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I was listening to terrestrial radio the other day and was surprised to hear a radio advertisement beckoning retirees to cash in their 401ks to join the cryptoc
by robotbikes 9y ago
I was listening to terrestrial radio the other day and was surprised to hear a radio advertisement beckoning retirees to cash in their 401ks to join the cryptocurrency future of Bitcoin and Ethereum. The bubble is too big for Google to slow it down and it has grown beyond the realm of tech savvy geeks into something fueled by hype and hubris.
- riffraff 9y agoin Italy, which is not the heart of tech bubbles, there have been reports (I got a call too!) of telemarketers cold calling people to invest in cryptocurrencies. This genuinely frightened me.
- danmaz74 9y agoI received one such call (in Italy)...
- notahacker 9y agoI've received a couple in the UK. Low end telemarketers (overseas, poor English, zero knowledge of their subject matter) and clearly originating from random dialling or a list of mobile numbers without names, so making traditional boiler room operations seem sophisticated.
- drusepth 9y agoI wonder at what point it becomes profitable to hire telemarketers to drive interest in a cryptocurrency you've bought into so you can pump and dump, especially if these telemarketers are coming from overseas where they're notoriously cheap.
- s73v3r_ 9y agoWatch the John Oliver segment on cryptocurrencies from this weekend. They have a promo video from a company that is literally advertising pump and dump schemes.
- wyager 9y agoThere’s almost certainly no actual cryptocurrency involved. This sounds like a generic money-wiring scam.
- eitland 9y agoSame in Norway. Last week "Åsted Norge" reported about it. The cases they told about were pure scams where the fraudsters stole the cryptocurrencies directly.
- chx 9y agoFrom the best tweetstorm ever on topic by Sarah Jeong: https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/953464303960469504 https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/953464303960469504 > All of this has gone too far!!!!! It was fine when you paranoid dorks were out there scamming each other, please leave the normies alone!!!!!!!!!!!
- kelukelugames 9y agoI discovered her twitter account during the uber trial. She is hilarious and worth following.
- tjwds 9y agoAgreed — her reporting for The Verge is consistently amazing: https://www.theverge.com/users/Sarah%20Jeong https://www.theverge.com/users/Sarah%20Jeong
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- booli 9y agoWow she is awesome, her handle on GitHub.com is `badfeminist` and her badfeminist.github.io links to http://trumpisliterallyhitler.com http://trumpisliterallyhitler.com
- kakarot 9y ago> Get out of my mentions unless you read the white paper at least five years ago or earlier Love it, thanks for sharing. It does seem like she is making the mistake of conflating Bitcoin with general crypto however, which can be misleading to her audience. Bitcoin indeed suffers from slow transaction speeds and extreme volatility. Other coins, truer to the original vision, fair much better in those respects, and with wide adoption and usage, the volatility would subside.
- paulgb 9y agoI saw an ad for a cryptocurrency on the seat-back TV on a United flight recently, I was pretty surprised.
- ttul 9y agoDid they offer in flight 401-k redemptions and reinvestment in shitecoins?
- zitterbewegung 9y agoGoogle doesn't want to slow it down. They just don't want to be associated with companies that are related to fraud. And, I think that this is a valid and correct choice for Google because they have their own brand to protect.
- bhtru 9y agoThere’s just too many poor ICOs launching and floating around for Google to moderate and police all the potential ads they’d buy. Google has shown no issue with deliberately reducing the service of it’s product to offset future headaches before.
- amyjess 9y ago> They just don't want to be associated with companies that are related to fraud. More specifically, Google doesn't want the SEC to hold them liable when they go after some of these fraudsters.
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- notriddle 9y agoThey also don't want: * sites abandoning adsense because they don't want to be associated with cryptocurrency * users installing adblockers because they don't want to be running monero miners
- brwsr 9y ago> The bubble is too big for Google There is the "bubble" word again. So how about our economy, isn't that a bubble too? What is a bubble? I still see too many places in the world where the sales price for a house is easily 10x the price it actually cost to build it. Banks? Quantitative easing? Startup's? Or at what point will Google look like a bubble itself? Governments and Banks have learned that the crypto-currency revolution can replace a significant part of our current economy. Whether that's good or bad news, calling it a bubble is foolish and cheap IMHO.
- smt88 9y agoSure, any bubble can pop. But unlike some other assets, like houses, many popular cryptocurrencies currently have little-to-no intrinsic value.
- shitgoose 9y agodoes an AMZ share have an intrinsic value?
- the_gastropod 9y ago....yes https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/intrinsicvalue.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/intrinsicvalue.asp
- shitgoose 9y agoyep. the only intrinsic value i get in exchange for 1,300$ AMZ share is the link explaining the value of an intrinsic value. what exactly can you claim from amazon in exchange for a share? except for a kick in a butt from amazon security?
- admax88q 9y agoYes because at the end of the day an share of AMZ means you own a small percentage of that company. That includes a small percentage of all their physical assets, servers, real estate, cash on hand etc. So yeah there is some intrinsic value.
- Taek 9y agoThe frustrating bit is that these scams paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole. There's a lot of value to cryptocurrencies, and as a technology it's poised to change the world in some very serious ways. People latch onto it because it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it. People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole space as a scam. The scams are crowding out the innovation, drawing potentially disastrous regulatory scrutiny, and as a whole setting back a legitimate budding industry substantially. I hope that when regulators finally do step in, they are able to take actions that stop the scams without destroying the underlying technology.
- oreo81 9y agoHow could they destroy the underlying technology, even if they wanted to?
- wolfgke 9y ago> The frustrating bit is that these scams paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole. There's a lot of value to cryptocurrencies, and as a technology it's poised to change the world in some very serious ways. People latch onto it because it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it. > People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole space as a scam. The scams are crowding out the innovation, drawing potentially disastrous regulatory scrutiny, and as a whole setting back a legitimate budding industry substantially. I accept your reasoning. But cryptography was all the time about how one can "scam" another person or prevent being scammed (where "scammed" in this case means e.g. that the cipher is broken). To give a concrete example: MITM attacks on, say, Diffie-Hellman key exchange (just the standard textbook MITM attack if DH is used without any certificate) is in this wording just scamming the user that he has a secure connection while in reality someone can eavesdrop it or even modify sent messages. Of course the standard solution for this exact problem is to use X.509 certificates. But the "scamming" does not stop here: Of course a malicious person immediately thinks about more sophisticated attacks such as replay attacks to scam the user and again of course the protocols use methods to prevent this. In this sense my counterclaim is that this does not "paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole", but just presents the "ordinary man" with what cryptography has been about for decades in a completely realistic (though in this case perhaps somewhar painful) way.
- latencyloser 9y agoAnecdotal, but I have an uncle who, is a very good man but completely illiterate in terms of technology and closely resembles a "Larry the cable guy" stereotype, bought a surprising amount of bitcoin and then called me to ask how it worked, what make the price change, etc. It seems shoe shiners can come in many forms. But that was the particular one for me to unload all of my bitcoin and other crypto and get out while I was ahead.
- nkrisc 9y agoHe bought it and then asked you what he'd just spent all this money on?
- latencyloser 9y agoYes, essentially. He understood it was some kind of currency. But wasn't sure _why_ people used it, _what_ they really used it for or what all the hype was about. He bought mostly due to fear of missing out.
- just_one_time_ 9y agoIt is not a bubble you idiot, the world is in the middle of switching currencies and you are too dense to accept it.
- mastax 9y agoWatched some CNBC yesterday - that channel is about 1/3 cryptocurrencies now. Ads, news, and the "crypto guy" who comes on and tells you to buy monero.
- username223 9y agoFM radio ads trying to scam retirees? Wow, it's hard to go lower than that, but people have managed. John Oliver's recent segment on crypto was mostly intro-level, but he managed to dig up a video ad for a pump-and-dump ring. It wasn't at all wink-and-nudge or euphemistic: they pretty much flat out said "join our group to pump and dump cryptocurrencies and shaft some rubes." I'll be surprised if the whole space doesn't completely crater sometime this year, a bunch of ordinary people get shafted, and the SEC steps in and knocks some heads. There's no way I'm getting near this until after the dust settles.
- lambda 9y agoI've tend to chat with drivers when I take Lyft, and frequently mention that I'm a programmer. Several of the drivers have then asked me about cryptocurrency, mostly Bitcoin and Ethereum. I try to discuss how technically interesting they are, but how financially shaky; that there is likely a bubble and that they are probably not good long term investment options but could be worth buying a little bit for fun. We are definitely in a very hype driven cryptocurrency bubble right now, and there are a lot of naive folks who are probably going to lose money to it. And yet somehow, we haven't really managed to make any cryptocurrencies an actual, widely accepted, payment alternative, for anyone other than a few people with special circumstances (government restrictions on currency exchange, criminals demanding ransoms, funding organizations that governments are trying to shut down) or people who are fairly technically competent. There's a chance the lightning network could be the last piece of the puzzle to make cryptocurrencies actually usable for payment, though even still, I have a hard time seeing most places wanting to accept payment in an asset as volatile as Bitcoin. Or maybe we'll see a coin backed by fiat currency and real, regulated banks on Stellar, where you don't have nearly the same scalability issues nor gigawatts of power wasted just to try to solve Sybil attacks. If you have a coin backed by fiat currency, and low transaction costs, businesses are a lot more likely to accept it as payment as most of their expenses, taxes, debts, and so on are in the local fiat currency rather than than in any cryptocurrency.
- zerostar07 9y ago> I have a hard time seeing most places wanting to accept payment in an asset as volatile as Bitcoin. I have an even harder time seeing any of those people who invest in bitoin using their coins for purchases.
- lambda 9y agoThat too. The deflationary nature of Bitcoin makes it really unsuitable for use as an actual currency, and of course the amount of speculation going on.
- fancyfacebook 9y agoEveryone I know who got into crypto has the same story: for some silly reason they all bought like 5-10 different coins and it would be inordinately complicated and expensive to sell them all. I'm pretty sure whatever "newbie guides" exist out there purposely lead people to this awful state.
- nasredin 9y agoAnd Steven Seagal! He is the spokesman/brand ambassador for "Bitcoiin". Yes that is two "I"s.
- arisAlexis 9y agounless its not a bubble anf the bubble is when you look at the stock market and america's debt