A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
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@the_quiet_one Yes, of course, I wasn't being super literal in categorizing scams.
But these things do have in common that you make money if you're in it early enough. You just need to find a sucker that's either lower in the pyramid than you are, or willing to buy your bitcoin for more than you spend.Different, but still the same
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@dkf The first rule of the tautology club...
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Only guaranteed way to make money, but not the only way.
You could have bought it a year ago and have made 700% on it, that's not negligible.Yes you could. IF you can find someone who will give you several thousand dollars for each of your bitcoins. Unfortunately, that's a really big if.
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@boomzilla I'm still waiting for the Scrubbing Bubble crash. Those little guys can't make toilet bowls shine forever.
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
You could have bought it a year ago and have made 700% on it, that's not negligible. You could still buy and hope it'll climb to $50k or something, but without hindsight you don't know when you lose everything.
@The_Quiet_One oh look, BTC has just reached $10,000. You can still jump on the before it reaches the cliff.
Except I still haven't worked out how to get money back out of it in sensible quantities. So far the options seem to be Exchanges with nebulous weekly 'limits' (that seem to be sub 100 USD). Or physically selling it to some rube you've found.
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@cursorkeys If you figure it out, let me know. I have something like $300-ish in bitcoins. (And another like $1000 I think is lost forever from the first time I played with it.)
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@cursorkeys said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Except I still haven't worked out how to get money back out of it in sensible quantities. So far the options seem to be Exchanges with nebulous weekly 'limits' (that seem to be sub 100 USD). Or physically selling it to some rube you've found.
Yeah, like I said earlier (was it in this thread or another?), I have never heard of someone actually converting a significant amount of any virtual currency back to real money.
Someone pointed to bitcoins-ATM that apparently exist in a couple of places, but what I found about them is so nebulous that there may very well have been a single of those, that was installed at some point in time and may or may not still work.
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@remi said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
bitcoins-ATM
So you walk up to a BTC-ATM, initiate the transaction, then wait an hour for it to get on the chain, in hope you get money and not a generic error message?
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@adynathos
No, you have to call ahead and schedule an appointment for them toswap out your battery packrecharge your wallet.
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@remi said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Someone pointed to bitcoins-ATM that apparently exist in a couple of places, but what I found about them is so nebulous that there may very well have been a single of those, that was installed at some point in time and may or may not still work.
It's probably only for small sums (similar to normal ATM) since larger transactions need to be reported for money laundering reasons.
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@adynathos @PleegWat I don't have the slightest idea how they would work in practice. I assume the answer is "poorly or not at all" and I would even bet (some fraction of a bitcoin?) that they don't exist (or work) any more.
Someone mentioned them (I would search for the exact post but given how useless search is, this is too much work :lazy:) and I found a couple of articles on the web about it, but really, it seemed like something that happened once in one place, and nothing indicated how it really worked, nor if it really worked, nor if it still does nowadays.
Of course the company doing it was claiming that in a couple of years those would be as common as normal ATM (or some similar wildly optimistic bullshit), but, you know, that's kind of expected for anything related to a bubble...
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@remi I guess they are about as useful in practice as an ATM that gives out gold.
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@pleegwat They were supposed to also allow converting back bitcoins into real money, so that would be the more useful part.
But again, I have no idea how that worked and if it still does.
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Looks like some people are going to get a rude awakening in what 'capital gains' actually encompasses.
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@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Oh, the picture seems to partly answer my question about bitcoin ATM! They do still exist (at least one of them does), if the picture title/date is accurate (but given that the point of the picture is to display the high price, it has to be recent):
A screen displays the price to purchase Bitcoin at a Bitcoin ATM at the Bitcoin Center NYC in New York City, U.S., November 27, 2017
Now we just have to find out if anyone actually withdraws cash from them, and how that works.
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@remi Most likely though the only one withdrawing cash is the person responsible for emptying the ATM.
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More fools and their not-really-money
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@El_Heffe
Next:
"Investors" who bought lottery tickets sue because they did not win the promised millions.
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Apologies for Medium link:
https://medium.com/@jesperht/dont-go-freaking-do-it-5da4df4d4b44
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Oh god damnit, I should have come up with that idea.
No, I haven't read it and no, I have no clue what "CryptoKitties" are. But it's perfectly clear it's some Snapchatty FarmVilly thing to rip people off by milking the crypto hype with gamification.
Next up: cryptokitties.stackoverflow.com
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@bb36e said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Apologies for Medium link:
https://medium.com/@jesperht/dont-go-freaking-do-it-5da4df4d4b44
Freelance FinTech CTO
I don't think that's a thing.
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@cursorkeys
I mean, I have a relative who's a freelancer, filling the CTO position at a financial services company on an interim basis. I don't think they identify as a FinTech CTO though...
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@izzion said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@cursorkeys
I mean, I have a relative who's a freelancer, filling the CTO position at a financial services company on an interim basis. I don't think they identify as a FinTech CTO though...TIL, I didn't think freelancing was something that happened at Director level. That and the 'FinTech' bit which sounded made-up.
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@cursorkeys said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I didn't think freelancing was something that happened at Director level
Most of the senior IT management at my company are temporary contractors
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@bb36e said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
https://medium.com/@jesperht/dont-go-freaking-do-it-5da4df4d4b44
No permissioning for setting a goal as failed. The “onlyOwner” guard is missing for setGoalFailed. This means that anyone can “fail” the goals of every user in the contract at any time, essentially donating all their money to the contract owner.
A recurring theme in Ethereum contracts.
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Guy buys Lamborghini with Bitcoin he initially paid $115 for.
Loss of appreciation of the currency on the amount he paid for the Lamborghini is ~$4,000/day.
But, when the bubble finally does burst he will still have a Lambo.
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I'd rather have a lambo than a fake currency.
And until it's worth less than $115 he hasn't "lost" anything
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@jaloopa said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
And until it's worth less than $115 he hasn't "lost" anything
Yep. Unless he would have cashed out at that point, he had not lost anything. Chances are he would have kept riding the bubble until it crashed.
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@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Loss of appreciation of the currency on the amount he paid for the Lamborghini is ~$4,000/day.
Not winning the lottery and not robbing banks is costing me millions of $ / day.
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@polygeekery What kind of idiot exchanged a Lambo for fake internet money. I want to focus on THAT guy.
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This post is deleted!
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@polygeekery What kind of idiot exchanged a Lambo for fake internet money. I want to focus on THAT guy.
What kind of idiot exchanged fake internet money for a fake internet cat.
[...] with multiple kittens selling for ~50 ETH (around $23,000) and the “genesis” kitten being sold for a record ~246 ETH (around $113,000).
It would be stupid if the cats were like 5$ each, but holy fuck this is just astonishingly stupid.
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I wonder if this announcement is related to all the recent articles about Steam's BitCoin provider being a huge ripoff scam...
EDIT: Great onebox. The headline is actually: "Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin"
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@blakeyrat
Pure gold comment:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7e7wsq/shady_business_of_bitpay_buy_29_game_on_steam/dq37zld/Uh, you realize that the primary "feature" of BitCon is that it evades regulatory control, right?
Someone nominate that guy for a
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Counterpoint: I have some fraction of a bitcoin (that's now "worth" "hundreds" of dollars) and I've been using it to periodically renew my premium subscription to a usenet indexing service, and have never had a problem doing that with BitPay.
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@hungrier
Yeah, later downthred a BitPay service rep responded to OP, indicated they did in fact submit a payment of 0.003853 BTC for an invoice of 0.003857 BTC, and hence the refund and how the fees on that worked.But facts making fun of BitConnies.
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@izzion Ok; the guy screwed up. The amount of fees charged him for a slight screw-up were still ridiculous and unjustified.
And I also am aware that a portion of those are simply due to the fact that Bitcoin is stupid and was designed by morons and it currently costs $3.25 to have a reasonable chance of your transaction being verified in less than an hour which is insane.
However you may justify it, paying $10 in fees to fail to complete a $25 transaction is scam territory.
In other news, I logged into CoinBase today out of whim and it turns out the tiny amount of BitCoin I've been holding are now worth about $3000 if I could ever cash them out, which I surely could not. Also they raised my purchase limit to like $750/day so I'm tempted to buy more but goddamned I am stupid.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
the tiny amount of BitCoin I've been holding are now worth about $3000 if I could ever cash them out, which I surely could not.
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@timebandit There's one at some random Chevron station in Kirkland. Huh.
Unfortunately, that website has no information about its fees or limits, so I'd actually have to drive to Kirkland to check and I wager its limit is a low lower than $3000.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
and was designed by morons
Is it right to call them morons just because they tried to solve a problem no one had, and introduced a whole slew of problems that were already solved? I mean, yes, obviously, but on the other hand, clearly the market was clamoring for a moronic invention, and they delivered what the market wanted.
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@blakeyrat can't you just just buy something at one of the
manyfew places that actually sell real things for bitcoin, then use it / sell it / have it refunded in actual dollars?
For $3000 worth of fake money, it'd at least try to spend it before the bubble bursts.
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
can't you just just buy something at one of the manyfew places that actually sell real things for bitcoin, then use it / sell it / have it refunded in actual dollars?
Sadly I missed my window of opportunity to convert it into SteamBux.
Maybe Amazon has a way to make it into AmazonBux...
EDIT: there's a site named eGifter.com which lets you buy gift cards with Bitcoin-- they use CoinBase for verification, and not the scammy horrible BitPay, so that seems like the best option at the moment.
EDIT EDIT: the article that referred me there said they use CoinBase; the actual site says it uses BitPay. I had to actually go through the checkout process to learn that. (Although, in retrospect, it's in the site's FAQ I didn't read.)
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So I've been thinking: the hype seems to be going at full force right now, it can't be more than months before this whole thing collapses.
Is there any way we can still profit from this bullshit in a way that's not buying into the bubble?
Obviously we can just invent another altcoin. But there's no reason why WTFCoins would be worth anything, just like all the other altcoins. (Which also proves how arbitrary bitcoin is)
I've not completely understood what Ether is. As far as i can tell, though, it's purpose is exactly that: provide a framework so everybody can build their own scam and throw around buzzwords like smart contracts to make sheep buy it.
The CryptoKitty thing was the perfect example of this. Completely useless, obviously stupid, yet in hindsight such an obvious avenue to build another scam. The guy with the "give me your money and if you behave well I might give it back" is also pretty clever.
So, Request for Comments: what can we do for our own CryptoWTF project? The more obviously stupid the better, apparently.
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
WTFCoins
You should trademark that name !
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Is there any way we can still profit from this bullshit in a way that's not buying into the bubble?
How many ethics do you have?
That's basically what every ICO is doing right now. ICOs are crypto-currencies based on (and I think interchangeable with?) Etherium crypto-currency. (EDIT: to be specific, ICOs are Initial Coin Offerings of coins based on Etherium coins.) Transactions in the Etherium blockchain can have little computer programs attached, so in theory you can make ICOs do fancy things or even run a company in an automated fashion.
Some ICOs provide something of value-- one of them for example uses the ICO coins to pay for borrowing storage from someone else's hard drive, making a kind of ad-hoc mesh network. Or that dumb cat game, which is useless but no more so than the real life Beanie Baby craze. Maybe these business ideas are dumb, but they're at least implemented.
The lazy ICOs just do the bare minimum to stake their claim as a separate coin, then put up a website full of vague promises. These are the scamming ones. But it turns out the hype's so high right now that even the ICOs with zero business plan can easily still get hundreds of thousands in Etherium.
If you have zero ethics, the ICO-based-on-vague-whitepaper is surely the way to go at this point in time. But be quick about it: won't be more than a few weeks before every major government bans them. (In the US, ICOs will no doubt be labelled as "Securities Trading", which imposes all kinds of rules that'll destroy the wild wild west operations we have going now. Other countries have already banned them outright, like South Korea.) If you decide to pull this scam, it would behoove you to not be in the US or South Korea while you're doing it.
@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I've not completely understood what Ether is. As far as i can tell, though, it's purpose is exactly that: provide a framework so everybody can build their own scam and throw around buzzwords like smart contracts to make sheep buy it.
Pretty much yeah. There's a lot of interesting ideas in Etherium, but the implementation is awful (look at the critiques of the one and only programming language you can use with it, for example), and it's hard to imagine how the idea of a business run entirely on a crypto blockchain with zero humans involved (their original goal) could actually work in reality.
@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The CryptoKitty thing was the perfect example of this. Completely useless, obviously stupid, yet in hindsight such an obvious avenue to build another scam. The guy with the "give me your money and if you behave well I might give it back" is also pretty clever.
CryptoKitty is at least a functional video game type experience. Most ICOs are backed by nothing but vague promises in a whitepaper.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@timebandit There's one at some random Chevron station in Kirkland. Huh.
Unfortunately, that website has no information about its fees or limits, so I'd actually have to drive to Kirkland to check and I wager its limit is a low lower than $3000.
After fees, you'd probably be ok!
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Is there any way we can still profit from this bullshit in a way that's not buying into the bubble?
How many ethics do you have?
- 3 ethics.
If you have zero ethics, the ICO-based-on-vague-whitepaper is surely the way to go at this point in time. But be quick about it: won't be more than a few weeks before every major government bans them. (In the US, ICOs will no doubt be labelled as "Securities Trading", which imposes all kinds of rules that'll destroy the wild wild west operations we have going now. Other countries have already banned them outright, like South Korea.) If you decide to pull this scam, it would behoove you to not be in the US or South Korea while you're doing it.
Unfortunately I think I'm slightly above zero ethics to pull that stunt myself. But if we were to design CryptoWTFs, I might actually be in on that.
Think about it: you buy digital WTF tokens, they increase in value everytime someone produces a new major WTF. Since this is an exponentially growing market (cough IoT cough), the tokens will boom like there's no tomorrow. And the worse the implementation of the smart contract is, the more self-referential WTF value it will have.
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
what can we do for our own CryptoWTF project?
I'm thinking LorneCoins: you give us money and we tell you back “fuck you”. We're totally up front about the whole thing, so no matter how stupid it is it still cannot possibly be a scam, and that's got to be better than the majority of ICOs out there right now, yes…?