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Comment by ratg13 | Hacker News Reader

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It's definitely embarrassing that people losing their shirts in crypto didn't see it coming. It's bad that people think a zero sum game is worth playing against incumbents. The marks aren't the worst part, though. Everyone promoting memecoins and utility-free cryptocurrency in general is either ignorant or just a bad person with a warped idea of success. Personal money accumulation is a sad goal compared to actual wealth creation. The parasites who push crypto on the hopeful proto-bag holders are destroying the prosperity that supports them.

Yeah on memecoins isn’t that just a loophole for running naked pyramid schemes? I.e. a pyramid where everyone knows it’s a pyramid.

Like the weird part about a pyramid is that depending on your risk tolerance it may actually make sense to participate in a pyramid even if everyone involved knows it’s a pyramid. So are that many people being scammed as in tricked (seems hard to believe), or is it just a risky form of gambling that is outlawed in legacy formats.

EDIT: Ponzi -> Pyramid

I've never purchased crypto or had any involvement but acquaintances I know have used that exact argument. They know it's a pyramid but believe they can get ahead because they were in early enough.

They are usually a lot more vague when I ask about their realized gains.

I have many friends who started from really humble beginnings ~5 years ago (or instance, a typical small business like "an e-shop selling bullshit Chinese gizmos online making 20k per month"), and are now uber rich in crypto. Like, hundreds of millions in net worth and spending 200-400k per month. And yes, they don't invest their money anywhere except new and new crypto projects themselves, just because they don't know anything that gives near similar returns. Not one-off success, but 5-10 or more different avenues of making money there (but certainly none of them was about "trading coins" or passively investing in them).

Just to be clear I'm not saying that my aquaintences didn't make money. Just that they are vague.

But ultimately if you have friends making hundreds of millions of dollars and there is enough of them then that essentially proves there will be many more losers than winners.

I personally don't partake for the same reason I didn't partake in Amway in college. It's functionally a pyramid scam and on a personal level a boring way to make a living.

How do you know it’s boring? The guy above clearly has some bright ideas about it.

It’s on par with inventing an axe and now living in a forest god mode. Is that boring, or is that……… why I’m even asking, an ability to spend $e5/mo covers allmost all personal interests in the world.

What? It's my personal opinion which I explicitly pre-qualified. Why do you care what I think?

Move on and live your life.

Just curious, how think.

I have enough money to live comfortably for the rest of my life working on interesting problems even if they don't make me a hundred-millionaire.

Everything that's optimised for making money, is a scam.

> memecoins and utility-free cryptocurrency

As opposed to what?

During the previous wave of crypto, there were all sorts of ambitious if doomed plans to do interesting things with blockchains. Even Bitcoin was originally supposed to be a means of exchange, not an "investment".

Now we don't even pretend that $DOGE/$TRUMP/whatever has any utility aside from speculation.

As far as I know the only difference between these so-called memecoins and 'reputable' cryptocoins is that the former have a funny name. Other than that they're essentially the same product.

Bitcoin, ETH, and Monero all have utility in one way or another. Bitcoin is accepted by most black markets (and Monero is even better for privacy). And software is built on top of the ETH chain. No one is buying stuff using DOGE or Trump coin. There's a clear difference between memecoins and legitimate cryptocurrencies whether you like them or not.

The question is: what makes a cryptocoin legitimate, in your opinion, considering that 'ilegitimate' memecoins are usually just a copy-paste version of a supposedly 'legitimate' cryptocoin?

If people are using them outside of speculation then I'd consider that legitimate. I'll concede that most of the market cap of cryptocurrencies is from speculation but at least Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a few other coins have use cases outside of that and for that reason, they will at the very least have some value even if that value is much closer to 0 than to what it is currently.

It was an offline multi-sig wallet. Hackers seem to have musked the transaction when the owners signed it as it looked good to them.

Wow it must have been really musked then, huh?

A “musked” transaction consists of payload obfuscation and spoofing, more often than not malicious actors create a genuine looking UI with legit transaction details, while being malicious underneath.

It’s basically phishing at a transaction signing level.

I only found the term a few weeks ago and thought I was the one left out, sorry for not defining it earlier.

It’s got an eerie ring to it though, right?

And only a few weeks ago the lawsuit started payout the 'early lump sum' repayment option for creditors.

"Bybit CEO Ben Zhou wrote on X that a hacker "took control of the specific ETH cold wallet and transferred all the ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address."

From the article. Not that I endorse crypto, in fact I despise it. But at least per this statement, it seems to have been handled offline. How a hacker could get access to this is another story to unpack.

edit: I guess this is the story that "unpacks". One more reason to not believe in crypto.

https://x.com/benbybit/status/1892963530422505586

By "online wallet" they were likely referring to the Bybit website being the wallet of those customers that held their coins there rather than keeping them in their own private wallets, and not whether the hack involved a hot wallet or a cold wallet. Calling it a custodial wallet would have been more accurate.

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