Crypto scammers hack OpenAI's press account on X
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/11zhr9n/the_...
A surprisingly enormous amount of people who are enthusiastic about the finance side but entirely clueless about the tech side.
Another macro point, I don't know OP's age but this vision of Silicon Valley as a tiny subset of nerds in the shadows tinkering is way out of date. The biggest public companies on the planet are all here, and a lot of people have spent the last 10+ years trying to break into tech for the monetary rewards, especially among the terminally online crypto zealots who spend all day chasing the next get quick rich scheme, which just so happens to be AI applications currently.
A lot of these people are also fundamentally clueless.
(And some of who are in leadership positions at OpenAI now.)
Even as someone who likes crypto, it seems like the push for "public acceptance" of cryptocurrency starting like 8 years ago was way too early and mostly caused by price action. I also blame the "steve jobs" imagery we always see associating technological development with mass adoption, It's clear that you have to develop the a strong basic use case first before marketing to users.
The time spent discussing poltics and price of crypto and onboarding new users would be better spent developing the core technology and creating simple real-world markets that use cryptocurrency. Instead, cryptocurrency is getting outmoded by the likes of "dumb" systems like CashApp and more competitive inter-bank systems like Plaid.
The mass of uneducated users in cryptocurrency space is a major problem because it does not allow the open-source development process to be democratic. That requires a userbase that is proactive about change and willing to undergo Hard-Forks that respect the users at large (against other interest groups like Miners, Owners, etc.).
Maybe I'm too cynical, but from my perspective, the mass of uneducated users is literally by design. They are people who early adopters wanted in so the price would go up without too much hassle of really explaining what was happening. Something, something, bag holders?
Or am I incorrect?
Users use cryptocurrency for real transactions and ultimately derive actual economic value from the convenience of the network. If a cryptocurrency has a lot of users, the price will be more stable and the fee model will hold up in the long term. Users do not necessarily have a lot of funds.
Owners only get value by on-boarding more owners, so they can sell and stop being owners, which is ultimately zero-sum (actually less than zero-sum because someone has to pay the miners).
The problem with pretty much every cryptocurrency that exists is that there are more owners than users, and the owners have more power than users. But the long-term success of the system relies on users.
It’s all a numbers game at this point.
... which seems to be maga only now and those seem to be quite into falling for crypto scams
Your comment is weirdly American-centric. Especially for HackerNews.
There's a certain kind of ideological alignment there, as odd as it may be.
I personally don't quite know how to handle them as it's basically more sad than anything; before the internet I didn't know that many of these people existed in my country. Let alone that they can get voted into government and make policy (well... policy... anyway). In the 80s we had 1 guy; JanMaat and he was a joke of a person; no-one took him in any way seriously, so there was no way extreme right would get anywhere with this slackjawed idiot at the helm. Now these people get voted in... How?
On the scam url side of things: Sam Altman runs Worldcoin which caught on in the developing world, in some regards, despite the nonscam part of the product looking like a scam anyway. Worldcoin’s speculative value does move based on OpenAI news, not because people expect dividends or for a rich Sam to pump it, just because people want to. Developing nation sycophants are less discerning about urls. Developed nation sycophants exist too, or are lapsing in judgement at that time of day when it drops.
On the token side of things:
It has been incredibly lucrative to interact with projects without tokens. One of the main ways that tokens have been avoiding securities law issues since 2020 is to airdrop unpredictable amounts to users. What this means is that people who actually use the product or platform the most - with their funds and liquidity - get airdropped potentially disproportionate amounts of a potentially valuable token. They typically announce a “snapshot” date in the future, meaning that you have to get all your activity in early.
VC backed projects are the main ones doing this, and it has been even more lucrative to try and sybil attack these, because all of your addresses get rewarded.
People have earned millions of dollars worth of tokens, that, yes, they can immediately sell for millions of dollars. I probably made $80,000 from Uniswap airdrops in 2020, spending nothing and only using Uniswap for trading.
Scammers can take advantage of that by making a vague site you have to interact with, that drains your wallet instead of providing a service or dispensing a token. I understand that all three of those possibilities are considered a scam to people skeptical of the crypto industry. Only the draining violates the social contract and it is useful to differentiate if you want anything different to happen.
However, what are you talking about with the article from Sam's website. He posted this.
What makes you think it's a scammer?
Does the prevalence of cryptocurrency-related scams point to the actual effectiveness and use-case of cryptocurrencies as a legitimate* means of value exchange?
Criminals and pornographers are often the acid-testers for new, fringe technologies.
*where legitimate is the ability to exchange value from one party to another, as opposed to the delivery method, ie. hacking / scamming.
Would I use bitcoin to buy a sandwich? No. Would I use it to do some weird spy stuff? Sure.
It is an incredibly lucrative industry that rivals and exceeds big tech compensation packages.
And that’s before stealing people’s funds, which is even more lucrative.
All because there is a crypto native audience already where the answer to your question is “yes”.
Haha. Blockchain against AI.
Scammers against scammers. /s