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Crypto has attracted almost every type of criminal under the sun, to the detriment of 'regular' people who got conned into this stuff and is now left holding th

Crypto has attracted almost every type of criminal under the sun, to the detriment of 'regular' people who got conned into this stuff and is now left holding the bags. That German saying is on point and really sad.

threeseed 4y ago
> Crypto has attracted almost every type of criminal under the sun This is actually quite a profound statement. Is there actually anything in human history that can come close to rivalling this ? We have everyone from teens promoting shitcoins on TikTok, to household celebrities like Matt Damon, to white collar criminals, to arguably VCs, all the way to nation states like Iran and North Korea.
- blantonl 4y ago
  The western United States was pretty wild for a while until it was "tamed"
  - pibechorro 4y ago
    Incorrect. There was less violence overall in the wild west. Modern America has insane violence at much larger scales (inner city gang violence in Chicago, millions of civilians killed over the past 2 decades via Iraq, Drone programs, etc). The wild west was only wild because Hollywood needed a narrative.
    - nradov 4y ago
      You shouldn't be down voted, this is largely correct. High rates of violence in the "wild west" are a myth created by Hollywood. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=6182 https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=6182
      - astura 4y ago
        It was downvoted because it was an irrelevant, off topic rant. The question was about financial fraud, not violence.
      - xbar 4y ago
        I would clarify further. High rates of violence were an exaggeration of 19th Century East Coast newspapers that created a myth that was perpetuated by Hollywood.
    - LastTrain 4y ago
      Interesting. Do you have any sources of information to back that up? It contradicts my perception of things, and I would like to know if I've been operating under a faulty understanding. Example: according to this [1] article : per-capita murder rates were something on the order of 30/100000 in colonial times, 15/100000 in the "wild west" period compared to 6/100000 today. [1] https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-crime-declines-in-america/ https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent...
    - roflyear 4y ago
      Lol that's not true at all. Why spout nonsense? First our cities today are as safe as they have ever been. Crime is slightly up from 2018 but 2018 was the lowest ever. Small bumps in crime are not usual. Second, googling murder rates in that region is possible and they are an order of magnitude greater than even the worse US cities.
- mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  I would give a pass to any celebrity that was paid to be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and say lines convincingly. We don't have written accounts of the tulip craze but I would imagine there were a lot of nefarious activities underway then. This is more global and the movement of money is transparent but anonymous in some ways. I think a hard part for a criminal enterprise like a drug cartel is the cash to crypto laundering that needs to happen in the amounts that it needs to. My guess is it was easier for shady banks and other crypto products to do shady things since its all just bits and bytes.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    > I would give a pass to any celebrity that was paid to be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and say lines convincingly. I disagree. It's super weird that we accept "well I was just doing it for the money" as an excuse from people who are often already insanely wealthy.
    - brookst 4y ago
      If there’s a moral obligation to fully vet the industry and operations of a company before accepting a short contracting job from them, why would one’s bank balance matter?
      - mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
        Does everyone fully vet their companies executive suite, board of directors and operations before accepting a job? Or the bank they use? Or the owner of the coffee shop they frequent? Everyone walks around with a computer in their pocket built in a factory where people were to have known to be treated poorly, possibly to the point of suicide and then they use that device to type in comments about moral superiority.
        brookst 4y ago
        Yes. And wait until you hear about how US railroads, which we in the US all depend on, were built. Civilization is a story of gradual improvement. Insisting that anything be completely beyond reproach overnight is not a productive view. And yet some people can't resist.
- Stranger43 4y ago
  Doing the wild west days America had a bunch of what was called wildcat currencies issued by private banks with dubious backing in either non existing gold reserves or over inflated property holdings. look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking it's kind of an interesting period in finance that got kind of forgotten as it did not exactly end well.
  - umeshunni 4y ago
    I read a comment somewhere along the lines of "Crypto is a great experiment where people who didn't live in the 19th century get to relive at 10x speed all the bank runs and regulatory changes that happened then"
    - nullc 4y ago
      Early in Bitcoin we came across the 1923 "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator", https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/60979 https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/60979 -- which described some of the scams we were seeing cropping up. Much of the altcoin industry seems to have picked it up as an instruction manual. (Not that there aren't scams in Bitcoin land-- but they've mostly been concentrated into the altcoin ecosystems, which tend to be overweight in the exuberant and gullible even compared to Bitcoin. It's completely unsurprising to see the FTX implosion happening at a scamcoin casino who's CEO had been publicly attacking Bitcoin -- it would have been much more surprising to see it at a Bitcoin only or mostly organization)
      - opportune 4y ago
        Altcoins prey on gullible, ignorant, greedy people - the best people to scam. Those are also the targets of Nigerian princes and all other get rich quick schemes. Shitcoins represent a technological breakthrough in scamming because they scale so much better than operating a call center and have no physical footprint
  - busyant 4y ago
    Wildcat banking sounds exactly like crypto. thank you for the link.
- tsukikage 4y ago
  Whenever you have a space where boundaries are not imposed and actions merely have externalities rather than consequences for the actor, malicious actors that find it difficult to act how they want elsewhere flock to this space; this makes being in that space more and more painful, and so if the space remains lawless, people who can exist elsewhere abandon it, until the space is inhabited mostly or only by malicious actors. We see this in online communities. We see it in the real physical world. And, yes, we are seeing it play out in crypto. An online community without restrictions or boundaries doesn't look like one's fond memories of university dorm chats over a glass of wine; it looks like 4chan or the dark web. A country without effective governance doesn't look like the romanticised media depictions of the wild west or your favourite science fictional post-scarcity anarchy utopia; it looks like Somalia. A financial system without regulations doesn't look like your family kitty; it looks like, well, the crypto ecosystem. Humans can't do better unless we all start to consistently choose cooperate/cooperate in prisoner's dilemma, and one quick look at, well, any community anywhere today shows we are a long way away from that. This is not a technical problem, and cannot be solved with a technical solution. Humans do not know how to solve it. I wish we did. Historically, the most aspirational attempts to solve this problem have been the ones with the most gruesome outcomes.
- WeylandYutani 4y ago
  Years back when TOR was new I stumbled on a site selling "family videos with kids" for ethereum. Soured me on crypto enough never to fall for it.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pibechorro 4y ago
3rd party exchanges and banks.. basically like it always has. Crytpo, aka your keys, are still fine.

threeseed 4y ago

> Crypto has attracted almost every type of criminal under the sun This is actually quite a profound statement. Is there actually anything in human history that can come close to rivalling this ? We have everyone from teens promoting shitcoins on TikTok, to household celebrities like Matt Damon, to white collar criminals, to arguably VCs, all the way to nation states like Iran and North Korea.

blantonl 4y ago
The western United States was pretty wild for a while until it was "tamed"
- pibechorro 4y ago
  Incorrect. There was less violence overall in the wild west. Modern America has insane violence at much larger scales (inner city gang violence in Chicago, millions of civilians killed over the past 2 decades via Iraq, Drone programs, etc). The wild west was only wild because Hollywood needed a narrative.
  - nradov 4y ago
    You shouldn't be down voted, this is largely correct. High rates of violence in the "wild west" are a myth created by Hollywood. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=6182 https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=6182
    - astura 4y ago
      It was downvoted because it was an irrelevant, off topic rant. The question was about financial fraud, not violence.
    - xbar 4y ago
      I would clarify further. High rates of violence were an exaggeration of 19th Century East Coast newspapers that created a myth that was perpetuated by Hollywood.
  - LastTrain 4y ago
    Interesting. Do you have any sources of information to back that up? It contradicts my perception of things, and I would like to know if I've been operating under a faulty understanding. Example: according to this [1] article : per-capita murder rates were something on the order of 30/100000 in colonial times, 15/100000 in the "wild west" period compared to 6/100000 today. [1] https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-crime-declines-in-america/ https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent...
  - roflyear 4y ago
    Lol that's not true at all. Why spout nonsense? First our cities today are as safe as they have ever been. Crime is slightly up from 2018 but 2018 was the lowest ever. Small bumps in crime are not usual. Second, googling murder rates in that region is possible and they are an order of magnitude greater than even the worse US cities.
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
I would give a pass to any celebrity that was paid to be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and say lines convincingly. We don't have written accounts of the tulip craze but I would imagine there were a lot of nefarious activities underway then. This is more global and the movement of money is transparent but anonymous in some ways. I think a hard part for a criminal enterprise like a drug cartel is the cash to crypto laundering that needs to happen in the amounts that it needs to. My guess is it was easier for shady banks and other crypto products to do shady things since its all just bits and bytes.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  > I would give a pass to any celebrity that was paid to be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and say lines convincingly. I disagree. It's super weird that we accept "well I was just doing it for the money" as an excuse from people who are often already insanely wealthy.
  - brookst 4y ago
    If there’s a moral obligation to fully vet the industry and operations of a company before accepting a short contracting job from them, why would one’s bank balance matter?
    - mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
      Does everyone fully vet their companies executive suite, board of directors and operations before accepting a job? Or the bank they use? Or the owner of the coffee shop they frequent? Everyone walks around with a computer in their pocket built in a factory where people were to have known to be treated poorly, possibly to the point of suicide and then they use that device to type in comments about moral superiority.
      - brookst 4y ago
        Yes. And wait until you hear about how US railroads, which we in the US all depend on, were built. Civilization is a story of gradual improvement. Insisting that anything be completely beyond reproach overnight is not a productive view. And yet some people can't resist.
Stranger43 4y ago
Doing the wild west days America had a bunch of what was called wildcat currencies issued by private banks with dubious backing in either non existing gold reserves or over inflated property holdings. look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking it's kind of an interesting period in finance that got kind of forgotten as it did not exactly end well.
- umeshunni 4y ago
  I read a comment somewhere along the lines of "Crypto is a great experiment where people who didn't live in the 19th century get to relive at 10x speed all the bank runs and regulatory changes that happened then"
  - nullc 4y ago
    Early in Bitcoin we came across the 1923 "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator", https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/60979 https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/60979 -- which described some of the scams we were seeing cropping up. Much of the altcoin industry seems to have picked it up as an instruction manual. (Not that there aren't scams in Bitcoin land-- but they've mostly been concentrated into the altcoin ecosystems, which tend to be overweight in the exuberant and gullible even compared to Bitcoin. It's completely unsurprising to see the FTX implosion happening at a scamcoin casino who's CEO had been publicly attacking Bitcoin -- it would have been much more surprising to see it at a Bitcoin only or mostly organization)
    - opportune 4y ago
      Altcoins prey on gullible, ignorant, greedy people - the best people to scam. Those are also the targets of Nigerian princes and all other get rich quick schemes. Shitcoins represent a technological breakthrough in scamming because they scale so much better than operating a call center and have no physical footprint
- busyant 4y ago
  Wildcat banking sounds exactly like crypto. thank you for the link.
tsukikage 4y ago
Whenever you have a space where boundaries are not imposed and actions merely have externalities rather than consequences for the actor, malicious actors that find it difficult to act how they want elsewhere flock to this space; this makes being in that space more and more painful, and so if the space remains lawless, people who can exist elsewhere abandon it, until the space is inhabited mostly or only by malicious actors. We see this in online communities. We see it in the real physical world. And, yes, we are seeing it play out in crypto. An online community without restrictions or boundaries doesn't look like one's fond memories of university dorm chats over a glass of wine; it looks like 4chan or the dark web. A country without effective governance doesn't look like the romanticised media depictions of the wild west or your favourite science fictional post-scarcity anarchy utopia; it looks like Somalia. A financial system without regulations doesn't look like your family kitty; it looks like, well, the crypto ecosystem. Humans can't do better unless we all start to consistently choose cooperate/cooperate in prisoner's dilemma, and one quick look at, well, any community anywhere today shows we are a long way away from that. This is not a technical problem, and cannot be solved with a technical solution. Humans do not know how to solve it. I wish we did. Historically, the most aspirational attempts to solve this problem have been the ones with the most gruesome outcomes.
WeylandYutani 4y ago
Years back when TOR was new I stumbled on a site selling "family videos with kids" for ethereum. Soured me on crypto enough never to fall for it.

throwawaysleep 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

pibechorro 4y ago

3rd party exchanges and banks.. basically like it always has. Crytpo, aka your keys, are still fine.