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Crypto bros are self selecting for scams. If your world view has been degraded to see zero trust as a solution rather than a dystopian end state, meaning you’ve
by gmerc 3y ago
Crypto bros are self selecting for scams. If your world view has been degraded to see zero trust as a solution rather than a dystopian end state, meaning you’ve lost all trust in society, you’re highly vulnerable to be conned by the authority figures you secretly crave to trust.
It’s much of what Elon,
Trump and other populists actively foster and exploit in their fan base through relentless conspiracy theories and undermining of trust into anyone who isn’t them.
There’s a paradox here - the more people have their trust violated, the more distrustful they get, the easier they get scam as the overhead of approaching every transaction / interact in life with an adversarial mindset exhausts critical capacity and drives people into desperate savior fantasies - technological miracles, charlatans. snakeoil, the twentieths coin or pump and dump.
Zero trust (non security version - the inability to extend trust) is a miserable desperate state to be in as a human being and makes people highly vulnerable to getting taken advantage of and crypto signaling on social media either identifies you as a scammer or as a mark. You still believe technology can solve societies trust dilemma, you are asking for it at this point.
And the longer the scamming goes on, the stronger the signal of this self identifying audience becomes. It’s like responding to Nigerian prince emails at this point.
Go reddit, look at the safemoon subreddit. It’s … wild how many times you can rip off some people and have them get more militant in their belief they are smart.
As a footnote, more and more tech companies explore this to prop up shrinking profit margins. By selling previously valuable trust marks such as the top result on google (there was a time you could trust this) or flat out verification marks that previously were meant to foster Trust and Safety for money, erosion of trust becomes a profitable feature. It’s good for platforms when users cannot tell placed / bought placement and fake news from actual valuable content.
It’s just terminal for society - each time someone is scammed, has their trust betrayed, they slide a little bit closer into that state that is so exploitable by populists.
- bannedbybros 3y ago[dead]
- buildbuildbuild 3y agoYou'd be surprised at the typical profile of a crypto scam victim. I trace cryptocurrency professionally and try to help as many victims as possible. Most that I meet are far from the "crypto bro" archetype. Often they are people who trust others easily, are not very tech-savvy, and believe what a website tells them without second guessing.
- xwolfi 3y agoYup I think your definition of crypto bro is wrong: that's exactly who they are in their vast majority, people who read once the opinion that the "federal reserve is never federal nor a reserve" and believe it and start clicking on bullshit links. It's in the very name of it and they can still believe the first guy telling them, with no proof nor demonstration, that it's not. Trusting the first website they read is exactly the defining trait of crypto bros. Normal people just use experience to guide their decision, like say, do like their parents and stick to a bank account.
- ajonit 3y agoQuote of the day - If your world view has been degraded to see zero trust as a solution rather than a dystopian end state, meaning you’ve lost all trust in society, you’re highly vulnerable to be conned by the authority figures you secretly crave to trust. Very well said.
- mzsmartpants 3y ago> in their believe they are smart Nice. A happy user of Reddit, the platform, whose CEO edits messages of his opponents to win an argument, that shadow bans users for mentioning specific words ("Soros" is one, BTW), that automatically sends wrong-think posts to spam... would tell us about the dystopian future Musk is leading us into. What kind of trust do you have in mind, like the one built in soviet times Pravda and Moskovskiy Komsomolets?
- gmerc 3y agoIf you believe there is signal value in having consumed reddit content - or see a Soros conspiracy behind every criticism of certain idols, I have some crypto coins to sell you too. Speaking of Soviet Russia - the FSB has fascinating manuals on exactly this topic, how to break down people’s ability to trust systematically to make them vulnerable to ideological hijacking via authority figures and contrarian messages. Highly recommended reading. As we say in German “getroffene Hunde bellen ”.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago> Highly recommended reading. If one were interested in finding these to read where or how might they be found?
- gmerc 3y agoGoogle is surprisingly shit today, actively pushing current events over historic ones despite search filters (weirdly reminiscent of LLM attention issues and biases to recency). I’ll see if I can find the primary ones, they are from the archives after the Soviet collapse. Secondary reading: Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” New York Times Magazine, June 2, 2015, and Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss, The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money, New York: https://tnsr.org/2022/09/whats-old-is-new-again-cold-war-lessons-for-countering-disinformation/ https://tnsr.org/2022/09/whats-old-is-new-again-cold-war-les... Institute of Modern Russia and The Interpreter, 2014. https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/cis/center-for-securities-studies/resources/docs/NDC%20fm_9.pdf https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/c...
- oefrha 3y agoPretty sure 95%+ of crypto “investors” are in it for get-rich-quick, rather than some sort of “zero trust” ideology.
- yokem55 3y agoThe healthier attitude to trust issues in crypto (and society at large too), is to find mechanisms (cryptographic, game theory, economic, legal) to manage and constrain the trust assumptions that are made. You can't eliminate trust, and you probably shouldn't try. But you should figure out ways to put good seatbelts and airbags on that trust so that when you do use trust as a social lubricant (it is very good at that), the damage from when it goes wrong is constrained.
- dang 3y agoPlease don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. It makes discussion more predictable and eventually more nasty. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=generic%20discussion%20by%3Adang%20-flamewars%20-flamewar&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html