14 ms·

BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute

138 points by nemoniac 5y ago

WilTimSon 5y ago
It's astonishing to me that people will just buy into any success story that involves crypto and NFTs. People don't question why poorly drawn pictures are being bought for thousands of dollars, don't question why there are hundreds of altcoins on the market and some "cryptocurrency experts" are supposedly "offering free tips" on investment. The whole space is rife with scams and embellishments and yet there are so many people just blindly buying into it, including the damn BBC!
- cpach 5y ago
  Many people dream of getting rich quickly, by windfall. Buying index funds is a great and easy way to enhance your personal financial situation – over time. But you will not get rich quickly. So people still seek out alternatives that are incredibly risky and unsound.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    Many people are teased and abused, for year after year after year, working hard with obvious threat of termination, while a different system of money that they have no access to, grows and grows (investments) every day in the newspaper headlines for everyone to see.
    - tluyben2 5y ago
      I think this is quite important; many ‘normal’ people simply struggled while others got money ‘for free’; while of course this (with stocks, houses, inheritance etc) happened all the time before crypto, that was for the rich mostly. Now it appears you can put the little money you ‘have’ into crypto and make a nice living like a rich person; make so much interest that you can live of it. Even the careful people I know now are saying; yeah, you keep saying it’ll crash for years but it doesn’t so I am going in. And that effect is spreading. I have, in my circles, way too many people who are living off crypto interest fully.
      - lariati 5y ago
        Crypto has to periodically 10X though for this to happen. The narrative has a type of theta/time decay as there is just no way for the majority to 10X their investment periodically. I think it is also very hard to think about the global entertainment dollars that have been locked up for the past 2 years. It is an enormous amount of money and as the pandemic fades people are going to splurge on the non-digital services and goods that they have not been able to for the past two years. The pandemic fading throws the whole process that has pushed crypto to these levels in reverse. The fact crypto has continued to make new highs is basically meaningless as far as the future is concerned.
  - soneil 5y ago
    I think it doesn't help that the "normal answers" for "normal people" are essentially broken right now. We were looking at somewhere to park €50k while we hunt for a house. Growing up we're always told about savings accounts. We should have a savings account, we should be contributing to savings accounts, blah blah blah. So we asked our bank about a savings account, and they offered an annual return of €78. And I don't even mean 0.0015%, but the return is capped so it's not allowed to compound.
  - lariati 5y ago
    You also can't separate that this all became popular during a global pandemic and people love to gamble. I think its easy to underestimate the amount of global entertainment dollars that have been on the sidelines the past two years. It is a fashion trend that will turn to dust as the pandemic fades. No one is going to want to be reminded of the pandemic in two years when people were so starved for entertainment they were buying these stupid ape pictures.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  Yeah. A friend the other day put it like, 'Yeah, internet conmen are charismatic'. I would guess that many people are well aware that 85+% of NFT hype is based on scams, money laundering, and bagholders. But their voices get drowned out. I feel bad for the people who fall for it; I do. And I even feel a little bad for the conmen who have to live with themselves. However, the BBC have no excuse for letting such a documentary get so far without doing basic checks on a scamcoin that was so scammy it actually got shut down, four months ago. That's egregious. Not supporting illegal wars for oil egregious, and not quite smearing Corbyn for years egregious, just ordinary "this is what happens when you put terrible Tories in charge" second order effects.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    The BBC were not especially in support of the war - in fact, much of their problems stem from questioning the "dodgy dossier", resulting in the events of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry and it being made clear to them that the government and security services would not accept this criticism and would take revenge for it. > smearing Corbyn for years egregious This really has been egregious. > internet conmen are charismatic Half-baked theory, but I wonder if the prevalence of voice comms - Discord, Clubhouse and its twitter ripoff - in this space is used to enable charisma to ensnare victims.
  - toyg 5y ago
    > internet conmen are charismatic All conmen are charismatic (well, the successful ones at least), the new generations just happen to use the internet - like in any other profession.
    - dwater 5y ago
      The word conman comes from the phrase "Confidence Man". They generally use charisma to gain the confidence of others and then exploit that confidence for personal gain.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  People want free money. No one minds whether it's badly drawn pictures or tulip bulbs or whatever that is the intermediary step :)
- luckyandroid 5y ago
  Every person I've spoken to who's told me they're interested in crypto literally only care about it to make money, and have no interest in learning how it works. They all treat every last crypto-based use as investment like stocks, and not as a normal economic choice (e.g. "I want $3000 worth of bitcoin to buy a car" is not something people are doing, instead it's all "I want $3000 worth of bitcoin because the internet told me it'll be 3 million in a year"). NFTs also annoy me because it's literally the worst part of art industry - "buying" the "rights" to a piece of art so you can turn it for more cash later on, and not as an appreciation of the work. Bored Apes might be one of the few exceptions where people are doing it for "bragging rights", which is infinitely better because you're buying it to say you own it, much closer to normal art purchases.
  - cuteboy19 5y ago
    This is largely because there is almost nothing you can do with crypto apart from speculate and gamble. The more I learn about stuff like defi the more I understand just how fractally useless crypto is.
    - Rarebox 5y ago
      You can buy drugs and other illegal things off the internet (tor), that's very useful for some people. Basically crypto allows for transactions that could otherwise be blocked or easily tracked by central parties (1). It can also be used to bypass gambling laws. For legal purchases and activities crypto is useless, regular money is much more practical. [1] depending on which crypto and how it's used tracking is possible, so care is required (especially) when converting dollars to crypto.
      - pessimizer 5y ago
        > You can buy drugs and other illegal things off the internet (tor) Can you? After that huge bust a few years back, I figured that particular usage was marginal at this point. Seems like the only use for crypto is ransomware, dodging taxes or smuggling embezzled money out of your country.
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  >People don't question why poorly drawn pictures are being bought for thousands of dollars I'm also mystified by the prices that modern 'art' can command. >It's astonishing to me that people will just buy into any success story 'get rich quick like him' is as old as the hills. I'm not being snarky i'm just pointing out that the underlying principles behind your complaints have always existed to some extent. I think it's just a symptom of 'post truth' and and cynicsm at the system that allows the illusion to be even more blatant.
- loceng 5y ago
  It could also have been more of a "hit piece" by the BBC on crypto/NFTs, and perhaps the controllers are financially incentivized/aligned with Bitcoin et al's success - so they pulled it? A possibility exists in the direction opposite to what you suggest.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
  - rchaud 5y ago
    Did you read the article. Absolutely nothing says it was a 'hit piece'. In fact, it appears to have been pulled because of poor editorial oversight. The documentary as filmed made no mention of the fact that this guy set up his own coin and crypto fund, which was shut down and left investors in the lurch. > The Guardian asked the BBC if it was confident in his claimed financial returns and questioned why the programme’s promotional material did not mention that Hassan’s cryptocurrency Orfano was abruptly shut down in October, with many unhappy investors claiming they were left out of pocket as a result.
- ben_w 5y ago
  While I generally agree with your sentiment, some of the most iconic art in the world seems to me to be poorly made and I have no idea why they are valued or admired. I don’t just mean the usual go-to controversial examples in modern art like Serrano’s “Piss Christ”[0] or Emin’s “My Bed”[1], as even some older stuff like Klimt’s “Der Kuss”[2] give me this confusion (the woman has always looked to me like she has a broken neck). (If it was just “I don’t like it” I would also list Cubism, but I can get that there are well-made examples of Cubism without liking the style). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Bed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Bed [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_(Klimt) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_(Klimt)
  - j4yav 5y ago
    The first two I would categorize more as anti-art (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-art). Modern art, which does include Klimt, is its own thing that is (relatively?) more traditional than those examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art. Anti-art is more like a sort of trolling meta commentary on art. The "performance art" of the art world, really. People who like it like it for the iconoclasm and/or humor of it, I think.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      I mean small-m modern, not the art style Modern. Synonym treadmill for words which mean “now-ish” being baked into specific periods, reminds me a bit of the meme of files called “Report_final_FINAL_2_feedback_final.doc” :)
      - j4yav 5y ago
        Fair enough, worth mentioning still that contemporary art (the name for the period we're currently in) is also not all anti-art either.
  - toyg 5y ago
    I'm so used to The Kiss being a masterpiece out of the sheer force of its qualities (the passion, the reluctance, the dresses, the gold...) that I honestly struggle to see it from your point of view - she doesn't have a broken neck, she's "turtling" away from him. But i guess the eye of the beholder is what it is. I do agree with your view of contemporary work though, it's hard to see the value of a lot of it (diamond skulls, broken mattresses, etc etc). Art has become an investment vehicle with a veneer of cultural education, so now the rulebook has gone out of the window.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  Why limit it to crypto? People don't question why the value of houses seems to magically rise globally despite no tangible value being added to the assets in most cases. People don't question why Wall Street traders get rich by trading second derivatives of mortgage backed securities with each other all day. What makes a mortgage any more "real" than an NFT?
  - blfr 5y ago
    People question it all the time. And a house has obvious utility. It's also kind of a share in the city's future. It can be mispriced but it's not entirely based on hype.
    - globular-toast 5y ago
      I'm not talking about the houses, though. I'm talking about mortgages. Have you ever wondered why you can't just save up for a house and buy it with cash? Why do you need to first acquire this thing called a mortgage? What part is the bank actually playing in this transaction? You'll pay tax to them for 30 years but what exactly are you getting in return? These are the questions that need to be asked.
      - rchaud 5y ago
        Houses are acquired in cash all the time. There is no legal requirement to tie oneself to a mortgage, if you already have the means to pay the price in full.
      - fusionbro 5y ago
        The reason people aren't buying a home in cash, which is not necessarily common but completely doable and not illegal or anything, is because almost no one can afford to do so. Saving for 30 years and then buying a house in cash all while paying rent somewhere in the meantime I think is pretty undesirable.
      - pjc50 5y ago
        > Have you ever wondered why you can't just save up for a house and buy it with cash? You can. > What part is the bank actually playing in this transaction? They're lending you the money. I assume you have some different, less obvious answers to this? If you're against the lending of money for interest, how about a halal mortgage? https://www.qardus.com/news/halal-mortgages-everything-you-need-to-know https://www.qardus.com/news/halal-mortgages-everything-you-n...
- pibechorro 5y ago
  In any open market you are going to have the whole spectrum. You fail to mention the positive transformation and liberation of millions of people by crypto. From Nigeria, to Turkey, to Argentina millions are being saved from decades of financial isolation or straight up robbery by their corrupt institutions. You look at the glass half empty my friend.
  - thematrixturtle 5y ago
    Sigh, this old hoary chestnut again. I don't suppose you'd have the thinnest shred of evidence of those "millions"?
    - frockington1 5y ago
      Look at Turkish Lira inflows into crypto in recent months. You'll see the value. Also check out the inflow of USD as the Federal Reserve printed trillions of new dollars
      - dwater 5y ago
        Any evidence that this represents the common man freeing himself from the economic authorities and not just the privileged class using it for capital flight and tax evasion?
        frockington1 5y ago
        Any evidence this is the privileged class using it for capital flight and tax evasion and not the common man freeing himself from the economic authorities? In my opinion it doesn't matter. Good for all involved who are taking back control of their wealth
        brazzy 5y ago
        Putting your money into Bitcoin is the opposite of "taking back control".
        5y ago
- enriquto 5y ago
  > poorly drawn pictures are being bought not even the picture. The url to a picture on a random site.
  - FabHK 5y ago
    Yes. That there's no hash of the underlying "art" is astonishing. It really is purely, as far as I understand, the URL, and as such depending on DNS and the hoster.
- api 5y ago
  People generally don't question when number goes up. They only question when it doesn't.
- Allower 5y ago
- gpmcadam 5y ago
  "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
- mgh2 5y ago
  Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30272241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30272241
- wink 5y ago
  I dunno, I am not really questioning why some limited-run sneakers are being bought for thousands of dollars. Or why people spend 50k on their bathroom. Or why old Nintendo cartridges go for enormous prices. Or diamonds. I don't see the difference here. Now, I also don't get why NFTs have taken off AT ALL. But I don't see how they're really different than anything I listed above, except maybe more unstable or even more useless than a 2000$ pair of sneakers, which you could still wear if you ever ran out of shoes.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    Probably a lot of the value in rare real things is that people want to have them. It evokes joy. A lot of NFTs don't do this for their owners. Its just the belief that there's a high probability of being able to resell for more. The question is what % of the market participants see genuine value in the asset itself.
  - onesafari 5y ago
- fsloth 5y ago
  People never stop buying tulips. There is always a new breed that create a new self-propelling market rush of doom. Crypto assets have one rational thing behind them - as an asset class their value seems to fluctuate more or less randomly, hence (as long as the value fluctuates above zero) they provide a nice asset class that is detached from every other asset class - which means they are a nice way to pad an investment portfolio.
- guru4consulting 5y ago
  I guess NFTs are being used mostly for money laundering. No one in their sane mind would buy NFTs with their hard-earned money. Not sure if regulatory authorities get bribed secretly with bitcoins to keep quite and not do their job.
antihero 5y ago
> The Guardian asked the BBC if it was confident in his claimed financial returns and questioned why the programme’s promotional material did not mention that Hassan’s cryptocurrency Orfano was abruptly shut down in October, with many unhappy investors claiming they were left out of pocket as a result. I feel like this is the key thing. He probably made the money with a scamcoin and the BBC nearly aired something that didn't even include this fairly critical fact?
- sva_ 5y ago
  > As per the Orfano website, Orfano is a unique Rugpull-Proof coin moulded by the community, looking to benefit the lives of orphans in the poorest countries That'd be especially scummy, to defraud people with something like that.
  - FabHK 5y ago
    Ouch, indeed (from coinmarketcap): > The coin has been Audited by Techrate and has passed this assessment. > The main purpose of the token is to provide support and life-saving aid to orphans in the poorest countries. The future plans of the team are to explore partnerships with other coins to further use cases such as NFT marketplaces. > Owners: Hanad Hassan (CEO) - Founded the coin alongside Ahmed Mohammed. Hanad Hassan has prior experience working withing the charity field however he will also be recruiting team members with a wealth of experience in project management and charitable organisations. Mr Hassan has also worked as a team member for 2 separate coins which have achieved high levels of success, $PIT and $SAFEMOON. > Ahmed Mohammed (CMO) - Mr Mohammed is the owner of a digital marketing agency and has utilised his expertise to market $ORFANO and gain excellent exposure for the token.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  > it was one of the channel’s headline commissions for its new regional television news show We Are England. This new show replaced the long-running Inside Out regional current affairs series, which was cancelled as part of BBC funding cuts in a decision that resulted in many investigative journalists based outside London losing their jobs. > Continuing cuts to BBC budgets and deep job cuts, caused by successive licence fee freezes, have been blamed for recent errors in the corporation’s news output, especially in regional English newsrooms. Lack of funding lead to budget cuts which lead to worse quality journalism which will probably be used to justify reduced funding in the future.
astoor 5y ago
From the now-deleted BBC article[0] he allegedly turned $50 into $10,000 in 5 days, but doesn't say with which coin(s) and/or token(s): "Fifty dollars turned into $500 (£369) three days later," Mr Hassan said of his financial journey that began at the age of 19. "Two more days later, it was $5,000 (£3,690)." He said he called his parents to discuss what he should do, but during that half-hour conversation, his investment had more than doubled in value again." [0] https://archive.is/6taZ8 https://archive.is/6taZ8 and https://web.archive.org/web/20220209102657/https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-60289028 https://web.archive.org/web/20220209102657/https://www.bbc.c...
- jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
  Could have been any one of thousands of dog-themed shitcoins. The hard to believe part is not the percent gain, but that it lasted 5 days before rugpulling.
Pete-Codes 5y ago
The BBC relentless drop in standards continues then.
- rvz 5y ago
  It has fell from standards years ago. It turns out it wasn't the first time they have questioned or even sourced their own reports with suspicion and skepticism. [0]. They just follow the hype and report the same content that every other mainstream media does. They are supposed to be exposing and investigating these scammers, not praising them. [0] https://twitter.com/RossMcCaff/status/1491362600483180547 https://twitter.com/RossMcCaff/status/1491362600483180547
- ninkendo 5y ago
  Because they pulled it? Or because they were very close to airing it?
yodelshady 5y ago
If you're looking for a podcast, the BBC have previously produced a crypto documentary that did not miss the salient fact: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07nkd84 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07nkd84 Made some long journeys fly by.
- kenrick95 5y ago
  This is a surprisingly very good podcast that digs into so much rabbit hole
- tchock23 5y ago
  Exit Scam is also worth checking out: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/exit-scam/id1565845318 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/exit-scam/id1565845318 (Disclosure: I know one of the producers)
ID1452319 5y ago
People talk about misinformation on Facebook, but the British media are guilty of promoting criminals and fraudsters via news stories about their "success". For example, my local newspaper published a number of articles about a "successful" trader who was offering training programmes. Last month he was sentenced to three years in prison for fraud. There are numerous examples of this and even "reality" TV shows promoting these people as successful or rich, it is about time the media are held to account.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Stories of success are meaningless if you don't know how many people failed... If you listen to lottery winners, investing in lottery tickets is the best way to earn money,... somehow noone makes documentaries about millions of people who buy tickets and get nothing.
  - ID1452319 5y ago
    This isn't even a story of success though. What due diligence did the BBC do to ensure he actually made that money and that he was using the methods claimed? There are lots of people in social media who pose in front of expensive cars and with designer bag in order to sell their crypto or forex trading training courses. Most of course don't make their money from trading, but from commissions paid by platforms for winding in suckers.
    - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
      Just look at the amount of altcoins now,... investing $100 into one of them could make you a millionaire, so someone will get rich out of them. Most of the others will fail miserably, and people will lose money. Again, the documentary will be made about the one who made it.
- gpvos 5y ago
  From the article: > Continuing cuts to BBC budgets and deep job cuts, caused by successive licence fee freezes, have been blamed for recent errors in the corporation’s news output, especially in regional English newsrooms. That is the main piece of news as far as I can see. (Maybe it's not news for those who have followed the British media more closely than me.) The BBC does have some internal standards, but is increasingly unable to follow them because of budget cuts by the government, leading to lack of internal quality control.
Angostura 5y ago
> This new show replaced the long-running Inside Out regional current affairs series, which was cancelled as part of BBC funding cuts in a decision that resulted in many investigative journalists based outside London losing their jobs. >Continuing cuts to BBC budgets and deep job cuts, caused by successive licence fee freezes, have been blamed for recent errors in the corporation’s news output, especially in regional English newsrooms.
theknocker 5y ago
nathias 5y ago
explain to me what crypto and NFTs are and why they are bad without knowing anything about crypto and NFTs
- dandanua 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme
- fusionbro 5y ago
  Crypto = unregulated digital currency. NFT = Beanie Babies. Blockchain itself is a tech that has some interesting use cases but is largely overhyped.
IMSAI8080 5y ago
This isn't the first article about "traders" I've seen where it's questionable as to the detail of what they're actually doing. He "invested $50 and within 3 months it was worth $1 million". It should be obvious to anyone from that statement there's nothing normal going on there but the journalist has no questions. The absurd narrative being pumped out is you just dump money into something something crypto and instant riches. They endlessly show pictures of young people leaning on an expensive car, implying that these schemes are easy money and a sensible thing to be doing.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
I wish they had shown it or made it availalbe but added Comennetary to the beginning or end.

138 points by nemoniac 5y ago

It's astonishing to me that people will just buy into any success story that involves crypto and NFTs. People don't question why poorly drawn pictures are being bought for thousands of dollars, don't question why there are hundreds of altcoins on the market and some "cryptocurrency experts" are supposedly "offering free tips" on investment. The whole space is rife with scams and embellishments and yet there are so many people just blindly buying into it, including the damn BBC!

cpach 5y ago
Many people dream of getting rich quickly, by windfall. Buying index funds is a great and easy way to enhance your personal financial situation – over time. But you will not get rich quickly. So people still seek out alternatives that are incredibly risky and unsound.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  Many people are teased and abused, for year after year after year, working hard with obvious threat of termination, while a different system of money that they have no access to, grows and grows (investments) every day in the newspaper headlines for everyone to see.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    I think this is quite important; many ‘normal’ people simply struggled while others got money ‘for free’; while of course this (with stocks, houses, inheritance etc) happened all the time before crypto, that was for the rich mostly. Now it appears you can put the little money you ‘have’ into crypto and make a nice living like a rich person; make so much interest that you can live of it. Even the careful people I know now are saying; yeah, you keep saying it’ll crash for years but it doesn’t so I am going in. And that effect is spreading. I have, in my circles, way too many people who are living off crypto interest fully.
    - lariati 5y ago
      Crypto has to periodically 10X though for this to happen. The narrative has a type of theta/time decay as there is just no way for the majority to 10X their investment periodically. I think it is also very hard to think about the global entertainment dollars that have been locked up for the past 2 years. It is an enormous amount of money and as the pandemic fades people are going to splurge on the non-digital services and goods that they have not been able to for the past two years. The pandemic fading throws the whole process that has pushed crypto to these levels in reverse. The fact crypto has continued to make new highs is basically meaningless as far as the future is concerned.
- soneil 5y ago
  I think it doesn't help that the "normal answers" for "normal people" are essentially broken right now. We were looking at somewhere to park €50k while we hunt for a house. Growing up we're always told about savings accounts. We should have a savings account, we should be contributing to savings accounts, blah blah blah. So we asked our bank about a savings account, and they offered an annual return of €78. And I don't even mean 0.0015%, but the return is capped so it's not allowed to compound.
- lariati 5y ago
  You also can't separate that this all became popular during a global pandemic and people love to gamble. I think its easy to underestimate the amount of global entertainment dollars that have been on the sidelines the past two years. It is a fashion trend that will turn to dust as the pandemic fades. No one is going to want to be reminded of the pandemic in two years when people were so starved for entertainment they were buying these stupid ape pictures.
mandmandam 5y ago
Yeah. A friend the other day put it like, 'Yeah, internet conmen are charismatic'. I would guess that many people are well aware that 85+% of NFT hype is based on scams, money laundering, and bagholders. But their voices get drowned out. I feel bad for the people who fall for it; I do. And I even feel a little bad for the conmen who have to live with themselves. However, the BBC have no excuse for letting such a documentary get so far without doing basic checks on a scamcoin that was so scammy it actually got shut down, four months ago. That's egregious. Not supporting illegal wars for oil egregious, and not quite smearing Corbyn for years egregious, just ordinary "this is what happens when you put terrible Tories in charge" second order effects.
- pjc50 5y ago
  The BBC were not especially in support of the war - in fact, much of their problems stem from questioning the "dodgy dossier", resulting in the events of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry and it being made clear to them that the government and security services would not accept this criticism and would take revenge for it. > smearing Corbyn for years egregious This really has been egregious. > internet conmen are charismatic Half-baked theory, but I wonder if the prevalence of voice comms - Discord, Clubhouse and its twitter ripoff - in this space is used to enable charisma to ensnare victims.
- toyg 5y ago
  > internet conmen are charismatic All conmen are charismatic (well, the successful ones at least), the new generations just happen to use the internet - like in any other profession.
  - dwater 5y ago
    The word conman comes from the phrase "Confidence Man". They generally use charisma to gain the confidence of others and then exploit that confidence for personal gain.
LatteLazy 5y ago
People want free money. No one minds whether it's badly drawn pictures or tulip bulbs or whatever that is the intermediary step :)
luckyandroid 5y ago
Every person I've spoken to who's told me they're interested in crypto literally only care about it to make money, and have no interest in learning how it works. They all treat every last crypto-based use as investment like stocks, and not as a normal economic choice (e.g. "I want $3000 worth of bitcoin to buy a car" is not something people are doing, instead it's all "I want $3000 worth of bitcoin because the internet told me it'll be 3 million in a year"). NFTs also annoy me because it's literally the worst part of art industry - "buying" the "rights" to a piece of art so you can turn it for more cash later on, and not as an appreciation of the work. Bored Apes might be one of the few exceptions where people are doing it for "bragging rights", which is infinitely better because you're buying it to say you own it, much closer to normal art purchases.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  This is largely because there is almost nothing you can do with crypto apart from speculate and gamble. The more I learn about stuff like defi the more I understand just how fractally useless crypto is.
  - Rarebox 5y ago
    You can buy drugs and other illegal things off the internet (tor), that's very useful for some people. Basically crypto allows for transactions that could otherwise be blocked or easily tracked by central parties (1). It can also be used to bypass gambling laws. For legal purchases and activities crypto is useless, regular money is much more practical. [1] depending on which crypto and how it's used tracking is possible, so care is required (especially) when converting dollars to crypto.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      > You can buy drugs and other illegal things off the internet (tor) Can you? After that huge bust a few years back, I figured that particular usage was marginal at this point. Seems like the only use for crypto is ransomware, dodging taxes or smuggling embezzled money out of your country.
FridayoLeary 5y ago
>People don't question why poorly drawn pictures are being bought for thousands of dollars I'm also mystified by the prices that modern 'art' can command. >It's astonishing to me that people will just buy into any success story 'get rich quick like him' is as old as the hills. I'm not being snarky i'm just pointing out that the underlying principles behind your complaints have always existed to some extent. I think it's just a symptom of 'post truth' and and cynicsm at the system that allows the illusion to be even more blatant.
loceng 5y ago
It could also have been more of a "hit piece" by the BBC on crypto/NFTs, and perhaps the controllers are financially incentivized/aligned with Bitcoin et al's success - so they pulled it? A possibility exists in the direction opposite to what you suggest.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
- rchaud 5y ago
  Did you read the article. Absolutely nothing says it was a 'hit piece'. In fact, it appears to have been pulled because of poor editorial oversight. The documentary as filmed made no mention of the fact that this guy set up his own coin and crypto fund, which was shut down and left investors in the lurch. > The Guardian asked the BBC if it was confident in his claimed financial returns and questioned why the programme’s promotional material did not mention that Hassan’s cryptocurrency Orfano was abruptly shut down in October, with many unhappy investors claiming they were left out of pocket as a result.
ben_w 5y ago
While I generally agree with your sentiment, some of the most iconic art in the world seems to me to be poorly made and I have no idea why they are valued or admired. I don’t just mean the usual go-to controversial examples in modern art like Serrano’s “Piss Christ”[0] or Emin’s “My Bed”[1], as even some older stuff like Klimt’s “Der Kuss”[2] give me this confusion (the woman has always looked to me like she has a broken neck). (If it was just “I don’t like it” I would also list Cubism, but I can get that there are well-made examples of Cubism without liking the style). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Bed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Bed [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_(Klimt) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_(Klimt)
- j4yav 5y ago
  The first two I would categorize more as anti-art (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-art). Modern art, which does include Klimt, is its own thing that is (relatively?) more traditional than those examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art. Anti-art is more like a sort of trolling meta commentary on art. The "performance art" of the art world, really. People who like it like it for the iconoclasm and/or humor of it, I think.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    I mean small-m modern, not the art style Modern. Synonym treadmill for words which mean “now-ish” being baked into specific periods, reminds me a bit of the meme of files called “Report_final_FINAL_2_feedback_final.doc” :)
    - j4yav 5y ago
      Fair enough, worth mentioning still that contemporary art (the name for the period we're currently in) is also not all anti-art either.
- toyg 5y ago
  I'm so used to The Kiss being a masterpiece out of the sheer force of its qualities (the passion, the reluctance, the dresses, the gold...) that I honestly struggle to see it from your point of view - she doesn't have a broken neck, she's "turtling" away from him. But i guess the eye of the beholder is what it is. I do agree with your view of contemporary work though, it's hard to see the value of a lot of it (diamond skulls, broken mattresses, etc etc). Art has become an investment vehicle with a veneer of cultural education, so now the rulebook has gone out of the window.
globular-toast 5y ago
Why limit it to crypto? People don't question why the value of houses seems to magically rise globally despite no tangible value being added to the assets in most cases. People don't question why Wall Street traders get rich by trading second derivatives of mortgage backed securities with each other all day. What makes a mortgage any more "real" than an NFT?
- blfr 5y ago
  People question it all the time. And a house has obvious utility. It's also kind of a share in the city's future. It can be mispriced but it's not entirely based on hype.
  - globular-toast 5y ago
    I'm not talking about the houses, though. I'm talking about mortgages. Have you ever wondered why you can't just save up for a house and buy it with cash? Why do you need to first acquire this thing called a mortgage? What part is the bank actually playing in this transaction? You'll pay tax to them for 30 years but what exactly are you getting in return? These are the questions that need to be asked.
    - rchaud 5y ago
      Houses are acquired in cash all the time. There is no legal requirement to tie oneself to a mortgage, if you already have the means to pay the price in full.
    - fusionbro 5y ago
      The reason people aren't buying a home in cash, which is not necessarily common but completely doable and not illegal or anything, is because almost no one can afford to do so. Saving for 30 years and then buying a house in cash all while paying rent somewhere in the meantime I think is pretty undesirable.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      > Have you ever wondered why you can't just save up for a house and buy it with cash? You can. > What part is the bank actually playing in this transaction? They're lending you the money. I assume you have some different, less obvious answers to this? If you're against the lending of money for interest, how about a halal mortgage? https://www.qardus.com/news/halal-mortgages-everything-you-need-to-know https://www.qardus.com/news/halal-mortgages-everything-you-n...
pibechorro 5y ago
In any open market you are going to have the whole spectrum. You fail to mention the positive transformation and liberation of millions of people by crypto. From Nigeria, to Turkey, to Argentina millions are being saved from decades of financial isolation or straight up robbery by their corrupt institutions. You look at the glass half empty my friend.
- thematrixturtle 5y ago
  Sigh, this old hoary chestnut again. I don't suppose you'd have the thinnest shred of evidence of those "millions"?
  - frockington1 5y ago
    Look at Turkish Lira inflows into crypto in recent months. You'll see the value. Also check out the inflow of USD as the Federal Reserve printed trillions of new dollars
    - dwater 5y ago
      Any evidence that this represents the common man freeing himself from the economic authorities and not just the privileged class using it for capital flight and tax evasion?
      - frockington1 5y ago
        Any evidence this is the privileged class using it for capital flight and tax evasion and not the common man freeing himself from the economic authorities? In my opinion it doesn't matter. Good for all involved who are taking back control of their wealth
        brazzy 5y ago
        Putting your money into Bitcoin is the opposite of "taking back control".
      - 5y ago
enriquto 5y ago
> poorly drawn pictures are being bought not even the picture. The url to a picture on a random site.
- FabHK 5y ago
  Yes. That there's no hash of the underlying "art" is astonishing. It really is purely, as far as I understand, the URL, and as such depending on DNS and the hoster.
api 5y ago
People generally don't question when number goes up. They only question when it doesn't.
Allower 5y ago
gpmcadam 5y ago
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
mgh2 5y ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30272241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30272241
wink 5y ago
I dunno, I am not really questioning why some limited-run sneakers are being bought for thousands of dollars. Or why people spend 50k on their bathroom. Or why old Nintendo cartridges go for enormous prices. Or diamonds. I don't see the difference here. Now, I also don't get why NFTs have taken off AT ALL. But I don't see how they're really different than anything I listed above, except maybe more unstable or even more useless than a 2000$ pair of sneakers, which you could still wear if you ever ran out of shoes.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Probably a lot of the value in rare real things is that people want to have them. It evokes joy. A lot of NFTs don't do this for their owners. Its just the belief that there's a high probability of being able to resell for more. The question is what % of the market participants see genuine value in the asset itself.
- onesafari 5y ago
fsloth 5y ago
People never stop buying tulips. There is always a new breed that create a new self-propelling market rush of doom. Crypto assets have one rational thing behind them - as an asset class their value seems to fluctuate more or less randomly, hence (as long as the value fluctuates above zero) they provide a nice asset class that is detached from every other asset class - which means they are a nice way to pad an investment portfolio.
guru4consulting 5y ago
I guess NFTs are being used mostly for money laundering. No one in their sane mind would buy NFTs with their hard-earned money. Not sure if regulatory authorities get bribed secretly with bitcoins to keep quite and not do their job.

antihero 5y ago

> The Guardian asked the BBC if it was confident in his claimed financial returns and questioned why the programme’s promotional material did not mention that Hassan’s cryptocurrency Orfano was abruptly shut down in October, with many unhappy investors claiming they were left out of pocket as a result. I feel like this is the key thing. He probably made the money with a scamcoin and the BBC nearly aired something that didn't even include this fairly critical fact?

sva_ 5y ago
> As per the Orfano website, Orfano is a unique Rugpull-Proof coin moulded by the community, looking to benefit the lives of orphans in the poorest countries That'd be especially scummy, to defraud people with something like that.
- FabHK 5y ago
  Ouch, indeed (from coinmarketcap): > The coin has been Audited by Techrate and has passed this assessment. > The main purpose of the token is to provide support and life-saving aid to orphans in the poorest countries. The future plans of the team are to explore partnerships with other coins to further use cases such as NFT marketplaces. > Owners: Hanad Hassan (CEO) - Founded the coin alongside Ahmed Mohammed. Hanad Hassan has prior experience working withing the charity field however he will also be recruiting team members with a wealth of experience in project management and charitable organisations. Mr Hassan has also worked as a team member for 2 separate coins which have achieved high levels of success, $PIT and $SAFEMOON. > Ahmed Mohammed (CMO) - Mr Mohammed is the owner of a digital marketing agency and has utilised his expertise to market $ORFANO and gain excellent exposure for the token.
wongarsu 5y ago
> it was one of the channel’s headline commissions for its new regional television news show We Are England. This new show replaced the long-running Inside Out regional current affairs series, which was cancelled as part of BBC funding cuts in a decision that resulted in many investigative journalists based outside London losing their jobs. > Continuing cuts to BBC budgets and deep job cuts, caused by successive licence fee freezes, have been blamed for recent errors in the corporation’s news output, especially in regional English newsrooms. Lack of funding lead to budget cuts which lead to worse quality journalism which will probably be used to justify reduced funding in the future.

astoor 5y ago

From the now-deleted BBC article[0] he allegedly turned $50 into $10,000 in 5 days, but doesn't say with which coin(s) and/or token(s): "Fifty dollars turned into $500 (£369) three days later," Mr Hassan said of his financial journey that began at the age of 19. "Two more days later, it was $5,000 (£3,690)." He said he called his parents to discuss what he should do, but during that half-hour conversation, his investment had more than doubled in value again." [0] https://archive.is/6taZ8 https://archive.is/6taZ8 and https://web.archive.org/web/20220209102657/https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-60289028 https://web.archive.org/web/20220209102657/https://www.bbc.c...

jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
Could have been any one of thousands of dog-themed shitcoins. The hard to believe part is not the percent gain, but that it lasted 5 days before rugpulling.

Pete-Codes 5y ago

The BBC relentless drop in standards continues then.

rvz 5y ago
It has fell from standards years ago. It turns out it wasn't the first time they have questioned or even sourced their own reports with suspicion and skepticism. [0]. They just follow the hype and report the same content that every other mainstream media does. They are supposed to be exposing and investigating these scammers, not praising them. [0] https://twitter.com/RossMcCaff/status/1491362600483180547 https://twitter.com/RossMcCaff/status/1491362600483180547
ninkendo 5y ago
Because they pulled it? Or because they were very close to airing it?

yodelshady 5y ago

If you're looking for a podcast, the BBC have previously produced a crypto documentary that did not miss the salient fact: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07nkd84 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07nkd84 Made some long journeys fly by.

kenrick95 5y ago
This is a surprisingly very good podcast that digs into so much rabbit hole
tchock23 5y ago
Exit Scam is also worth checking out: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/exit-scam/id1565845318 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/exit-scam/id1565845318 (Disclosure: I know one of the producers)

ID1452319 5y ago

People talk about misinformation on Facebook, but the British media are guilty of promoting criminals and fraudsters via news stories about their "success". For example, my local newspaper published a number of articles about a "successful" trader who was offering training programmes. Last month he was sentenced to three years in prison for fraud. There are numerous examples of this and even "reality" TV shows promoting these people as successful or rich, it is about time the media are held to account.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
Stories of success are meaningless if you don't know how many people failed... If you listen to lottery winners, investing in lottery tickets is the best way to earn money,... somehow noone makes documentaries about millions of people who buy tickets and get nothing.
- ID1452319 5y ago
  This isn't even a story of success though. What due diligence did the BBC do to ensure he actually made that money and that he was using the methods claimed? There are lots of people in social media who pose in front of expensive cars and with designer bag in order to sell their crypto or forex trading training courses. Most of course don't make their money from trading, but from commissions paid by platforms for winding in suckers.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Just look at the amount of altcoins now,... investing $100 into one of them could make you a millionaire, so someone will get rich out of them. Most of the others will fail miserably, and people will lose money. Again, the documentary will be made about the one who made it.
gpvos 5y ago
From the article: > Continuing cuts to BBC budgets and deep job cuts, caused by successive licence fee freezes, have been blamed for recent errors in the corporation’s news output, especially in regional English newsrooms. That is the main piece of news as far as I can see. (Maybe it's not news for those who have followed the British media more closely than me.) The BBC does have some internal standards, but is increasingly unable to follow them because of budget cuts by the government, leading to lack of internal quality control.

Angostura 5y ago

> This new show replaced the long-running Inside Out regional current affairs series, which was cancelled as part of BBC funding cuts in a decision that resulted in many investigative journalists based outside London losing their jobs. >Continuing cuts to BBC budgets and deep job cuts, caused by successive licence fee freezes, have been blamed for recent errors in the corporation’s news output, especially in regional English newsrooms.

theknocker 5y ago

nathias 5y ago

explain to me what crypto and NFTs are and why they are bad without knowing anything about crypto and NFTs

dandanua 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme
fusionbro 5y ago
Crypto = unregulated digital currency. NFT = Beanie Babies. Blockchain itself is a tech that has some interesting use cases but is largely overhyped.

IMSAI8080 5y ago

This isn't the first article about "traders" I've seen where it's questionable as to the detail of what they're actually doing. He "invested $50 and within 3 months it was worth $1 million". It should be obvious to anyone from that statement there's nothing normal going on there but the journalist has no questions. The absurd narrative being pumped out is you just dump money into something something crypto and instant riches. They endlessly show pictures of young people leaning on an expensive car, implying that these schemes are easy money and a sensible thing to be doing.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

I wish they had shown it or made it availalbe but added Comennetary to the beginning or end.