A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
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@polygeekery Wow, did someone really seriously create a TulipCoin? There are many references to it but I'm not motivated enough to check if it's a joke.
If it's not a joke, it had to be from someone with either balls of ultra-steel, or no brain at all. Maybe both.
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as someone whose 401k is backed by Dogecoin, this news upsets me
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
currency for restaurant reviews
The only thing I can think of is making it easy for restaurants to pay for favorable reviews - not really something we want to encourage.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I can't even remotely imagine why you'd need a "currency for restaurant reviews". Like... what? You write a review and you get some of these MUN from... who? The people who read it? Or... I don't get it.
That's been my reaction to so many of these ICOs where the tokens are good for something that the company provides.
It's
UberBitcoin for $my_product!
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@adynathos said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
currency for restaurant reviews
The only thing I can think of is making it easy for restaurants to pay for favorable reviews - not really something we want to encourage.
Think Yelp with cryptocurrency instead of InternetPointzzzzz. They even said they would burn currency that was paid by restaurants for favorable reviews.
Still a really stupid idea though.
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@polygeekery So wait, they'd call up restaurants and say "if you pay us in our imaginary currency, we'll give you positive reviews" then when the restaurant actually bought some of their imaginary currency, they'd just destroy it outright?
And people invested in this?
Anyway I don't even use Yelp enough to know it had internetpointzzz.
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I can't even remotely imagine why you'd need a "currency for restaurant reviews". Like... what? You write a review and you get some of these MUN from... who? The people who read it? Or... I don't get it.
That's been my reaction to so many of these ICOs where the tokens are good for something that the company provides.
It's
UberBitcoin for $my_product!: How can we make our
slavescustomers give us more without making them feel like they are?
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
So wait, they'd call up restaurants and say "if you pay us in our imaginary currency, we'll give you positive reviews" then when the restaurant actually bought some of their imaginary currency, they'd just destroy it outright?
No. They would pay users in their imaginary money. They being the creators of the platform.
If retaurants we're to be found doing it they said they would burn that currency to deter paid positive reviews.
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@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
If retaurants we're to be found doing it they said they would burn that currency to deter paid positive reviews.
Who paid for the researchers who determined whether or not this happened? EDIT: also those guys get a command in the system to just outright delete money-equivalent? Jesus. The CEO of Bank of America doesn't have fucking that.
(I mean, the answer is likely: "they didn't bother getting that far, they already had enough in the whitepaper to dupe the morons they needed.")
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
So wait, they'd call up restaurants and say "if you pay us in our imaginary currency, we'll give you positive reviews" then when the restaurant actually bought some of their imaginary currency, they'd just destroy it outright?
And people invested in this?TFA didn't say anything about soliciting positive reviews. It seems like more of an implied thing, because why would restaurants pay for bad reviews.
I think the ICO craze is basically just allowing people to cash in on wacky ideas that they can't even sell to VCs.
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I think the ICO craze is basically just allowing people to cash in on wacky ideas that they can't even sell to VCs.
We are going to see a lot of "X, but with cryptocurrency". A new way of recycling ideas. All of them will be stupid.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
If retaurants we're to be found doing it they said they would burn that currency to deter paid positive reviews.
Who paid for the researchers who determined whether or not this happened? EDIT: also those guys get a command in the system to just outright delete money-equivalent? Jesus. The CEO of Bank of America doesn't have fucking that.
(I mean, the answer is likely: "they didn't bother getting that far, they already had enough in the whitepaper to dupe the morons they needed.")
I found the blog post referenced in TFA. I see two potentially redeeming qualities (as in, these are things that people actually want, not that they mean the enterprise makes sense) [gratuitous accidental emoji][
Non-fake reviews:
Because it is hosted on the Blockchain, every transaction or activity that occurs on the Munchee platform is immutable and verifiable. In other words, the Blockchain brings a level of transparency and honesty to Munchee’s restaurant reviews that cannot be found on Yelp or other competing platforms.
Tokens redeemed for real world value:
And on the consumer end, the MUN tokens can be used as a payment method at participating restaurants, or for use in the Munchee app for rewards and interactions. Then, when consumers spend their MUN tokens at participating restaurants, those restaurants can either turn around and spend the tokens on advertising on Munchee.
In theory, of course, assuming they can get restaurants to participate.
So, basically, since people put money into the thing, they're assuming that's a reason for diners to trust the reviews, which gives value to their network and encourages restaurants to advertise with them and accept tokens for food.
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"Luigi, this pasta was excellent. Look, I'm not going to pay you for this meal in cash, I got something even better-- it's called MUN! See. you take this MUN and then you can go to this website or, get how convenient this is, an app on your phone, and use it to get advertising to your restaurant! You can't buy advertising with cash! I feel like I'm cheating you, this is such a good deal. In fact, better bring me another bottle of wine and come by with the tray of desserts. I'll even tip your waitress and she can use the MUN tip to buy advertisement...s?"
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I'm totally convinced. /sarcasm
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@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
If retaurants we're to be found doing it they said they would burn that currency to deter paid positive reviews.
That is not what they say, in my interpretation.
They burn the coins when restaurants buy advertising from them:@MUN said in 7 reasons ...:
In addition, Munchee can also “burn” tokens, or take a small number of MUN tokens out of circulation, when a restaurant pays Munchee for advertising. Decreasing the total supply in circulation, this, along with our tiered membership plan, will support the appreciation of the value of the remaining MUN tokens.
They describe how the "value" of their coins will increase:
As users accumulate tokens, they can do one of the following:
- Redeem them for fiat money (i.e. USD, Euros) [I wonder where and at what rate]
- Hold onto the tokens and watching their value increase over time
- Spend the tokens at restaurants that belong to the Munchee network
But the coins are also used to pay for their services (advertising, or for "rewards and interactions" on their site).
So the coin's increasing "value" means their services will become more and more expensive.(One could say they could lower their prices in coins, but that would decrease the "value", and they emphasize how it will increase)
Finally, let's destroy their claims about honesty of users:
Because it is hosted on the Blockchain, every transaction or activity that occurs on the Munchee platform is immutable and verifiable. In other words, the Blockchain brings a level of transparency and honesty to Munchee’s restaurant reviews that cannot be found on Yelp or other competing platforms.
It is like saying Bitcoin is a blockchain therefore it can't be stolen :D
Blockchain being immutable and verifiable helps the honesty of the site operator not the users. So we can verify that the company didn't just add internet points in their database.
In no way does it prevent fake reviews, because the blockchain will not verify that the user actually went to a restaurant and enjoyed the food.Their system actually incentivizes bots and fake likes, because they pay for likes directly.
There is already an industry of buying facebook or instagram likes / followers, I am sure this industry would love a service which pays them for likes directly.users are incentivized to use the platform because they can earn tokens, which are backed in Ethereum, for carrying out activities like accumulating lots of likes on a photo.
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
because why would restaurants pay for bad reviews.
To kill off a competitor?
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@slackerd said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Monero
Hey, that's the one my friend is mining.
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About the IOTA cryptocurrency.
The author is somewhat TRWTF too:- he evaluates the theory and code behind the currency, finds them unclear and incomprehensible
- decide nevertheless to invest into it
- acts surpised when the system stops working
http://codesuppository.blogspot.ch/2017/12/iota-tangled-mess.html
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A couple of my friends got caught up in the craze. One buddy just told me he got 100k CZK worth of bitcoin when it was at about 4500 USD - so at this point his investment roughly quadrupled in a few months. To bring that into context, 100 thousand CZK is a pretty big deal, it's about 4 months worth of average wage - or about twice the worth of my car, and about 5 times the worth of this guy's car.
He's not being crazy about it, he says it's money he can afford to lose, and I'm sure that's true, but still, dude, you have a mortgage, a little kid, and a wife on maternity leave. Come on...
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@blek If he immediately sells $4500 of his bitcoin back into actual money and does whatever with the rest, I'd say he's being responsible. If he's just going to keep it all in Bitcoin forever, then yes your criticism is very valid.
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@blakeyrat You know, that didn't even cross my mind. I'll try talking to him.
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@blakeyrat
But selling it back to real money will cost him $250 a day!
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I can't find a reliable source for this supposed story, so it may be fake. Still funny though:
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@polygeekery I'm with Ron on this.
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@polygeekery Google says it isn't true, though it is currently the third autocomplete item for "Chuck E Cheese ..." (after no extra words and "coupons").
It's also a really awesome idea.
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Mint your own, put the symbol on them. Still cheaper than actual bitcoins. It becomes a lot more believable.
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@pie_flavor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Mint your own, put the symbol on them. Still cheaper than actual bitcoins. It becomes a lot more believable.
Change your name to Bil and stamp them with "BilCoin". It's their problem if they didn't read the EULA.
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♫ Another one bites the dust ♫
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Given the state of the Venezuelan power grid, what are the odds that anyone is doing this? Cue calls that this is why the grid is this way.
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I found this on Hacker News:
State-sponsored ICO? Or just someone pretending to work for the government?
Estonia's "e-resident" program seems to have swallowed all the BitCoin-isms hook line and sinker:
Despite this, the amount of money being raised globally by startups through ICOs is now far in excess of the amount being raised through venture capital.
Haha no. There's no way this is true.
People invest crypto-currencies with fuzzy valuations into ICOs, true. But you can't use your WTFCoin tokens to pay salaries, or especially taxes, and until they can be converted directly into US Dollars (or Euros or some other widely-respected currency) they have no value.
Governments do need to consider the disruptive impact of how crypto tokens can be used as currency because they provide a more efficient means for exchanging value globally.
Efficient meaning efficient? Hah. We've all seen dozens of articles about how horribly inefficient crypto-currencies are.
Efficient as a euphemism for "can easily dodge taxes?" Ah! Now we're talking.
Ugh, this shit disgusts me.
Oh wait:
In addition, our secure digital identities can be used as part of the KYC (Know Your Customer) procedures that would otherwise cost companies both more time and more money when they need to verify identities of investors and customers. Everyone’s heard stories about investors losing access to their crypto tokens — perhaps because they forgot their private key for example — but this doesn’t happen to e-residents if their wallets are linked to their government-backed digital identity.
Oh good. Estonia can dip their fingers in the pot whenever they like... you don't even get the "dodging taxes" part of the whole deal anyway.
I like how they try to sell that to you as a "security precaution", like when Valve or Amazon asks for your phone number for "security" purposes and then just uses it to make the data they sell advertisers more juicy.
Many ICOs also try to use the reputations of organisations and people who may have no real involvement in the project. With that in mind, please note that any announcements from e-Residency (or other parts of the Estonian state) related to our proposed crypto token or how Estonia is supporting ICOs would always be shared in detail on this blog.
Wait... what? You mean Medium.com? That's supposed to build confidence?
I mean that's crazy. Everybody knows that Tumblr is the place to be for trusted government communication to its citizens. (Alternative headline: Estonia can't set up blogging software; issuing new ICO anyway.)
There’s even a discussion underway about how Estonia can legalise Artificial Intelligence.
Hey entrepreneurs, did you know that in the US literally everything is legal until the government makes it otherwise?
Apparently in Euro-land the very concept of Artificial Intelligence is illegal. You go to Deep Dream, and you'll be whisked off to prison. Huh?
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
State-sponsored ICO?
The Estonians are mad enough to do that sort of thing. They've been doing all sorts of weird things to promote their country for e-business use (I have a friend who lives over there to take advantage of the accommodating laws) so this would fit in with all of that. I'm not sure what benefit they see in doing it (other than a chance to sell more electricity?) but they think they see something so whatever…
As I understand it, the hard part with the Ethereum contract system (apart from the broken-ass javascript variant used) that backs most ICOs is writing a good foundational contract at all. I guess a government might have a better chance of doing that than most programmers, given that they're supposed to also have some lawyers about and contracts are what they're supposed to be good at.
I'd be far more worried for them if they were talking about issuing actual Bitcoins. That's reached the point of stupidity.
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@adynathos said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
http://fortune.com/2017/12/20/bitcoin-investors-hypnotherapy/
- The session went great, Mr Desperate Investor. We made good progress. No password yet, but I'm sure we're getting closer. That's 1 bitcoin. See you next week. Neeext!
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@mrl said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
That's 1 bitcoin. See you next week. Neeext!
Sure, just let me enter the password to my bitcoin key, oh...
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@adynathos said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
http://fortune.com/2017/12/20/bitcoin-investors-hypnotherapy/
Excerpt from that article where somebody really wants to throw good money after bad:
One such mourner is Mr. Philip Neumeier, who bought 15 bitcoins for roughly $260 in 2013, when he was toying with the idea of accepting the virtual currency on his e-commerce site, reports the WSJ. Now that his cache’s value is nearly $300,000, he’s trying to recover that long-forgotten password. Though he considered hypnosis to help recall the subconscious memory, he decided instead to build a supercomputer that tries to use “brute force” to crack the code.
The brute force required is hot and heavy work, and so the five foot-tall computer system sits in a 270 gallon tank of special mineral water to disperse the heat it generates, says the WSJ. Mr. Neumeier suggests it might even take a few hundred years to run through every possible combination of letters, numbers and symbols.“I should probably be about 332 years old by then—hopefully bitcoin will be worth something,” he said to the WSJ.
By now he must have burned a sizeable chunk of money...
Or this one:
However, even he won’t be able to help James Howells, a British IT worker who says he threw away a hard drive with 7,500 bitcoins on it in 2013, and is now trying to work out how to locate the hard drive in the landfill site where he believes it’s buried. They were worth $130 when he threw it away – and they’re worth $126.7 million now.
Let's hope he finds it before it becomes worthless...
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@jbert said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@mrl Excerpt from that article where somebody really wants to throw good money after bad:
One such mourner is Mr. Philip Neumeier, who bought 15 bitcoins for roughly $260 in 2013, when he was toying with the idea of accepting the virtual currency on his e-commerce site, reports the WSJ. Now that his cache’s value is nearly $300,000, he’s trying to recover that long-forgotten password. Though he considered hypnosis to help recall the subconscious memory, he decided instead to build a supercomputer that tries to use “brute force” to crack the code.
The brute force required is hot and heavy work, and so the five foot-tall computer system sits in a 270 gallon tank of special mineral water to disperse the heat it generates, says the WSJ. Mr. Neumeier suggests it might even take a few hundred years to run through every possible combination of letters, numbers and symbols.“I should probably be about 332 years old by then—hopefully bitcoin will be worth something,” he said to the WSJ.
By now he must have burned a sizeable chunk of money...
That's such a waste of effort. He can just give me $100.000 and I'll call him in 300 years to tell him it didn't work.
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@jbert
Such a shame too. He bought those 15 bitcoins in small denominations so that he could make change in his e-cashdrawer, and now he can't even sell all those bitpennies back.
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Well, Bitcon is really coming into its own now, an insider trading scandal!
Update: Coinbase said Tuesday evening users wouldn't be able to buy and sell bitcoin cash four hours after it said trading of the cryptocurrency would be enabled on its platforms. Chief executive Brian Armstrong said the company is looking into whether employees tried to profit from advanced knowledge of the news.
Filed under: Closing the barn door after the horses are looooooooooooooong gone
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I see no possible way this could go wrong:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=buy bitcoin with credit card
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@polygeekery You realize most "credit cards" are actually debit cards that don't actually create debt, right?
It's hard to say whether those searches are worrying or simply people (like me) who type "credit card" as code for "card processed by VISA, Mastercard or Amex, including pre-filled gift cards and debit cards drawing directly from checking accounts".
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
You realize most "credit cards" are actually debit cards that don't actually create debt, right?
No, I do not realize that. I would imagine that most people only have one debit card, but multiple credit cards.
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@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
No, I do not realize that. I would imagine that most people only have one debit card, but multiple credit cards.
Whatever.
Point is, "credit card" typed into a search engine doesn't necessarily mean "credit card". It probably just means "card that can be processed by VISA, Mastercard or Amex".
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Point is, "credit card" typed into a search engine doesn't necessarily mean "credit card". It probably just means "card that can be processed by VISA, Mastercard or Amex".
Since the #2 country is Nigeria, it probably also means: how can I max out this stolen card.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
It's hard to say whether those searches are worrying or simply people (like me) who type "credit card" as code for "card processed by VISA, Mastercard or Amex, including pre-filled gift cards and debit cards drawing directly from checking accounts".
The debit card search is going way up, too:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=buy bitcoin with debit card
However, the number 2 country there is the USA, so I'd says it's more likely to be people "legitimately" trying to buy bitcoins.
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@polygeekery I mean, if it goes nowhere but up, then it's a simple enough scheme - buy on credit, wait for it to go up, sell and pay off the credit.
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@pie_flavor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@polygeekery I mean, if it goes nowhere but up, then it's a simple enough scheme - buy on credit, wait for it to go up, sell and pay off the credit.
Invest in tulips. They're a sure thing.
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@pie_flavor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@polygeekery I mean, if it goes nowhere but up, then it's a simple enough scheme - buy on credit, wait for it to go up, sell and pay off the credit.
Ever hear of these?
They were real big a few years ago. Can you guess why they're not any more?
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It's so hard to keep your position as the most expensive bitcoin hack these days. Now exchanges are double dipping...
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@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
You realize most "credit cards" are actually debit cards that don't actually create debt, right?
No, I do not realize that. I would imagine that most people only have one debit card, but multiple credit cards.
I have one debit and one credit. So, in accounting viewpoint, I have a balanced book.