A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
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@kian said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Sure, but how do you advertise that you have a ton of free glucose monitors to give out for free? I'm not even talking about the part of not looking like an asshole, just the logistics of it are difficult. The people that regularly buy the monitors won't know to look into whatever platform she would use to advertise it either.
I dunno. Drive around town looking for people drinking diet coke then shove one into their hands while screaming "HERE'S A FREE GLUCOSE MONITOR YOU FAT FUCK!"
It's a start.
(Or donate them to a free clinic?)
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@lorne-kates said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
That person: "Other people are going to be assholes, so I might as well be one too."
All those other people: "Well, other people are going to be assholes, so I might as well be one too."
It's almost as if NOT being an asshole-- makes society better.Prisoner'sAsshole's dilemma.Tragedy of the
CouponsCommonsChinese
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God fucking dammit.
I have a friend, who I was going to start a service for Minecraft servers with. Previously, he'd officially started a company, which I and some other people are members of, but the official filing was as far as we've ever gotten on actual projects. I'd rather not release the details of this service, which I will call SB, but trust me when I say it is something that is both in decent demand and very profitable, on the condition that it is cheaper and has better features than the entrenched competitor. Him, I, and a couple of other developers had planned for a while about this, and getting SB up and running was always in between a priority and a rainy day plan for us. If it became popular enough, it could have actually turned into a full-time job.For the last few months, his Discord server, which is where a few different things he manages take place, has had a new section: cryptocurrency. I have stayed completely out of it, but I know he's been very active in Bitcoin trading and creating his own cryptocurrency. So far it has not managed to infect anything else. Until now.
Today, he came to me with this fantastic new proposal - instead of paying for SB with real money, users could pay with a cryptocurrency. Not anything that already exists, mind you, but a currency that is created and maintained for the sole purpose of paying for SB with it. We would manage the official mining pool, after mining a ton of it, and people could either mine it themselves or buy it from us, and then use it to pay for SB. Every claim that people would just mine it and then we'd be giving SB subscriptions out for free was met with 'but we'd just sell that currency back to other people so we get money in the end'. Every claim that complexity would alienate our non-insane users was met with 'but they don't have to use it if they don't want to'. Every query as to just what the fuck the point of the currency would be was met with 'it's anonymous, and you should go look up how crypto works because you evidently don't understand it'.
He's the head, and he makes the decisions. This is going on the project whether I like it or not. I am fairly confident that we're doomed.
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@pie_flavor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I am fairly confident that we're doomed.
And you are correct.
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@pie_flavor If you control the "currency" and it isn't mined by users, it isn't that different from "microsoft points" with a blockchain.
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@pie_flavor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
He's the head, and he makes the decisions. This is going on the project whether I like it or not. I am fairly confident that we're doomed.
Can you persuade him to buy you out? (With real money, of course.)
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@dkf This isn't a startup, we don't have stock, there's nothing to 'buy out'. This is a couple of Sponge plugin devs with dreams of a real business goofing around in a Discord. I'll probably soon quietly make my retreat, and then go ahead and write the whole thing myself while he's still trying to figure out the logistics.
@sockpuppet7 said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@pie_flavor If you control the "currency" and it isn't mined by users, it isn't that different from "microsoft points" with a blockchain.
Yes, but if you have to pay for it at one point, then it's no longer 'anonymous'. He's got the anonymous brainworm, and this is why it's crypto and not regular points.
Keep in mind, by the way, that this is not oriented towards players, but server owners. As in, the people who want absolute stability in their systems, are buying exactly one subscription (so 'points' are stupid in the first place), and on the whole generally give not a fig about anonymity, so long as we're not selling their data.
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@pie_flavor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
and then go ahead and write the whole thing myself while he's still trying to figure out the logistics.
This is ringing alarm bells for me. Careful, because part of the intellectual property may be his and if you do become successful you may get sued for a piece of that sweet, sweet success.
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@heterodox Nah, I came up with the name and most of the ideas, and the topic's nothing new (like I said, entrenched competitor).
Even if so, I'll be fine forking over part of it since he still did help with the ideas - there's just no way in hell a product with my name on it will have cryptocurrency in it.
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@heterodox said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
if you do become successful you may get sued for a piece of that sweet, sweet success
Bah, if that happens, you just pay him with his crypto currency
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@pie_flavor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
but if you have to pay for it at one point, then it's no longer 'anonymous'.
Anonymous cards are available at any drugstore :) :)
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@thecpuwizard Does PayPal accept those? Anyway, that's just another reason why we didn't need this in the first goddamn place. He finally gave an example of how people paying with mined currency wouldn't cause us to lose money - if someone bought the currency, and saved it for a rainy day, and then lost their wallets, we'd have made net positive money, so it all balances out in the end.
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@pie_flavor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
someone bought the currency, and saved it for a rainy day, and then lost their wallets, we'd have made net positive money, so it all balances out in the end.
Until the regulators and tax people come around, and point out that, just like gift cards, you have to keep that money on the books as a liability until it's redeemed.
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@pie_flavor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I am fairly confident that we're doomed.
But maybe not before you run off with all that sweet ICO money!
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@boomzilla
And the best part is, cryptocurrencies are anonymous, so you don't even have to run off to a remote desert island with no extradition!
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@boomzilla Nobody would invest in a Minecraft server service. Nobody. This is extremely small-scale. Of course, if we just managed the currency...
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@pie_flavor Of course not. But they would invest in a Minecraft BLOCKCHAIN Server Service. But you probably need to strike soon, while the iron is still hot.
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@pie_flavor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@boomzilla Nobody would invest in a Minecraft server service. Nobody. This is extremely small-scale. Of course, if we just managed the currency...
They spend a lot on ddos protection, and was this market that motivated the creation of the mirai botnet.
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@jaloopa said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I've been looking on freelancing sites recently, and was struck by the adage that the way to make money from a gold rush is to sell pickaxes.
This is why I bought stock in Nvidia. It's doing pretty well for me so far!
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@masonwheeler said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
This is why I bought stock in Nvidia. It's doing pretty well for me so far!
ATI ain't doing too shabby either. Their RX 580 is currently the altcoin mining hero, and flying off the shelves-- I know this because I've been trying to upgrade my actual PC used for playing actual games, and I ended up having to pay almost $500 for a RX 580 with 8 GB of memory, when list price is somewhere around $350.
That said, it is a really good card, and comparable to $600+ cards from NVidia.
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@boomzilla Has he realized yet that Bitcoin has no practical value?
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@pie_flavor I suspect "he" has.
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@pie_flavor I suspect "he" has.
Ah, shit, I Poed.
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♫ We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn…
This morning, the Japanese crypto exchange platform Coincheck was hacked and had 526 million XEM (c. USD 400 m) stolen, Lon Wong, President of the NEM.io Foundation, told Cryptonews.com.
If the hack is confirmed, it will be even bigger than Mt Gox by USD 50m
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TL;DR: Tether is the largest ongoing scam in the cryptocurrency world, and that's saying something. They have created over 2 billion Tether tokens declaring that "each Tether is backed by a 1$, pinky promise". Most of these tokens have been used to buy Bitcoin, miraculously pulling the price back up when it was tanking. Their claims of past audits and total soundness have never been proven, and they just broke up with the latest auditor company (more likely, the auditor company saw a disaster and abandoned them).
More Tether analysis: http://www.tetherreport.com/
Edit: additional info about the same story:
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@dcoder Tether might have been running for a while but apparently there are others who don't want to learn:
The first of these “stablecoin” follies was the Bitshares project, back in 2014, which claimed that blockchain alchemy could create a stablecoin called BitUSD which was pegged to the dollar and indeed pegged to any other asset (gold, silver, marmots) which users of the system chose to create. I wrote at the time that the Bitshares “USD peg” system was doomed to fail, and sure enough, 100 hours after launch the thing fell flat on its face.
In October, a scheme called Basecoin claimed to have re-discovered the philosopher’s stone of finance. As with Bitshares, the scheme creates a cryptocurrency instrument that is collateralized by itself and depends on an environment of ever-rising cryptocurrency prices and never-ending cryptocurrency collateral. I wrote about it. It’s a really bad idea.
Now we stumble upon MakerDAO.
Put differently, this system [...] only works if the price of Ether goes up. Cognizant that the conventional wisdom is that the Ethereum “World Computer’s” price will always go up, and it has done nothing but go up for the last 18 months, I can see how this might make sense to the MakerDAO team.
Unfortunately for them, history shows that this investment thesis has been wrong 100% of the time, and Ethereum is as user-friendly and scalable as an angry rhinoceros experiencing heroin withdrawal.
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@dcoder The sad thing is this Tether thing has been going on for months, and they're still suckering in new investors. Here's an article from October, when they first started lying about relationships with banks: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/the-mystery-of-the-bitfinex-tether-bank-and-why-this-is-suspicious-a8a6407a1241
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@blakeyrat Yeah, despite all the warnings from @bitfinexed and others, it's still rolling and its victims are still in "lalala nothing wrong here, you're just a sore loser because you missed out" mode. When it inevitably implodes, the backlash is definitely going to be spectacular, if not outright disastrous.
There's a sucker born every minute
is still true, I suppose.
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This person, whose posts I linked to earlier, proposes introducing the term "Nakamoto scheme" (after the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto used by the elusive Bitcoin founder) because "Ponzi scheme" or "pyramid scheme" do not adequately describe the situation:
The Nakamoto Scheme is an automated hybrid of a Ponzi scheme and a pyramid scheme which has, from the perspective of operating a criminal enterprise, the strengths of both and (currently) the weaknesses of neither.
The Nakamoto Scheme draws strength from the same things which make pyramids and Ponzis so compelling, in that it promises insane investment returns, can be accessed by the man on the street with almost no effort at all, and recruits individual participants as new, self-interested evangelists of the scheme.
It has no current weakness in that the regulators, blinded by lobbying from the Valley, have seen these schemes as futuristic and cutting-edge rather than what they really are: victim factories, which in the next crash will produce hundreds of thousands of howling investors with little formal legal recourse due to four years of inaction on the regulators’ part.
Let's see if it sticks...
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@dcoder Apparently there's now 2.2 billion with a B dollars in Tether now. They're beyond the capability of all but the largest of banks to back it, even if any bank wanted to (which of course none do).
And yet people are still falling for the scam...
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@kian said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
he's hurting a bank too.
No such thing.
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@kt_ said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@kian said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
he's hurting a bank too.
No such thing.
I'm pretty sure banks exist.
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@kian said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@kt_ said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@kian said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
he's hurting a bank too.
No such thing.
I'm pretty sure banks exist.
So does hurt.
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@blakeyrat For some reason, I just can't bring myself to feel a lot of sympathy for the investors.
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Recently, Ars Technica posted an article describing how a malicious seed generator, iotaseed.io (now offline), was able to steal almost $4 million (!) worth of IOTA from its users’ wallets. The way they describe this is that the website “stored data about each seed generated along with information about the wallet it was associated with, allowing whoever was running the site (or whoever hijacked it) to simply wait until wallets were filled and then cash them out.”
My first thought was "only $4 million? that's not even top 10." Then I realized just how messed up that is.
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@blakeyrat Dammit. According to their whitepaper, most of the team behind Prodeum is from my home country.
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@dcoder And now local media reports:
- the people named as the Prodeum Team are all claiming innocence and identity theft. (Duh?)
- the claims of "millions of investor dollars" are exaggerated, in reality they only grabbed about 3 ETH.
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@bb36e wow!
As some users have since pointed out on Twitter, it appears Prodeum might have been paying Fiverr users to write their brand on their bodies and post the images on social media.
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@bb36e I’ll pay you three Greycoin to write my name on your forehead.
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@greybeard said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@bb36e I’ll pay you three Greycoin to write my name on your forehead.
Hey @bb36e: I'll pay you FOUR Greycoins to carve your name on @Greybeard 's head.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Interestingly, the slashdot story covering this claimed they scammed a mere $11. Somehow that would be funnier.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@dcoder Apparently there's now 2.2 billion with a B dollars in Tether now. They're beyond the capability of all but the largest of banks to back it, even if any bank wanted to (which of course none do).
And yet people are still falling for the scam...
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Lots of crypto news today:
Bitmain has some big-deal negotiator, to get Samsung in their pocket. Sheesh.