A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@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?
Without reading the article.... Why? Why would anyone do that?!?!
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@tsaukpaetra the idea was that after a few years your house would be worth enough that you could sell it, pay off the mortgage and have a load left over
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@tsaukpaetra You could do that in Sweden up until some years ago. Then they changed the law to make repayments mandatory until the loan reaches 50% of property value, then they become optional but highly recommended instead. Also, the maximum mortgage is 85% of property value so you can't use it as security for too much money.
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Interest only mortgages are very much a thing in Australia, used mainly for investment properties.
Not like there's a housing bubble that's likely to burst in a few years or anything...
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@douglasac said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Interest only mortgages are very much a thing in Australia, used mainly for investment properties.
They only really work when the market is generally rising (or, more formally, when they're secured against significantly less than the overall value of the asset). Get a price retrenchment, even a small one? Watch the availability of that mortgage class evaporate overnight.
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@jaloopa said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@tsaukpaetra the idea was that after a few years your house would be worth enough that you could sell it, pay off the mortgage and have a load left over
Sounds almost if not more terrible than predatory loans...
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Not The Onion...
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@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Not The Onion...
Lies!
I'm not going to read more than the title, that is The Onion and you're not convincing me otherwise.
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@dcoder Someone took out a mortgage to buy bitcoin? Jesus.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@dcoder Someone took out a mortgage to buy bitcoin? Jesus.
You mean to tell me you're surprised?
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@dcoder Someone took out a mortgage to buy bitcoin? Jesus.
I'm pretty sure He was smarter than that.
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@dcoder
I want to vote Poe. But my experience with humanity tells me that could very well be a Noe.
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Since idiot mortgage guy was begging for donations, I figure I ought to too:
Send your bitcoins to: 1NwMaBt3JyMxsbCAFwaqBehLsZvGhR95hY
ALL OF YOUR BITCOINS.
Instead of donating them to a moron who lost money and has 4 kids to support, donate them to a responsible adult person who is actually pretty well-off thank you very much but who likes to dick around in crypto-currency as a hobby.
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@dcoder 23% isn't even that bad. It still needs to crash much harder. Of course, for someone who just took a loan on it that's a lot.
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@blakeyrat did you manage to sell some of your bitcoin by now? There's still idiots buying this shit, there MUST be away to cash it back into dollars.
I'd feel much better if some of the people despising this made some money, too.
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@topspin I haven't tried.
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@tsaukpaetra said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@jaloopa said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@tsaukpaetra the idea was that after a few years your house would be worth enough that you could sell it, pay off the mortgage and have a load left over
Sounds almost if not more terrible than predatory loans...
Yes, but AFAIK they weren't pushed on people who couldn't afford them by the banks. I'm sure a lot of get-rich-quick-schemes with con-artists getting people into the house-flip trend were pushing people into them, though.
Professional flippers during the bubble did use interest-free loans, though, and profited from them.
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@blakeyrat Will we get a "fuck you" in return?
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@coderpatsy Sure why not.
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@dcoder Someone should tell panic-selling moron that Bitcoin's back up to $15,600.
I mean, he still bought at a legendary high price like a idiot moron, but if he hadn't panic-selled, he'd be in ok shape right now.
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@blakeyrat That's assuming he wasn't just being a big troll.
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Fuck y'all
No, you're doing it wrong. Get the money first.
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@polygeekery said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@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.
Just imagine all the patent opportunities.
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@polygeekery There's probably people who would pay for that too.
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...BY COCAINE!
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@boomzilla I'll add this to my list of reasons to not use SMS verification codes. It is strangely hilarious though that the hack was just to promote some cryptocurrencies.
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@lb_ "just promot[ing] shitcoins" is important enough, because there are lots of lemmings and bots actually listening to him:
His daily posts—which are now supposed to be weekly—have had huge implications for the market. Recommended coins such as Tron, HMQ, and even Verge have seen dramatic spikes in demand following his tweets, allowing him, a single person, to have a tangible effect on a billion dollar industry.
In virtually every case these recommendations have triggered pump and dumps where the price of a coin more than 2x's in less than 30 minutes before diving back to normalcy, yet that still leaves plenty of opportunity for anyone with a trigger finger quick enough to invest the moment he recommends a coin before selling it at its peak.
Naturally, quite a few computer literate investors have set up bots that scan McAfee's tweets for Coin of the Day, buy up a large quantity of the mentioned coin, and then dump it just a few minutes later for massive profits. The reality is this is just about the only way to get in on the action, because the sheer speed of the market makes it virtually impossible to realize the potential of the value surge if you don't buy within seconds of him tweeting.
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@lb_ said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I'll add this to my list of reasons to not use SMS verification codes.
My coworker just had his bank account hacked because of that. Well, and because TMobile was talked into 'yeah, I lost my phone and need to get my number changed to this other phone'
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@boomzilla the remaining question is, was he
- actually hacked and only noticed much later, in which case he might be the worst security guru ever (as if that'd be news),
- or he realized his shilling for crypto crap wasn't a good idea, and wants to save his reputation by, um, admitting he's the worst security guru ever.
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@topspin I bet he was hired (or maybe not even hired, just convinced) by a crypto pump and dump ring. He probably realized at some point that those are illegal, and decided to not take the risk.
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@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
the sheer speed of the market
Are we talking about the same thing here? Isn't this the same technology that takes hours to perform a transaction?
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@tsaukpaetra Oh yeah transactions are slow, but the value of bitcoin changes regardless of transactions.
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@tsaukpaetra said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Are we talking about the same thing here? Isn't this the same technology that takes hours to perform a transaction?
Virtually all of these value changes are happening on the exchanges, Coinbase, Bitfinex, etc. Transactions within the exchange don't leave the exchange, and thus don't need to worry about the transaction verification time.
Same way you can trade oil barrel futures faster than you can physically move oil barrels around.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Same way you can trade oil barrel futures faster than you can physically move oil barrels around.
Or coal.
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Mr McAfee added that he had since removed two-factor authentication from all of his accounts as a precaution.
Wat.
How does that make any sense?
"Yesterday, people needed to both crack my account password and bamboozle my phone operator, so as a precaution, I made sure they no longer need the latter!"The only way "two-factor authentication" could make something less secure is if the new factor somehow replaces the old one, meaning it actually stays one-factor authentication.
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@medinoc McAfee is an insane idiot, but he might have a point here.
There have been recent attacks where people have called a phone company and taken over another person's phone number (which is social engineering easier than most technical hacks).
Sites that use dumb 2-factor and send phone confirmations of stuff like "forgot my password" can then be intercepted by the new owner of the phone number.
There was a recent story on HackerNews about a guy who had his phone number stolen, and the hacker used it to empty out his bitcoin account in a matter of minutes. (I mean he was an idiot in several other ways, but still.)
And yes you're technically correct that if you can reset a password after stealing a legit user's phone, it really is only one-factor authentication. But you won't site a website on earth that uses that definition.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@medinoc Sites that use dumb 2-factor and send phone confirmations of stuff like "forgot my password" can then be intercepted by the new owner of the phone number.
Which means, effectively, that the phone has become the only factor.
So you're right, McAfee's decision makes sense because other people have been idiots.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
There have been recent attacks where people have called a phone company and taken over another person's phone number (which is social engineering easier than most technical hacks).
My co-worker is fighting this right now. They (phone co) were going on&on, no you can't have the same number on 2 phones. After several calls / redirects, he finally got a tech that said 'oh yeah, that could happen...'. Latest issue was they (bad guy) got a credit card reissued to a new address. He's now in the process of filing a police report (and put a lock on his credit a couple weeks ago). Because of all this shit, he was forced to get a new cell number. My prediction - his life is going to be hell for at least 12 more months.
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In other news:
Hooters makes a press release containing the word "blockchain" (in a context which, as far as I can tell, makes absolutely no sense), and their stock raises 50%.
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@blakeyrat TRWTF is going to Hooters and ordering a burger.
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@boomzilla
Well, they tend to give you the cold shoulder if you don't order some sort of food while you're there.
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@izzion said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@boomzilla
Well, they tend to give you the cold shoulder if you don't order some sort of food while you're there.Their wings with 911 sauce are pretty banging. As are their chili cheese fries, IIRC.
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@blakeyrat I'd have them investigated for insider trading because there's no way this press release makes sense other than pump and dump.
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@topspin Hard to prove. There are legitimate reasons to put restaurant loyalty cards on a blockchain system.
The Long Island Iced Tea company name change, that one's way more like insider trading than this.
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DogeCoin at $1 billion. This is a real life Poe if there ever was one.
Guys, I keep telling you, with our own WTFCoins we could have our own private islands already.
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I just...I don't even...the fuck?
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@polygeekery It's a 2000 year old ponzi scheme! It'll collapse ANY SECOND NOW!
Seriously, when Jesus was bitching about an industry, it might just be that that industry is here to stay.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@polygeekery It's a 2000 year old ponzi scheme! It'll collapse ANY SECOND NOW!
Seriously, when Jesus was bitching about an industry, it might just be that that industry is here to stay.
I wouldn't go that far. Plenty of fiat currencies have failed. If a fiat currency is mismanaged, or is in front of a really shit economic policy it absolutely can fail.
The tweet amazed me because this dude thinks that cryptocurrency are less likely to fail...for some reason. At least the "fiat currencies aren't real because they aren't backed by gold" people sort of have a point. They just miss the overall picture.