoming animated show."
What's stopping him? The image is still there at the same URL where it always was, and if he had a copyright license to use it before the NFT was stolen, then he still had it afterwards. There was no need to reacquire the NFT.
And
Thought I was minting GutterCat clones- phishing link looked clean [1]
And In a follow-up tweet, Green went into more detail about the scam. The attack had taken place after clicking on a phishy link to an NFT minting platform, attempting to mint GutterCat clones. [2]
[0] https://www.btcc.com/en-US/coin-news/market-updates/seth-gre...
[1] https://nitter.net/SethGreen/status/1526693106606809088#m
[2] https://insights.masterworks.io/nft/seth-greens-stolen-bored...
Generally, if you manage to track down a painting someone stole from you, you don't have to buy it back for a six figure sum like Greene did for his beloved ape.
Buying or possessing stolen property is a crime, so police intervention is the closest equivalent to reconciliation that we have in the world of physical goods.
Cryptocurrencies differ from fiat in all sorts of ways, but ready conversion at the point of sale is not one of them.
Edit: maybe it's more like asking if you can gamble at the casino with dollars instead of chips, either way there's some kind of misunderstanding involved.
That's an apt metaphor for cryptocurrencies, for sure.
Ummm have you heard of this public agency called "the police"?
If the title had said "We’ve only scratched the surface of how bad the credit card crime wave has gotten" that doesn't mean they're saying credit cards are a scam.
If Seth Green goes to NotAtAllSketchyNFTTrader.com and confirms their ToS, only that was a transaction transferring his NFT to them, is that a scam or a hack?
It could have but only in a narrow technical sense. They didn't and don't because those types of direct abuses of the consumer-facing financial system are pursued with great vigor and perpetrators punished severely. It's the same reason it made sense to deploy 0 day exploits to thieve WoW gold but not actual money.
One could imagine that it's just about the same amount of people who buy NFTs for $400,000, maybe a bit less as it's easier to buy something online than doing physical actions.
People who have that kind of money to gamble away, and want to gamble it away, will gamble it away no matter what kind of things exists in the world.
(Did anyone else have to threaten to put an agent of a foreign power through a Starbucks window, or is that a very "this city has no embassies and COVID has made people particularly antisocial in October 2020" situation? Can't wait to talk about that one on a stage not dedicated purely to comedy someday soon!!)
Edit: grammar stuff.
That should have been a clue.
The jokes they write themselves.
> Since the NFT was stolen, Green lost the right to use it in his show.
Under what law or other principle does using a picture in a show rely on an entry in a blockchain? Or is the risk that ignoring the NFT and the using the IP anyway might further pop the NFT bubble?
Green probably won't be able to get into NYC Apefest, which starts Monday. Which is the only actual benefit that comes from holding a BAYC NFT. Although, at age 48, he probably is too old for a rave.
Of course this could be intentional, as others have said, it furthers the narrative that NFTs are genuinely non-fungible.
At which point they're open to theft charges.
Bathing in kool aid indeed.
Maybe no one gets prosecuted if they’re clever, but they would be compelled to return it (or then face possession of stolen property charges and contempt of court)
It's a sticky situation. If they don't pretend they've lost the copyright by losing the NFT, then the NFT is demystified and no longer has value. Since the value of this particular copyright is almost entirely derived from the perception of NFTs being special, the NFT being demystified means they lose out anyway.
It's like you have a Picasso and all your friends are very impressed. Then somebody steals it, and to get it back means going to the police and inevitably admitting that it was never a real Picasso in the first place. So either way, you've lost. So instead you don't go to the police, never admit it was fake in the first place, and instead hope that it will be returned to you through some extrajudicial means that won't necessitate an admission of fakery.
Mint it.