A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
sfstandard.com
sfstandard.com
It is indeed MLM at its worst, because in this case you don't even walk away with any useless (but at least tangible) goods.
real crypto
It's interesting how often business success gets mistaken for general wisdom or street smarts. Just because someone built a profitable company doesn’t mean they’re immune to being naive or that their success wasn’t largely due to timing or luck. It’s a different skill set entirely to spot scams, especially the ones that are dressed up in just enough buzzwords to sound legit. Some people are great at one thing but totally blind in other areas of life.
> CoinMarketCap is dropping diamonds, fam! This airdrop is rugproof, ready to pump. Stack free bags!
> $ZEREBRO penispillreviews.com And yeah, that looks like an actual crypto website. This is bizarre. It's like they're rolling with the "we're totally a scam" angle.
So some suckers will fall harder if they know you're a scam, my theory.
It's common to have fake or hacked youtube channels - often with hundreds of thousands of subscribers - branded as official channels, featuring deepfake videos and livestreams from tech ceos announcing these scam coins. There are fake comments under tech videos and fake accounts on twitter discussing scam coins.
Inexplicably, X runs $Grok ads featuring fake Musk.
In all seriousness, when the topic of crypto is brought up, I feel angry at myself.
Back at the peak of crypto-hype, and NFT mania i had the gut feeling that this is all bullshit — even though I couldn't put my finger on why.
(And do you remember ICOs?? What was wrong with us??!!)
But seeing a lot of people around me — who are much more knowledgeable, and had way more experience and, most importantly, whose opinions I respected — embrace it, made me feel ashamed of myself for not being able to see the "obvious" value of crypto.
And while I didn't advocate for Blockchain, I feel that I wasn't vocal enough about its drawbacks.
Seeing now that the US government itself getting involved is very worrisome, and sad.
One reason this is worrisome is that crypto mining is 40% in the US and 45% between authoritarian countries of Russia, China, and North Korea. If they collaborate and get another 5% of the mining capacity, then they can destroy all of the value wrapped up in a given crypto. Wait until the US invests significant funds then make the investment worthless. Seems like US adversaries would be happy to invest many billions of dollars to have financial control of the US. And they only need the threat. The US investing in crypto cedes financial control of US currency to outside actors. And now they have the dipshit helping too.
$1.4M is a lot to you or me, but in the world of big money it is pocket change.
See this classic from 2015:
https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/press-release-basecamp-val...
In order to determine the valuation of companies, Bhatnagar typically applies the following formula: [(Twitter followers x Facebook fans) + (# of employees x 1000)] x (total likes + daily page views) + (monthly burn rate x Google’s stock price)-squared and then doubles if it they’re mobile first or if the CEO has run a business into the ground before.
Faking one's own death, evidently.
Furthermore, scammers often do "wash trades" where they set up two accounts and have one purchase from the other, for whatever price they feel like. So now they're making up both of the numbers that get multiplied to determine the market cap.
Most people who worry about silly little details such as "consequences" don't go into crime.
Survivorship bias because you can only observe the ones that are caught. I'm sure plenty of criminals have successfully faked their deaths.
I guess the typical reply is that we mostly know about the stupid ones who get caught. But it would depend on the crime types, I guess. With some crimes, if the person is really meticulous and clever, chances are also they probably managed to make their business legitimate, like they just become a politician, and get their gains from lobbying and writing "books" instead of running cryptocoin scams.
It seems the main difference is that Philippa spent most of this timed confined to the attic rather than just walk around outside assuming no one would find him. Or trading his crypto assuming no one would notice.
Kind of an amazing story by the way, but not many resources available about it in English. But for those who can speak Dutch there's e.g. https://meitotmei.nl/zoldernazi-jacques-philippa-begon-zijn-... or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQceZ5O2oog
Zerebro was building an AI agent framework (+ the obligatory coin) and also released AI-generated music. The music is lowest common denominator AI pop with cringe lyrics [1] but at one point achieved a respectable ~40k monthly listeners on Spotify.
Jeffy hit the crypto podcast scene (see his Blocmates interview [2]) and comes across as quite earnest, but there was a lot of hype too, for sure.
One thing that these thread comments are maybe overlooking is that Jeffy may have been genuinely frightened of being harmed, like kidnapped. Hence the fake death. Crypto kidnappings are more prevalent in Europe, so maybe they're going to take off in the USA now too ...
[1] https://youtu.be/5JTgWQq0who?feature=shared
[2] https://youtu.be/A-_cd7Ze8mE?feature=shared
The lyrics to the music video betray a very shallow copycat misogyny.
I would argue that people make more purchases with Bitcoin than they do with gold.
It has plenty of utility, though. Open up any electronic device.
This is exactly what happened with gold, and then people realized that basing money on gold was stupid, so now we have the system we have today. Cryptofools are two financial revolutions behind modernity.
We used to back our money with precious metals, but no longer do so. The dollar is now backed by aircraft carriers, jets, and military might.
No, I'm putting my trust in the rule of law.
> The dollar is now backed by aircraft carriers, jets, and military might.
It is mainly backed by trust in government monetary policy. Otherwise, what is the GBP backed by? The Royal Navy isn't what it used to be.
E.g. you can pay for Mullvad in crypto, Mullvad is not a scam. You can trade predictions on Polymarket, Polymarket is not a scam.
im not sure whether this is gresham's law or the dynamics of a lemon market in action or what though.
the dynamics of the crypto market seem to push non scammers out.
Not sure if all crypto is a scam necessarily, but sure that world is chock full of scammers trying to out-scam each other.
Even BTC and ETH are shady. ETH should have been classified as security. BTC is an environmental disaster and centralized by a few large miners.
The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.
But these scammers. So many of them... Easy to smell though, but the problem we need to fix is these scammers get most of the online traction/attention, taking it from truer builders.
These are all scams, too. No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO serves as a nice concrete example. "Code is law" fell apart as soon as the code resulted in a large enough bad outcome for enough people.
Citation needed. Governance and finance absolutely need human judgment recovery edge cases such as "My house burnt down containing my ID (keys) and I need access to my bank account to rebuild it"
Human beings cannot do that.
It seems the common approach now is to make a v2/v3/etc. of your protocol and let your own users migrate. Previous versions will still run forever, but your frontend can push migration paths.
"My house burned down and inside was my spouse, who was my reco ery contact"
"My recovery contact died / isn't speaking to me / is backpacking in the Himalayas"
The problem isn't technical. It isn't a formal mathematical problem. It's that the real world is messy.
There are plenty of other classes of problems too. "This person committed a crime and their assets need to be seized", etc.
Rather, blockchains enable anyone to provably check the state of the database. Your fintech app logs you out. No proof, and frustrating customer service hell for days/weeks/months.
No, blockchain really isn't all that amazing. Blockchain is useful when you need something decentralized, immutable, and trustless. That trustless bit is the important part, there are existing solutions for decentralized immutable ledgers that work far better than blockchains and require far less compute power. And it turns out that the vast majority of human and business interactions and transactions are actually based on varying levels of trust.
And that's before you get into blockchain-specific issues like the Oracle Problem.
Decentralization is important but isn't as important. There are many successful chains that aren't decentralized at all and are quite useful.
Most top/real projects in blockchains aren't immutable. Pretty much everything is upgradable/changeable, including blockchains themselves.
Trustless - even this part isn' true for most blockchain systems. They all contain various levels of trusting different entities.
It is the transparency and verifiability that is the key idea and most important improvement that blockchains bring.
You can have transparency and verifiability without blockchain, so long as you trust the parties publishing the ledger. So once again, trustless is really the key part to blockchain.
> Trustless - even this part isn' true for most blockchain systems.
Blockchains are immutable, trustless, permissionless. Otherwise it's called a database.
Eh? I thought blockchain didn't scale? As far as I can see blockchain swaps trust in banking institutions ( not to simply make up numbers in their banking systems ) - to trust in a majority based voting system where you don't know the people involved and you just hope the bad guys don't have a majority.
And the computational cost of running the distributed voting system - is many of orders magnitude higher than the computational costs of transactions in the we-trust-the-bank-model.
As for smart contracts - a quick google suggests that the cost of deploying a smart contract on Ethereum is 500 dollars - that's quite an overhead for the vast majority of financial transactions.
Hekin upvoted kind stranger!
We want curious conversation here. That can only happen when people say new things. Generic denunciations like what you posted here not only are nothing new, they're as repetitive as it gets.
Exit Scam (https://www.exitscam.show/) -- Crypto exchange founders rip off their customers so much that it has an actual name, as infamous a grift as the The Money Box or The Big Store. This podcast explores a QuadrigaCX and its founder's likely faked death, digging into a few other crypto scams for parallel examples.
Number Go Up by Zeke Faux (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/711959/number-go-up...) -- this book, which reads as a cross between investigative reporting and New Journalism, tracks Sam Bankman-Fried's rise and fall, discusses the NFT grift, and explores the weird, wild world of stablecoins. Turtles all the way down on this stuff.
And not everything is scam, there are good projects. That being said the behavior of people and organizations in crypto is poor and will slow adoption. I still regularly see major crypto ecosystems rug pull their own developers. They simply can’t help themselves.
* don't financially benefit their creators
* are not a copy-paste of an existing coin with some trivial changes
I don't disagree, but at this point it has to be like 90% of crypto products are scams, and that number is still increasing. They're simply running out of people to scam. The 18-40 year old male demo can only lose so much on crypto and sports betting before they run out of money and credit. It's a giant ponzi that's losing it's legs. I'm sure it doesn't help that everything else is so expensive (housing), making these hail mary gambas more attractive, but the money will dry up regardless.
Let me know when you see it done right.
He was dead, with an obituary even and now back to being alive. Why the PTSD?! He should be rejoicing! /s
But I wonder, is faking your death on social media a crime? If he still paid taxes I guess he might be legally out of the woods, just based on the faking part, not related to the scamming thing.
If it's for financial benefit, it's criminal fraud.
Software people are just different from the normal person. Way different. I couldn't put my two friend groups together.
Are they "special?" Maybe, maybe not.
In my observations, the average software engineer is more likely to be persnickety, caught up in small details, and obsessive than the average person. We're more likely to split hairs than most people would care to, and proper labeling and categorization is much more important to us than average person.
It's not that software engineers are somehow magical or special, it's that there is a selection bias to become a software engineer. It's extra not special, because the same thing happens for virtually any specialized field. There are famous stereotypes about the personalities of psychologists, for instance.
It sounds like a fancy way of saying that people on the spectrum are more likely to become software engineers than some other arbitrary person.