A kid made $50k dumping crypto he'd created – then came the backlash

reminds me of Credit Default Swaps (CDS).

Maybe give it an acronym?

I sincerely hope their clientele gets jailed.

I see words, yet they make no sense. (Not criticising you, but rather me)

If anyone cares to enlighten someone who is very far from that scene: I’d appreciate it massively.

It will clog their network, Solana routinely has outages, they can't scale. Soon they'll announce l2 solutions like eth.

Couldn't find any stories on the car theft thing, any link to that outside of a podcast?

Indeed. They have no intrinsic value, as far as I can tell.

I think it’s the adrenaline rush that they’re playing on.

You are always wishing that there is more people buying after you and more than sellers. Is all

Because they think they are smarter than everyone else. Everyone knows it's a scam, that's why it's a meme. No one believes they will be the one holding the bag when the music stops.

They should buy well established NFTs instead.

or possibly casino chips?

There are probably some clandestine algo traders propping up the volume too.

Doubt.

Apparently someone traded $1.4 million worth of Moo Deng coins for Hawk Tuah coins and got wiped out. None of these words are in the Bible.

https://x.com/bostonrob__/status/1864494571947757839

Not at all.

It’s eerie, right? Feeling like the only sane person in the room in crypto discussions.

Not monero. It is the only useful cryptocurrency in my opinion, and it is easy to understand that it is private digital cash.

A person was trying to save his money, which mostly sat in banks in a country which got in a financial turmoil. No external wires were possible. He bought cryptocurrency which sold in another country and put the other currency in a bank in the save haven. He got substantial losses, around 10%, but there was a serious risk was to lose all.

Just as an illustration of a use which - for good or bad - reached the goals of the person.

That's not the whole story, some of it also has a functionality in facilitating trade of drugs and weapons.

They mostly don't have environmental impact as long as they're not PoW. Still got all the other problems.

I think I've seen ONE decent use of crypto so far: https://www.drips.network/

Nothing screams intrinsic value like burning enormous amounts of energy just to find a set of bits that happen to hash to a value less than a target value.

But hey at least we proved that we won the race to find said hash before someone else!

"Crypto" like Bitcoin and Monero have legitimate (non scam/non-greed-driven roots) academic roots and solve entirely real non-scam product problems. ETH is academically interesting as a platform, but as far as I've seen has not "solved" any real product problems people care about in a real way at scale that has persisted (I.e. not fads) or that don't actually NEED the concept of a Blockchain. Being able to transact and store value without a central entity solves a myriad of problems, including, but definitely not limited to:

* Sending funds internationally is much much easier, an order of magnitude less expensive, and several orders of magnitude faster than going through the traditional banking system. It's entirely next level and there are plenty of legitimate reasons why people need to send international wires.

* Transacting in legal, but morally divisive areas, where traditional banking/finance might shut down your business just because it doesn't like what you're doing or is scared of the risk. E.g. selling cannabis products, sex industry stuff (porn, sex work), gambling, etc. people may not like some of these businesses and want to impose their own morals to get rid of them, but crypto makes this impossible in ways the traditional banking system can't.

Point is: there is absolutely a toooon of BS scammery in crypto. And many naughty things it can enable. It's the financial Wild West. But to call all crypto a "BS scam" is simply untrue. It would be like calling the entire Internet a BS scam just because of what it enables (plenty of scams, online gambling, porn sites, darknet markets) and the immense energy it consumes. But like the Internet, the technology is fundamentally useful. You've got your blinders on a bit too strongly if you believe otherwise.

for memecoins, right about the first half but almost all them do not take much to run.

it can be wagered that all the social media airtime spent on them would probably waste more electricity in the process.

Well I see it listed on Coinbase (https://www.coinbase.com/price/solana), so I assume that means that US citizens can easily sell them for USD?

https://rekt.news/ is a similar one that is fun to read

Crypto threads are only allowed in HN if there's a good opportunity to shit on crypto.

I jest, but there's a significant number of users here who would agree.

I’ll play devils advocate

Bitcoin hitting some arbitrary new high is not newsworthy or interesting. It’s the same story we’ve read for a decade.

Some kid making 50k exploiting a crypto service with some social engineering via memes is actually hacking and what should HN be about?

Did they get flagged and removed? Or were they just not interesting/newsworthy?

Somehow it feels like even if I did something where I openly say "This is 100% going to be a rugpull", people are still going to put money in it... I need to get on this con...

It seems like the crypto boom times gave a lot of people a lot of stupid money, e.g. that crypto guy who bought that "art" banana for millions (well, single digit millions) and then ate it. There must be a term for this similar to "fuck you money"... maybe "dance, monkeys, dance money"?

Edit to add: which is why I feel like most of the people joining on the memecoin/rugpull bandwagons are either playing with their -- let's call it "monopoly money" that they gained by "playing crypto", or rubes that are actually putting their savings in. The first group will just laugh off a loss, while the second group saw the fist group, got FOMO and will get ruined when the rug gets pulled.

Somehow it's very similar to card-sharking, where the other "victims" help the shark lure the actual victim..

I can sympathize with this position when the scam is obvious, but what about fraud? It sounds like you were deceived into investing in a scam that was not obvious, at least at first. Ideally regulations and entities like the SEC should prevent that from happening, or at least shut them down before they cause too much damage (better if you get half your money back than none at all).

And even in cases where the scam is obvious (at least to you), I do think there's room to protect less knowledgeable people from themselves, just like there's room to protect addicted gamblers from harming themselves and their families too much.

And overall, for the greater good, maybe it shouldn't be possible to commoditize the creation of new scams, if only so that people would look for better investments (e.g. some that are not negative-sum).