Bitcoin and Digital Currencies

But it's extremely unlikely.

My 2 pieces of Bitcoin:

Chances are that if societal collapse happens the remnants may not be able to reserect the Internet as it currently exists either because the technical means are destroyed (no instutal knowledge, servers got ruined, everyone forgot how to rebuild infrastructure) or because people would fear it too much to consider brining it back unchecked (esp if crypto or AI is the cause)

If the Internet were to return to a post apocalyptic world, it is likely gonna be around the xp/ps2 era at best with vested interests aiming to keep it that way. Such tech would likely not be able to access or create block chain (or LL Ms) meaning the the crytpcurrency concept would be rendered worthless and given a reputation as the fool's gold that it is.

As for what would actually be used as an economic basis, likely a new fiat, bullets and toilet paper or a fiat backed by bullets and toilet paper.

We're getting a little afield from the topic.

Back to the topic, crypto's value is largely built on its ideological value, like most right-wing grift, and on its alleged suitability for financing criminal activity (even though it's a hell of a lot more trackable than any other currency...). People who want to get into crypto as an investment/slot machine are the majority of those involved in the trade, of course, but the core audience who make that ecosystem possible are the crypto bros, who believe that cash is not real and only crypto and gold are real money. Believing that fiction is a core part of their identity, and anyone who doesn't buy into it is a direct challenge to who they are.

So now that it's a thing, crypto's always going to have value to those people, at least until they find something else to hang their desperate need for validation on.

Most of the big names already fell off, didn't they?

Yeah, they mostly pivoted to AI.

Crypto is just the air guitar of money, really.

VGC: GameStop is closing its NFT marketplace after 18 months

And so ends yet another ignominious attempt to capitalize on the NFT craze by mainstream businesses. Apparently the traffic on the site wasn't nearly enough to justify the expense of operating it.

The platform formerly known as Twitter has also quietly discontinued NFT profile pics, a "perk" of Premium accounts, which will no doubt piss off crypto bros who stuck to that site on the basis of its friendliness to them.

The AI craze has been the last straw for the already reeling NFT industry, as all of the fraudsters and hacks with VC money to burn have moved on to ChatGPT and related scams. Now it's just the die-hards clinging to increasing irrelevance.

Of course, crypto is still alive and well in the underground and criminal markets, which is where it started and is its one unique selling point.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 15th 2024 at 10:52:29 AM

I wonder if whoever invented Bitcoin envisioned that its main use would be digital money laundering for pedophiles and North Korea.

Money laundering, most definitely.

Pedophiles and North Korea, maybe not.

In a sense, yes. The first practical use for bitcoin was buying illegal goods and services on websites like Silk Road. Maybe the original creator(s), who are forever lost to history, did it for purely idealistic reasons, but the core ethos was to escape the regulatory supervision of national banking systems, and thus its use for crime was inevitable.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 15th 2024 at 11:23:11 AM

So in other words: "Governments aren't letting us scam people so there's no money in this anymore."

I don't recall if GameStop was selling its own NFTs, but that wasn't the point. A marketplace is simply a place for people to buy and sell them, and can be as honest or corrupt as its owner(s) want it to be. The problem is that the company invested a lot of money into chasing a trend that was in the process of crashing.

The "regulatory uncertainty" thing is just a buzzword that hides the fact that it lost its investment and is burning cash running the site.

Edit: It's also a way of deflecting blame. "If only those mean regulators would stop getting in the way, our investment might have worked," etc., etc.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 16th 2024 at 10:42:41 AM

So a YouTube channel I'm subscribed to got hacked, had almost all of its videos purged (all but one, making it clear who the channel really is), though its community messages are still up, even if many were deleted.

What happened to the channel? Its name was changed to "MicroStrategy US," its logo was changed, and it kept all 1.42 million of its subscribers. It's broadcasting a livestream promoting cryptocurrency, and the chat is censored to allow only approved messages to go through, which means all the "What the hell is this crap?" "I didn't subscribe to some crypto scam thing!" messages would of course be blocked.

What channel was this? GameXplain this time, a gaming channel. Before that, The Webcomic Relief, a channel that reviews webcomics, was hacked in the exact same way.

This is a tactic that some group is using - hack a popular YouTube channel and change its name and logo so that its many subscribers will now be subscribed to some cryptocurrency scam channel, and end up being exposed to the scam. After all, all these subscribers to the hacked channel will see the livestream, wonder what's up with it, and maybe check it out.

It happened twice, to two channels I subscribe to. This is very annoying, and the people who run these scams need to be dealt with.

I might add that the previous time it happened, it was promoting some crypto allegedly attached to Elon Musk.

The fact that hackers feel the need to promote crypto says something...

Edited by BonsaiForest on Mar 1st 2024 at 9:55:35 AM

It's been going on for years now. The vector is usually a phony sponsorship offer, tricking the channel owner into downloading malware that steals their browser session data. The attackers clone the session, steal the account, then rebrand it for crypto scams.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 1st 2024 at 9:58:06 AM

The reality is that if you’re running a modestly popular You Tube channel you probably need to understand some basic cyber security and how to not fall for phishing scams.

Even then there is always the possibility that the hacker catches you off-guard with a perfect storm of coincidences. Like you're in communication with support already and they catch you at that very moment to trick you into thinking they're the support you were waiting for instructions from.

I know its a bit tinfoil haty, but I am still not fully convinced that North Korea wasn't who invented it, or at least didn't have a part.

The claimed inventor didn't exist, and the tech involved points more to a group then an individual any way.... and what group has benifited the most since they came into existance....

A Montenegro court ruled that Kwon Do, the man responsible for the Terra-Luna fraud, shall be extradited to South Korea. Previously, the court decided that Kwon shall be extradited to the US, but Kwon filed an appeal arguing that the Republic of Korea filed an official extradition request first. Kwon may be demanding that he be extradited to Korea instead of the US because the prison term for for fraud is longer in the US.

Per Reuters: Sam Bankman-Fried has been granted 25 years in prison for fraud, as ruled by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan.

The rest of the article quotes Bankman-Fried (and his lawyer Mukasey) using his usual doubletalk and Genius Ditz persona to downplay the severity of his involvement. There were also talks that he should've received 40-50 years instead.

Edited by XMenMutant22 on Mar 28th 2024 at 1:50:39 PM

25 years is a lot. He won't be scamming and defrauding people for quite some time.

And there's a pretty good chance his idiotic movement will burn itself out well before that happens.

Let's be clear: Sam Bankman Fried is a self-declared sociopath who believes that rules are for other people. If allowed, he'll find a scam. I don't know that prison will change his behavior, but at least it'll remove his ability to commit fraud. When he gets out, he's almost certainly going to start another grift under the guise of reformed piety. So keep up your guard.

Honestly, what baffles me more than the existence of charismatic fraudsters like SBF is the number of people who are eager to be defrauded by them no matter how many times they get burned. There's a long list of social media "influencers" whom I'd like to see behind bars for the many times they've used their fans for rug pulls or pump-and-dumps.

Sadly, our legal system is not well equipped to handle this sort of thing. It's extraordinarily difficult to prove willful wrongdoing.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 28th 2024 at 3:00:35 PM

I'm gonna note, after potentially 20+ years in prison, he's going to be in a pretty different environment. It's hard to build up capital and a following when you're stuck trying to figure out what a dwemble even is and how it works and everyone outside prison got access to them 15 years ago.

There's a reason that when a scammer gets taken out of the ecosystem for over a decade, they rarely manage to go anywhere when they get out. Like, some of the Enron culprits got out of prison and pretty much immediately faceplanted because...well, turns out that they have no idea how to handle smartphone stuff and environments where their pitch needs to have some degree of a real concept in it.

The scammer world moves very quickly and if someone loses contact for even a couple years, they're having to restart completely while competing against every single new person who showed up while they were gone while many of their compatriots would have cashed out or moved on to something else, leaving them with no support.

Edited by Zendervai on Mar 28th 2024 at 3:16:41 PM

Doesn't change the fact that there will always be more scammers. Putting one away is good, but it's an unending chase. The only way to stop scammers permanently is to stop people from falling for scams.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 28th 2024 at 3:17:30 PM