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I don’t understand how we have all this information on the internet and people still get sucked into these scams. 48%...that is not a realistic guaranteed retur

I don’t understand how we have all this information on the internet and people still get sucked into these scams. 48%...that is not a realistic guaranteed return! :/

pjc50 8y ago
Because the pro-scam information surfaces easier than the anti-scam information? Watch one ponzi scam video on Youtube and the algorithms will start showing you others ...
- creeble 8y ago
  This is an interesting phenomenon in general.
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    It's something the major social network sites are going to have to wrangle with. Someone who expresses even a tiny interest in conspiracy theories or extremist views gets pushed progressively deeper into that rabbit hole over time.
    - vkou 8y ago
      The problem with conspiracy theories is that we have no shortage of well-documented, actual, real conspiracies - alongside bullshit about how George Bush was a reptilian from the planet Xoros. The former absolutely need to be talked about...
    - notahacker 8y ago
      Depends a bit on your susceptibility to believe such things in the first place. If you're a little sceptical of some foreign policy incident and YouTube keeps surfacing the works of Alex Jones and David Icke as possible answers to the questions you've just seen a compelling video ask, there's a good chance it'll make you less questioning of the mainstream in future.
  - loceng 8y ago
    I've heard lots of coverage and excitement for Bitcoin et al on the radio, TV, etc - however they oddly never mention or talk about the Pyramid-Ponzi scheme, they never have an 'expert' on to counter the hype. Obviously there are more people incentivized to talk positively about these incentivized crypto-assets (assuming they own crypto-assets structured as Pyramid-Ponzi schemes), so they learn and get good talking about the hype and talk about the "positives." The reason these are more powerful than say a single stock broker running a Ponzi scheme, is that you have all of these unrelated, decentralized and people that are global that are indirectly collaborating. It's why it's so much more dangerous as well. It's continued in part for so long too, because with a stock broker, you arrest/charge the stock broker. With incentivized crypto-assets, you have a lot of different parties/systems that must work together, indirectly, for it to act like the Pyramid-Ponzi schemes that they are. This being convoluted like it is seems to be causing regulators and enforcement to lock up -- along with all of the people and organizations actively lobbying to "educate" regulators around the world with the version and whitewashing to see how they can try to fiddle their way to fit within the laws countering this kind of pattern. Or maybe they're being bribed with "$1,000,000" worth of "Bitcoins" (per year?) that they're promised will become worth 10-100x within 10-20 years. The solution is a crypto-asset that isn't incentivized, that is government mandated, and that CONVERTS their fiat currency into the crypto-asset -- not simply exchanging it, e.g. the "paper" currency gets destroyed, instead of given to the seller. With incentivized crypto-assets, the cost of the future value is transferred to the future holders - and even though it may be subtle, it will become a very substantial amount; it already is a substantial amount that's been transferred, however there's a bigger base of holders now who want to at minimum get the money back they bought them for - and so becomes the marketing force behind it all, disregarding or ignorant of the negatives for society as a whole. Edit: To add, can there be incentivized crypto-assets that are structured to be legitimate? It seems the angle that is being taken to legitimize this structure is that they perhaps mimic the structure of stocks on a stock market, however one major difference is that stocks on the stock market aren't used a transactional layer - and therefore don't have (hopefully) under or uneducated people making the trades/purchases; the whole purpose of these incentivized crypto-asset blockchains is of course to get general consumers/the masses a.k.a. highly likely under educated people buying/using them for their platforms as a transactional layer; people could otherwise simply pay fiat currency for access to identical services, without them adopting/vesting into these Pyramid-Ponzi scheme structures though (all who should be being educated that others must adopt/use the service in order to maintain the value for their crypto-asset; however is that education then too close to admitting it's a Ponzi-Pyramid scheme?). There are more differences than this example.
stevenwoo 8y ago
That's assuming that the truth will simmer up to the top and rise above the push marketing. Also on reddit there are entire subreddits that seem to be conducive to luring people in and performing pump and dump schemes, mixed in with legitimate posts.
chinathrow 8y ago
It's mostly people looking at how Bitcoin et al went up exponentially last fall, fueling FOMO heavily. "What if I had..."
- mkirklions 8y ago
  But then instead of buying Bitcoin who has 9 years of storing value, they buy a shitcoin.
  - kolpa 8y ago
    Well, 8 years of storing value and 1 year of collapsing value, eh?
  - spookthesunset 8y ago
    > But then instead of buying Bitcoin who has 9 years of storing value, they buy a shitcoin Most of them are running the exact same codebase as Bitcoin with a few tweaks. How are they any less of a "shitcoin" than Bitcoin?
chrischen 8y ago
Because normally there are regulations in place when dealing with USD that protect these people.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  Nah, these people knew damn well what they were doing. They knew it was a high high risk cryptocurrency. Its like instead of buying 10,000$ of stock, these people bought 10,000$ of lottery tickets. The horrible part is that on /r/cryptocurrency is that people still have this mentality.
  - chrischen 8y ago
    That would imply that no one actually believed in their marketing. A lottery ticket does not tell you of guaranteed earnings.
jandrese 8y ago
I think most people know that these things are basically digital pyramid schemes, but they think they're getting in at the top and will be smarter than the other suckers and will get out before it collapses. This is also why they collapse so fast. It's basically a race to not be left holding the bag.
rebel 8y ago
10-15 years ago, I was certain that "bullshitting" people was going to disappear in the near future. It seemed inevitable that people would just pull out their phone and fact check any scam or lie. In a bizarre twist, it appears the opposite has happened.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  If you can put information in someones eyes, you can bullshit them. That only costs money in 2018.
- rdiddly 8y ago
  Fact-checking is more convenient now, but there's still no antidote for a lie someone wants to believe.
- alexbeloi 8y ago
  Yeah... with 1000 conflicting versions of any event, it's more difficult than ever to sift through the misinformation. Then one brilliant soul will say "aha, I know the solution, I will hire experts and engineers to efficiently sift through information sources and present people with a version of truth we can be confident about!", behold the birth of the 1001st version of events.
loceng 8y ago
It's likely because they see of Bitcoin, Ethereum's Ether et al - that are also structured as Pyramid-Ponzi schemes, incentivized crypto-assets - and they see their success and figure they have a chance riding to the top in the next one that gains momentum or goes mainstream. Bitcoin et al of course don't outright make claims of returns. Their communities with vested interest have gained enough size and attention that they gained traction in mainstream media, and that community has been "smart"/clever enough to not outright market it as a Ponzi scheme - where they whitewash with marketing hype for anything but, and where they rally to "HODL" when the crypto-assets they own are either a) on a downtrend (to help reduce a massive sell off), and b) at highs (to avoid a massive sell off) - all of which to show how illiquid these crypto-assets are; https://hackernoon.com/analyzing-every-reddit-comment-mentioning-hodl-since-2017-part-one-d536eb8364ad https://hackernoon.com/analyzing-every-reddit-comment-mentio... - a blog post by a company who allows bot-based buying/selling based on these HODL patterns... There will be other tricks this organized community are surely doing now, like aligning big buyers with big sellers, so the value won't tank when someone wants to buy $100MM+ worth of the crypto-asset; all of which will lead to the perception of it not being so volatile. This is the best wolf-dressed-in-sheep-costume that's ever come into existence. I believe non-incentivized crypto-assets will win out in the end anyways - that is if blockchain is even a necessary part of a solution - as incentivized crypto-asset structures will cost society more (in the short term and long-term, anyone who "buys in" past a tipping point anyway), and so platforms that compete with incentivized crypto-asset powered platforms simply have to educate users/market to compete with how their wealth will be unreasonably/unnecessarily reallocated weighted towards the earlier adopters.

I don’t understand how we have all this information on the internet and people still get sucked into these scams. 48%...that is not a realistic guaranteed return! :/

pjc50 8y ago

Because the pro-scam information surfaces easier than the anti-scam information? Watch one ponzi scam video on Youtube and the algorithms will start showing you others ...

creeble 8y ago
This is an interesting phenomenon in general.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  It's something the major social network sites are going to have to wrangle with. Someone who expresses even a tiny interest in conspiracy theories or extremist views gets pushed progressively deeper into that rabbit hole over time.
  - vkou 8y ago
    The problem with conspiracy theories is that we have no shortage of well-documented, actual, real conspiracies - alongside bullshit about how George Bush was a reptilian from the planet Xoros. The former absolutely need to be talked about...
  - notahacker 8y ago
    Depends a bit on your susceptibility to believe such things in the first place. If you're a little sceptical of some foreign policy incident and YouTube keeps surfacing the works of Alex Jones and David Icke as possible answers to the questions you've just seen a compelling video ask, there's a good chance it'll make you less questioning of the mainstream in future.
- loceng 8y ago
  I've heard lots of coverage and excitement for Bitcoin et al on the radio, TV, etc - however they oddly never mention or talk about the Pyramid-Ponzi scheme, they never have an 'expert' on to counter the hype. Obviously there are more people incentivized to talk positively about these incentivized crypto-assets (assuming they own crypto-assets structured as Pyramid-Ponzi schemes), so they learn and get good talking about the hype and talk about the "positives." The reason these are more powerful than say a single stock broker running a Ponzi scheme, is that you have all of these unrelated, decentralized and people that are global that are indirectly collaborating. It's why it's so much more dangerous as well. It's continued in part for so long too, because with a stock broker, you arrest/charge the stock broker. With incentivized crypto-assets, you have a lot of different parties/systems that must work together, indirectly, for it to act like the Pyramid-Ponzi schemes that they are. This being convoluted like it is seems to be causing regulators and enforcement to lock up -- along with all of the people and organizations actively lobbying to "educate" regulators around the world with the version and whitewashing to see how they can try to fiddle their way to fit within the laws countering this kind of pattern. Or maybe they're being bribed with "$1,000,000" worth of "Bitcoins" (per year?) that they're promised will become worth 10-100x within 10-20 years. The solution is a crypto-asset that isn't incentivized, that is government mandated, and that CONVERTS their fiat currency into the crypto-asset -- not simply exchanging it, e.g. the "paper" currency gets destroyed, instead of given to the seller. With incentivized crypto-assets, the cost of the future value is transferred to the future holders - and even though it may be subtle, it will become a very substantial amount; it already is a substantial amount that's been transferred, however there's a bigger base of holders now who want to at minimum get the money back they bought them for - and so becomes the marketing force behind it all, disregarding or ignorant of the negatives for society as a whole. Edit: To add, can there be incentivized crypto-assets that are structured to be legitimate? It seems the angle that is being taken to legitimize this structure is that they perhaps mimic the structure of stocks on a stock market, however one major difference is that stocks on the stock market aren't used a transactional layer - and therefore don't have (hopefully) under or uneducated people making the trades/purchases; the whole purpose of these incentivized crypto-asset blockchains is of course to get general consumers/the masses a.k.a. highly likely under educated people buying/using them for their platforms as a transactional layer; people could otherwise simply pay fiat currency for access to identical services, without them adopting/vesting into these Pyramid-Ponzi scheme structures though (all who should be being educated that others must adopt/use the service in order to maintain the value for their crypto-asset; however is that education then too close to admitting it's a Ponzi-Pyramid scheme?). There are more differences than this example.

stevenwoo 8y ago

That's assuming that the truth will simmer up to the top and rise above the push marketing. Also on reddit there are entire subreddits that seem to be conducive to luring people in and performing pump and dump schemes, mixed in with legitimate posts.

chinathrow 8y ago

It's mostly people looking at how Bitcoin et al went up exponentially last fall, fueling FOMO heavily. "What if I had..."

mkirklions 8y ago
But then instead of buying Bitcoin who has 9 years of storing value, they buy a shitcoin.
- kolpa 8y ago
  Well, 8 years of storing value and 1 year of collapsing value, eh?
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  > But then instead of buying Bitcoin who has 9 years of storing value, they buy a shitcoin Most of them are running the exact same codebase as Bitcoin with a few tweaks. How are they any less of a "shitcoin" than Bitcoin?

chrischen 8y ago

Because normally there are regulations in place when dealing with USD that protect these people.

mkirklions 8y ago
Nah, these people knew damn well what they were doing. They knew it was a high high risk cryptocurrency. Its like instead of buying 10,000$ of stock, these people bought 10,000$ of lottery tickets. The horrible part is that on /r/cryptocurrency is that people still have this mentality.
- chrischen 8y ago
  That would imply that no one actually believed in their marketing. A lottery ticket does not tell you of guaranteed earnings.

jandrese 8y ago

I think most people know that these things are basically digital pyramid schemes, but they think they're getting in at the top and will be smarter than the other suckers and will get out before it collapses. This is also why they collapse so fast. It's basically a race to not be left holding the bag.

rebel 8y ago

10-15 years ago, I was certain that "bullshitting" people was going to disappear in the near future. It seemed inevitable that people would just pull out their phone and fact check any scam or lie. In a bizarre twist, it appears the opposite has happened.

mkirklions 8y ago
If you can put information in someones eyes, you can bullshit them. That only costs money in 2018.
rdiddly 8y ago
Fact-checking is more convenient now, but there's still no antidote for a lie someone wants to believe.
alexbeloi 8y ago
Yeah... with 1000 conflicting versions of any event, it's more difficult than ever to sift through the misinformation. Then one brilliant soul will say "aha, I know the solution, I will hire experts and engineers to efficiently sift through information sources and present people with a version of truth we can be confident about!", behold the birth of the 1001st version of events.

loceng 8y ago

It's likely because they see of Bitcoin, Ethereum's Ether et al - that are also structured as Pyramid-Ponzi schemes, incentivized crypto-assets - and they see their success and figure they have a chance riding to the top in the next one that gains momentum or goes mainstream. Bitcoin et al of course don't outright make claims of returns. Their communities with vested interest have gained enough size and attention that they gained traction in mainstream media, and that community has been "smart"/clever enough to not outright market it as a Ponzi scheme - where they whitewash with marketing hype for anything but, and where they rally to "HODL" when the crypto-assets they own are either a) on a downtrend (to help reduce a massive sell off), and b) at highs (to avoid a massive sell off) - all of which to show how illiquid these crypto-assets are; https://hackernoon.com/analyzing-every-reddit-comment-mentioning-hodl-since-2017-part-one-d536eb8364ad https://hackernoon.com/analyzing-every-reddit-comment-mentio... - a blog post by a company who allows bot-based buying/selling based on these HODL patterns... There will be other tricks this organized community are surely doing now, like aligning big buyers with big sellers, so the value won't tank when someone wants to buy $100MM+ worth of the crypto-asset; all of which will lead to the perception of it not being so volatile. This is the best wolf-dressed-in-sheep-costume that's ever come into existence. I believe non-incentivized crypto-assets will win out in the end anyways - that is if blockchain is even a necessary part of a solution - as incentivized crypto-asset structures will cost society more (in the short term and long-term, anyone who "buys in" past a tipping point anyway), and so platforms that compete with incentivized crypto-asset powered platforms simply have to educate users/market to compete with how their wealth will be unreasonably/unnecessarily reallocated weighted towards the earlier adopters.