A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
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@topspin 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:
@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.
At the rate you're indicating it would soon run out of fucks to give...
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The jokes write themself
https://www.reddit.com/r/NiceHash/comments/7i0s6o/official_press_release_statement_by_nicehash/
The amount stolen is now being reported as worth $62 Million at current bitcoin price.
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The guy with the "give me your money and if you behave well I might give it back" is also pretty clever.
That reminds me, I still need to write up the WTF bonus program at a company I used to work for. But this is not the thread for that, and tonight is not the night I feel like writing about it.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
In the US, ICOs will no doubt be labelled as "Securities Trading",
I thought I saw something that said they already had, but it looks like it was just fraud charges against a specific ICO. Or maybe it was an erroneous headline, if such an obvious error could possibly happen in the rigorous world of online news reporting.
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How will this person ever get this out? There's going to be so many people watching this address....
This is a weird contradiction that seems to keep coming up. Part of the appeal of bitcoin is supposed to be the fact that it's decentralised and untraceable and perfect for buying drugs, but every transaction is recorded in the blockchain and apparently trackable
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@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.
One of the fundamentals of Bitcoin transactions is that you're not sending coins to a specific target address, you're posting a message that says "anyone who can solve this math problem can redirect these." Usually the math problem is "prove you have the private key that corresponds to this public key." However, several other possibilities exist, most of which are considered too weird for miners to accept but are nevertheless valid if miners include them in their verification. One of those possibilities is requiring multiple signatures, such as requiring all three members of a company's board to assent to spend company BTC, or putting BTC into escrow so that two of the three parties involved (sender, receiver, escrow agent) must agree for the funds to be released. However, that's at about the limit of what can be defined: the entire amount is available if any of it is; you can't condition transactions on externalities, only human actors; and handoffs between parties in a multisig situation easily risk coins being Lost Forever.
Ethereum was supposed to address these shortcomings by allowing actors to express their intentions directly in code. If my grandpa left me a million dollars in his will, saying that I could have a $20/week allowance but my mom would have to approve any spending above that, then I would have to rely on the bank, my mom, and the courts to enforce that, actors who have their own goals and could easily wreak havoc with things. If instead he left me a billion ETH, the Solidity contract he'd've wrote would've directly, mechanically, automatically, and precisely enforced it, triggered off his own obituary -- practically none of which would have been possible within the limits of Bitcoin.
The problem, of course, is that people are simultaneously so much smarter and yet also so much stupider than anyone believes.
Solidity as a language is highly broken, and it's easy both to write contracts that expose flaws in the language and its engine (dealing with out-of-gas is a nightmare) as well as contracts that are logically incorrect and exploitable (the DAO). Very few of the contracts in the system are like the simple trust I described above, and most are either some kind of private fiat currency silliness (HashRush), weird pseudo-stock things (ICOs), or crap like CryptoKitties.@jaloopa said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
How will this person ever get this out? There's going to be so many people watching this address....
It's impossible-ish now, but if the person had been thinking at the time they could have sent it through any number of transaction anonymizers, washing it by mixing it with all sorts of other BTC such that you couldn't argue that the specific BTC in the account(s) they finally end up at are the same BTC that were initially stolen.
@jaloopa said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
This is a weird contradiction that seems to keep coming up. Part of the appeal of bitcoin is supposed to be the fact that it's decentralised and untraceable and perfect for buying drugs, but every transaction is recorded in the blockchain and apparently trackable
You can be absolutely certain that no address can spend money it doesn't have, because everyone would be able to see it. However, anyone can create addresses at any time, for free, without consulting anyone or providing any personal information. Bad opsec can lead you to be able to identify certain addresses as being related to each other, possibly involved in some sort of overall larger transaction or belonging to the same person. But unless you've got someone logged into their own wallet right in front of you, there's no way to directly link addresses to people.
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@el_heffe r/NiceHashItWouldBeAShameIfSomethingHappenedToIt
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@jaloopa said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
every transaction is recorded in the blockchain and apparently trackable
The appeal is that while every transaction is traceable back to the original mined bitcoin, it's difficult to pinpoint where along the way any of the addresses involved belong to Joe Drugdealer and Jeff Whobuysthedrugs.
Edit: Unless Joe does something silly like cash out the money directly from his DrugsBay bitcoin address.
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@twelvebaud said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
If instead he left me a billion ETH, the Solidity contract he'd've wrote would've directly, mechanically, automatically, and precisely enforced it, triggered off his own obituary -- practically none of which would have been possible within the limits of Bitcoin.
People can't write hello world without a bug in it. Sounds really smart to put your money in convoluted code that could invalidate it completely.
But ok, even if you'd get the biilion ETH in weekly increments, they might as well be worthless some time from now.
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@hungrier Which means either you are relying on traditional trust in some third party (the bitcoin laundering service), or you're traceable even more easily than with traditional currencies (because tracing bitcoin transactions does not involve paperwork).
The longer this bitcoin debacle lasts, the more sure I am that absolutely none of its purported advantages over traditional currencies actually exist.
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@el_heffe said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The amount stolen is now being reported as worth $62 Million at current bitcoin price.
... why were they holding that much? Isn't the pitch that they sent the bitcoin BACK TO THE MINERS?
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@jaloopa said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
This is a weird contradiction that seems to keep coming up. Part of the appeal of bitcoin is supposed to be the fact that it's decentralised and untraceable and perfect for buying drugs, but every transaction is recorded in the blockchain and apparently trackable
The wallets/accounts are 100% traceable and trackable.
The only thing that's not is you don't know which user owns which account. Basically, it's not that "it's untraceable!" it's that it doesn't store any metadata.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15871723
I have a queued transfer from Coinbase, I wonder if it'll go through or get cancelled...
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@blakeyrat Another thread on Hacker News links to this article the NYT published today:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/technology/coinbase-bitcoin.html
Which might explain what's going on with Coinbase.
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@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Totally not a bubble, yo.
Do they have a graph of transaction volumes as well, like any responsibly traded financial instrument?
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@dcoder McAfee is just drunk (or high) again.
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Bubbles are mathematically impossible.
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Next up in blockchain fuckery: Voting
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Genius! Now the ${HATED_OPPOSITION_PARTY} won’t have to rely on €{ELECTORAL_SHENANIGANS}, they can just create a hard fork and redo election results to the One True Outcome.
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Apparently the NiceHash guys reported the breach in a Facebook post. That's the mark of professionalism in that segment of the industry, I guess?
NiceHash announced the security breach on its Facebook page Wednesday afternoon, saying it is investigating the incident and stopping operations for 24 hours. NiceHash also recommended that users change their online passwords as a precaution, though they added “the full scope of what happened is not yet known.”
Sounds like there wasn't appropriate logging in place either, but I'll give them a pass I guess. It's still early.
Christ... these guys are running a company with assets counted in the millions (the fact that it is digital currency notwithstanding), you'd think they'd handle things a little more competently.
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@julianlam
To be fair, when they founded the company a week ago, the assets were valued in the hundreds.
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@izzion The company's a week old? Man, am I in the wrong industry.
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@julianlam said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Christ... these guys are running a company with assets counted in the millions (the fact that it is digital currency notwithstanding), you'd think they'd handle things a little more competently
Maybe they handled thing in such a way so they would get hacked and get all those millions lost without any trace
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@julianlam said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Christ... these guys are running a company with assets counted in the millions (the fact that it is digital currency notwithstanding), you'd think they'd handle things a little more competently.
Given my experiences with dealing with companies with assets in the billions, nope, I wouldn't expect competence at all…
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So you're saying there's a theoretical lower bound and upper bound where you're valued highly enough to give a shit, but not so much that you stop giving a shit?
brb, founding a new political ideology.
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@julianlam Ugh that's gonna be one of those super-long unfunny Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics now.
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@julianlam said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
So you're saying there's a theoretical lower bound and upper bound where you're valued highly enough to give a shit, but not so much that you stop giving a shit?
Assertion (lower_bound <= upper_bound) failed.
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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?
throw together a whitepaper, ICO, grab the money, and run
or open a new exchange but make the website say that it's 200% secure, unhackable, and then let it get 'hacked'
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@blakeyrat Another good one:
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@izzion No, they'll just lock up anyone who voted for the wrong thing. They got cryptographically signed proof after all.
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@blakeyrat Having everyone know me as the founder of McAfee Antivirus would make me go fundamentally insane as well. You can't blame the poor guy.
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@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Shorter: Nobody shares money better than this!
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EDIT: oh that's the NiceHash one, it's already posted here.
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Talking about selling bitcoins, buy gold with bitcoin
Not money, but a decent proxy.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about that firm.
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@cabrito the way Tesla is using up lithium, perhaps we should switch to the lithium standard instead /s
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@izzion Note how carefully they maintain the illusion that you can get non-trivial amounts of their money out when Bitcoin isn't crashing.
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Here's an interesting collection of cryptocurrency incident analyses.
And here's an older talk about multiple failures in the original giant, Mt Gox:
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To great fanfare, the CBOE turned up futures trading in Bitcon this weekend.
And trading " was so intense that halts designed to cool volatility were triggered twice on the CBOE." https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/11/569806357/bitcoin-futures-surge-in-first-day-of-trading
OMG! WTF! BBQ! The next wave in financial freedom is here!
So, let's go to the tape and see how badly Bitcon crushed legacy futures over the weekend...
Oh. :tumbleweed:
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In today's installment of "You have to be fist-fucking me?":
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@heterodox said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@dcoder McAfee is just drunk (or high)
againstill.
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Just posting this here as a reminder.
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@lb_ Wow I transferred way more bitcoin with way less fee (IIRC about $4 US dollar equivalent) and it went through in less than 2 hours. Whoever set the fee for that transaction is a moron.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Whoever set the fee for that transaction is
a moronlaughing all the way to the bank.
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@hardwaregeek Chinese miners get the fee.
Well it's not guaranteed to be a Chinese miner. It's just like... 80% guaranteed to be a Chinese miner.
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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.
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And more officially, a statement from the SEC:
A number of concerns have been raised regarding the cryptocurrency and ICO markets, including that, as they are currently operating, there is substantially less investor protection than in our traditional securities markets, with correspondingly greater opportunities for fraud and manipulation.
Investors should understand that to date no initial coin offerings have been registered with the SEC. The SEC also has not to date approved for listing and trading any exchange-traded products (such as ETFs) holding cryptocurrencies or other assets related to cryptocurrencies.[2] If any person today tells you otherwise, be especially wary.