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One of the themes in pro-crypto writings has been the idea that as long as you “do your own research” then the bad things won’t happen on your chosen cryptocurr

One of the themes in pro-crypto writings has been the idea that as long as you “do your own research” then the bad things won’t happen on your chosen cryptocurrency. The prevailing idea (among pro-crypto spaces) is that bad things only happen to other people who deserve them because they didn’t do the right research. Recently we’re seeing the bad things happen in more and more mainstream chains. Even famous NFT proponents have been losing their NFTs to scams at a shocking rate. I wonder if this will drive people back to simpler chains like Bitcoin, or if we’re going to see enough bad things (including crashes) that it just sucks the enthusiasm out of the crypto space entirely.

diob 4y ago
This is a common life viewpoint in general. Bad things happen to other people because they did something to deserve it. Good things happen to them because of luck. Good things happen to me because I deserve it. Bad things happen to me because of bad luck.
- cowtools 4y ago
  We're not talking about people getting struck by lightning here, we're talking about an intentionally built and voluntarily used computer system. If you don't understand the risk, don't invest.
  - diob 4y ago
usrn 4y ago
These are tokens not crypto currencies. Please stop confusing them.
tatertots1234 4y ago
Most of the things that cause these problems, like stolen apes, would not work on Bitcoin as it lacks smart contract functionality.
- cowtools 4y ago
  Bitcoin has some scripting[0] functionality, and its non-fungibility[1][2] can facilitate NFT-like colored coins[3][4] [0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fungibility https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fungibility [2] https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/fungibility-graveyard/ https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/fungibility-graveyard/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_Coins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_Coins [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=889JSfIaPzs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=889JSfIaPzs
  - AdrianEGraphene 4y ago
    Colored coins is one of my #1 favorite topics! The same issue (high fees) that plagued ETH would soon arise if doing "Colored Coins" for NFTs on BTC. Regardless, this could certainly be done. Colored coins was actually one of the 1st concepts that seriously drew my interest to this space. One might think Lightning Network would be a good solution, but LN is fungible, so that wouldn't work. Still, colored coins is an awesome concept and I'm planning to help with at least 1 use-case (fingers crossed!) in the next few months.
  - tatertots1234 4y ago
    Theoretically possible but practically impossible, and one of the reasons that NFTs and DeFi will probably never be adopted on Bitcoin L1 unless the protocol changes.
3a2d29 4y ago
Not to be super “arm chair psychologist” about this, but I always thought the whole “you deserve it if you got scammed” mentality comes from the people that believe crypto will replace all modern finance. For crypto to replace modern finance, it needs to be better in every way (so it’s a total replacement). Decentralized currency is better for some things, worse for things like preventing scams. If modern finance prevents scams better, than crypto won’t replace it in that area at least. Solution? Easy: scams aren’t a problem. Modern finance isn’t better in fixing that problem, cause it’s not a problem. Now crypto is once again better in every way.
- douglaswlance 4y ago
  >it needs to be better in every way It only needs to be better in enough ways to persuade enough people to adopt it such that it hits a tipping point and becomes the de facto standard.
  - iJohnDoe 4y ago
    No, it needs to be better in every way. If it’s not, then what’s the fucking point? Popularity and a better replacement are two different things.
    - jacobedawson 4y ago
      Here's a new type of computer - it's exactly the same as your current computer, except it consumes 1/10th of the power... A replacement doesn't have to be better in every single facet.
      - charcircuit 4y ago
        Do you mean 10x the power?
        filoleg 4y ago
        Unless you value inefficiency and spending a lot of money on electricity, the answer is "no", the parent comment actually meant 1/10th power.
granddemolisher 4y ago
I find it as absurd as anyone else. The field is unfortunately rifled with people who are shills and religious believers. I have talked to a few VCs and technical people drilling down into the tech - I had better arguments than them for why someone would use the projects they funded or created.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  Just last night the owner of the neighborhood convenience store was asking me to explain NFTs, as one of his other regulars was hyping them up earlier that day. This man has run his business for decades, understands commercial banking services, etc. I could not for the life of me fully convince them that with NFT's, "there's no there there." Like these things have been so hyped by so many people close enough to the main stream that the fomo style "those rich guys have to be onto something smart with this" assumption is incredibly hard to disprove. The closest I got was using beanie babies as an example.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    I lead with "Amateurs calculate gains; professionals calculate risk."
TrackerFF 4y ago
DYOR = watching 10 min vids from influencers pumping up shitcoins, hanging around in various discord or telegram echo chambers, skimming through whitepapers you don't understand.
agumonkey 4y ago
Research is fuzzy word in this bubble. I've seen people crafting their own tiny metric: twitter liveness, github activity, size of source code, website quality. White paper reading (I skimmed through a few, it felt like marketing speach most of the time). It only feels solid for newbs who never designed a system or seen math above HS level.
rglover 4y ago
They say "do your own research" and then when you do and have questions about difficult to conceive (or seemingly irrational things) they belittle you, attack you, and—at least on Twitter—reply with snarky memes. As soon as I started investigating Ethereum, ERC-20 tokens, etc. at a technical level, I realized it was a house of cards of immense proportions. The place that didn't happen? Bitcoin. There's not a lot of esotericism around Bitcoin (skim 1-2 books, listen to a couple of talks on YouTube, and generally speaking you "get it"). If you're genuinely interested, people are more than happy to help you and set you on the right path.
- acover 4y ago
  What's wrong with erc20 tokens?
  - cypress66 4y ago
    Not him, but in my opinion upgradeable contracts (not all erc20 use them of course)
Spartan22 4y ago
That's a straw man. Doing your own research doesn't guarantee protection against all scams or losses, it just increases it and scams and freezes are to be expected, that's why diversification and taking profits is key. Very flawed argument.
yieldcrv 4y ago
That's not the impression I get about this one action being discussed, but odd take. There are a variety of amateurish and hysterical things about this Solend project. Why don't you just talk about that project? Like, how the liquidation won't be that bad? Or how half a million dollars in Solend tokens gets to vote to seize $170m of funds? those things are hilarious.
SergeAx 4y ago
NFT is just an URL pointing to CDN (or even S3) stored on the ledger, how one can "lose" it?
wyager 4y ago
Basically anyone I consider especially credible has been consistently saying "everything except bitcoin is overwhelmingly likely to be a scam", which has proven to be a fairly reliable heuristic. I think anyone who actually "DTOR" and has the brain power to interpret the results comes to a similar conclusion.
saurik 4y ago
Solend is just some random lending market that I--despite being in this space full time--don't think I've ever heard of... supposedly it is similar to AAVE, but on Solana? Just because something happens "in more and more mainstream chains" is meaningless: the chain on which something is running is unrelated to whether it is a good idea or not. I want to be very clear about this: I highly doubt that any normal person CAN do enough research to safely manage loans or borrow and invest with leverage, which is what these lending platforms are for, but that doesn't mean that they are fundamentally broken or are scamming people.
physicsguy 4y ago
Like with normal investing, consumers do not have the ability to “do their own research” about the internals of companies who create and promote cryptocurrencies. Which means that the research is flawed.
- cormacrelf 4y ago
  This one was about the concentration of voting power. It turned out that a single, anonymous owner of governance tokens had enough votes to decide this hugely consequential issue on their own. Almost as if corporate shareholding concentration and acquisition-disclosure laws are as good as it gets for "decentralisation" of decision-making, and crypto is now going to have to reinvent that as well. Like, there are literally already laws in many jurisdictions that prevent multiple apparently-independent parties conspiring to avoid jumping over ownership thresholds but nevertheless acquire a majority of a company. Have fun emulating that with pseudonymity, no central regulator and no law enforcement with jurisdiction everywhere the participants are!

diob 4y ago

This is a common life viewpoint in general. Bad things happen to other people because they did something to deserve it. Good things happen to them because of luck. Good things happen to me because I deserve it. Bad things happen to me because of bad luck.

cowtools 4y ago
We're not talking about people getting struck by lightning here, we're talking about an intentionally built and voluntarily used computer system. If you don't understand the risk, don't invest.
- diob 4y ago

usrn 4y ago

These are tokens not crypto currencies. Please stop confusing them.

tatertots1234 4y ago

Most of the things that cause these problems, like stolen apes, would not work on Bitcoin as it lacks smart contract functionality.

cowtools 4y ago
Bitcoin has some scripting[0] functionality, and its non-fungibility[1][2] can facilitate NFT-like colored coins[3][4] [0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fungibility https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fungibility [2] https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/fungibility-graveyard/ https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/fungibility-graveyard/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_Coins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_Coins [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=889JSfIaPzs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=889JSfIaPzs
- AdrianEGraphene 4y ago
  Colored coins is one of my #1 favorite topics! The same issue (high fees) that plagued ETH would soon arise if doing "Colored Coins" for NFTs on BTC. Regardless, this could certainly be done. Colored coins was actually one of the 1st concepts that seriously drew my interest to this space. One might think Lightning Network would be a good solution, but LN is fungible, so that wouldn't work. Still, colored coins is an awesome concept and I'm planning to help with at least 1 use-case (fingers crossed!) in the next few months.
- tatertots1234 4y ago
  Theoretically possible but practically impossible, and one of the reasons that NFTs and DeFi will probably never be adopted on Bitcoin L1 unless the protocol changes.

3a2d29 4y ago

Not to be super “arm chair psychologist” about this, but I always thought the whole “you deserve it if you got scammed” mentality comes from the people that believe crypto will replace all modern finance. For crypto to replace modern finance, it needs to be better in every way (so it’s a total replacement). Decentralized currency is better for some things, worse for things like preventing scams. If modern finance prevents scams better, than crypto won’t replace it in that area at least. Solution? Easy: scams aren’t a problem. Modern finance isn’t better in fixing that problem, cause it’s not a problem. Now crypto is once again better in every way.

douglaswlance 4y ago
>it needs to be better in every way It only needs to be better in enough ways to persuade enough people to adopt it such that it hits a tipping point and becomes the de facto standard.
- iJohnDoe 4y ago
  No, it needs to be better in every way. If it’s not, then what’s the fucking point? Popularity and a better replacement are two different things.
  - jacobedawson 4y ago
    Here's a new type of computer - it's exactly the same as your current computer, except it consumes 1/10th of the power... A replacement doesn't have to be better in every single facet.
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      Do you mean 10x the power?
      - filoleg 4y ago
        Unless you value inefficiency and spending a lot of money on electricity, the answer is "no", the parent comment actually meant 1/10th power.

granddemolisher 4y ago

I find it as absurd as anyone else. The field is unfortunately rifled with people who are shills and religious believers. I have talked to a few VCs and technical people drilling down into the tech - I had better arguments than them for why someone would use the projects they funded or created.

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
Just last night the owner of the neighborhood convenience store was asking me to explain NFTs, as one of his other regulars was hyping them up earlier that day. This man has run his business for decades, understands commercial banking services, etc. I could not for the life of me fully convince them that with NFT's, "there's no there there." Like these things have been so hyped by so many people close enough to the main stream that the fomo style "those rich guys have to be onto something smart with this" assumption is incredibly hard to disprove. The closest I got was using beanie babies as an example.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  I lead with "Amateurs calculate gains; professionals calculate risk."

TrackerFF 4y ago

DYOR = watching 10 min vids from influencers pumping up shitcoins, hanging around in various discord or telegram echo chambers, skimming through whitepapers you don't understand.

agumonkey 4y ago

Research is fuzzy word in this bubble. I've seen people crafting their own tiny metric: twitter liveness, github activity, size of source code, website quality. White paper reading (I skimmed through a few, it felt like marketing speach most of the time). It only feels solid for newbs who never designed a system or seen math above HS level.

rglover 4y ago

They say "do your own research" and then when you do and have questions about difficult to conceive (or seemingly irrational things) they belittle you, attack you, and—at least on Twitter—reply with snarky memes. As soon as I started investigating Ethereum, ERC-20 tokens, etc. at a technical level, I realized it was a house of cards of immense proportions. The place that didn't happen? Bitcoin. There's not a lot of esotericism around Bitcoin (skim 1-2 books, listen to a couple of talks on YouTube, and generally speaking you "get it"). If you're genuinely interested, people are more than happy to help you and set you on the right path.

acover 4y ago
What's wrong with erc20 tokens?
- cypress66 4y ago
  Not him, but in my opinion upgradeable contracts (not all erc20 use them of course)

Spartan22 4y ago

That's a straw man. Doing your own research doesn't guarantee protection against all scams or losses, it just increases it and scams and freezes are to be expected, that's why diversification and taking profits is key. Very flawed argument.

yieldcrv 4y ago

That's not the impression I get about this one action being discussed, but odd take. There are a variety of amateurish and hysterical things about this Solend project. Why don't you just talk about that project? Like, how the liquidation won't be that bad? Or how half a million dollars in Solend tokens gets to vote to seize $170m of funds? those things are hilarious.

SergeAx 4y ago

NFT is just an URL pointing to CDN (or even S3) stored on the ledger, how one can "lose" it?

wyager 4y ago

Basically anyone I consider especially credible has been consistently saying "everything except bitcoin is overwhelmingly likely to be a scam", which has proven to be a fairly reliable heuristic. I think anyone who actually "DTOR" and has the brain power to interpret the results comes to a similar conclusion.

saurik 4y ago

Solend is just some random lending market that I--despite being in this space full time--don't think I've ever heard of... supposedly it is similar to AAVE, but on Solana? Just because something happens "in more and more mainstream chains" is meaningless: the chain on which something is running is unrelated to whether it is a good idea or not. I want to be very clear about this: I highly doubt that any normal person CAN do enough research to safely manage loans or borrow and invest with leverage, which is what these lending platforms are for, but that doesn't mean that they are fundamentally broken or are scamming people.

physicsguy 4y ago

Like with normal investing, consumers do not have the ability to “do their own research” about the internals of companies who create and promote cryptocurrencies. Which means that the research is flawed.

cormacrelf 4y ago
This one was about the concentration of voting power. It turned out that a single, anonymous owner of governance tokens had enough votes to decide this hugely consequential issue on their own. Almost as if corporate shareholding concentration and acquisition-disclosure laws are as good as it gets for "decentralisation" of decision-making, and crypto is now going to have to reinvent that as well. Like, there are literally already laws in many jurisdictions that prevent multiple apparently-independent parties conspiring to avoid jumping over ownership thresholds but nevertheless acquire a majority of a company. Have fun emulating that with pseudonymity, no central regulator and no law enforcement with jurisdiction everywhere the participants are!