Yeah look, I'm still pretty young, I'm usually "in" on whatever Internet slang is en-vouge and even use it myself in more casual places, but I still cringe when I see "zoomer speak" on this site.
"The idea is to talk like a small child or intellectually disabled person"
That's effectively an ignorant description of the entire doge meme.
RationalWiki's "source" for this information is a Reddit post with 6 upvotes and 5 comments. It's remarkable that anyone on hackernews even knew about this.
What is this subculture that watches for any slang to be used by an objectionable group so that it can be proclaimed a cultural characteristic of said group?
FWIW I think GP has a point, a lot of this stuff just bleeds into normal Internet slang. Despite what the news would say, I don't expect any rando posting pepe memes in a discord to be a hardcore /pol/ dweeb.
> It predates the co-opting by the alt-right though.
So does the "OK" gesture. The swastika existed for almost 2000 years, and was a good luck symbol, even in the west, until 1930s. The sonnenrad, the othal rune, the Celtic cross, and the triskele.
P(uses the OK gesture) dwarfs P(is alt-right). Plug it all into Bayes theorem and you'll find that P(is alt-right|gestures OK) must be small.
In other words, you're falling for a manufactured hysteria. One that is designed to make people jump at shadows, level unjustified accusations, and generally make you seem uncredible and neurotic.
Only fringe ideologues desperately searching for outrage think the OK gesture has anything to do with white supremacy. This is the McMartin Preschool of the present day.
The swastika, on the other hand, was used in living memory by an organization that murdered millions of people. Like the toothbrush mustache, it will be generations before that can come back in style.
I think it's a cute way to say the word "friends" for most people. I know it has another meaning. Alt-right folks can try to co-opt it and others can co-opt it right back.
I don’t know if “co-opt” is even the right way to think about it. Do you remember all the breathless articles from the early 2000s about how jelly bracelets are a sex thing? I think this is the modern version of that.
I don't think a 48-year-old professional actor is misspelling "friend" because of his accent, when that exact spelling is an alt-right shibboleth.
As indicated by the deliberate use of the word "adjacent", it's a sign that the crypto space and the alt-right have sufficient contact that there is horizontal memetic transfer (in both the original and modern senses of "meme") between the two.
I don’t think Seth Green is alt-right. I think he’s Jewish as well. I’m assuming ‘frens’ lost a lot of it's meaning, I doubt most of the people using it know it’s origins, and that includes Seth Green. It would be a similar infraction to Katy Perry using a Pepe meme.
And considering that Richard Spencer himself called Bitcoin, "the currency of the alt-right" it's not surprising if there's cultural cross-pollination.
You might be more closely tuned in to what's happening in those alt-right(-adjacent) spaces, but I am both seriously doubtful that the word originated in those places and also confident that it is used in such a large variety of ways that it cannot be reliable indicator that a person saying it has anything to do with those spaces.
For example, pretty much everyone I hear saying this word is a liberal. But that says more about who I spend my time with than who uses the words. It has more to do with being Extremely Online than with any specific political affiliation.
But it probably isn't. It's a cutesy term adjacent to pet-speak and baby-speak. Do an image search for "frens" and most of what you'll find is cute animals, 10-to-1 vs frog cartoons.
8 out of 10 Google image results for "frens" (in a new session) involve meme frogs, and one of them refers to "bopping" of non-frens which, at least at some point, was fren-speak for murder.
Maybe this is your browsing history? I did a duckduckgo image search from a private tab, and got 10-to-1 cute animals. Search it on reddit and you'll find that the term is very popular with people who like cute things.
The alt-right has a meme of 'appropriating' popular terms and symbols in an attempt to make people overestimate P(alt-right|symbol), to make their critics seem unhinged as they level accusations against innocent people, and to make themselves seem more popular than they actually are. They've done this with 'frens', the 'okay gesture', and even drinking milk. You have unfortunately fallen for this, and become their tool.
I just duckwent[1] an image search for "frens" and got four Pepes in the first 30 results.
The same search on Google gives me pretty much nothing but Pepes - only 7 images in the first 30 results are not Pepes. Google is pretty convinced "fren" is an alt-right signifier.
1: I am proposing "duckwent" as the past tense for "duckduckgo".
There must be a strong correlation between how willing people are to buy NFT and how easy they are to scam.
Even as someone technical who understands a bit of the ecosystem I feel uncomfortable making transactions without double- and triple-checking everything, including looking at the contract code. I can't even imagine doing anything as a non-technical person in crypto.
Managing domain names on a blockchain was one of the few good blockchain ideas. It offered a way to get rid of domain registrars, who were originally just record-keepers and managed to become rent-seeking landlords. But no. The .eth domain was implemented in a way that requires annual payments to somebody.
The first time I came across a pyramid scheme was in my late teens - where the game was literally: "you give money to me and they'll give money to you".
A lot of friends of mine were "playing" it. Regular people.
I didn't play not because I was smarter then them, but because I didn't care and I didn't have much money to play around with, but in the end it's all about mixing:
- how you're introduced to the game by people you trust (like friends);
- the prospect of wins;
- naivety;
I'm sure the large majority of the people that bought NFTs didn't even thought about the technical part of the game. And you just need to attend some communities on discord and reddit to understand the level a lot of people were playing.
Some people actually believed that complex games were going to be created, that would bring NFTs ingame - similar to Ready Player One movie - and everything would interact with that world. Everyone was having fun, and some even made money, how can kids understand it was all a scam?
So the question might even be, how didn't more people get scammed? Like, what stopped people from hopping in this frenzy?
Maybe the reality was that they were just busy with other stuff.
Social engineering alone was enough to perform criminal activities with little to no repercussions.
Though - to be fair - that old pyramid scheme costed only little money[1], so it was "affordable" to many, when we are talking of NFT's (or of those people that get burned because they put all their savings in a cryptocurrency that goes down to 0 or similar) and of hundreds of thousands (or millions) it is perplexing (to me) how they can risk all that money.
[1] taking into acoount inflation and what not it could have been at the time the same as 100 or 200 Euro, or if you prefer a dinner or two at the restaurant.
Chain letters were a thing when I was a kid 30 years ago. You were supposed to send a dollar to the person a the top of a list of like 4 people, then move everyone up one spot on the list and and put your name at the bottom and send it to 10 people with the same instructions. If everyone did it, you would end up receiving $10,000. Of course, some simple math will tell you that you will run out of people in the world very quickly.
I'm involved with NFTs as an artist, developer, and trader. Slip ups do happen and I just consider them the cost of doing business. Losses can be mitigated with some basic opsec like using multiple hardware wallets, etc.
"basic opsec" and you've already lost 90% of the audience.
If you are next positive in NFT world, you are either a scammer or profiting indirectly from the scam. The funds are coming from people getting scammed.
This is a very myopic view of the NFT space. There's more to it than monkey and punk profile pictures. There's a thriving community of digital artists supporting each other, think along the lines of patreon, etc. Of course it's a moot point to discuss this if you think all NFTs are a scam. I assure you there are different types of NFT collectors with various expectations. My favorite stuff is 100% on chain generative art. Take a look at Art Blocks for an example. There are also thriving NFT communities on cheap chains like Tezos, where the NFTs are very cheap and many folks approach it from a healthy perspective of having fun and supporting digital creators.
Could you point me to a thriving community of real people who are artists? Like, a forum of people who are making real art and then selling it? Of course “real art” is a bit of a loaded term, but I mean traditional artists like painters or sculptors (not ${RANDOM_APE}) who are thriving or making their money through NFTs?
Sellers have to interact with the blockchain too, so all the same pitfalls apply... from phishing attacks to typos, to holding proceeds and not putting them in stables and losing your hat. If you deploy your own custom contracts there are many ways to botch that too.
I'm into algorithmic and generative art on fxhash and art blocks. I also sell digital paintings and animations on makersplace and foundation. I've released some projects on opensea directly as well.
The 419 scammers intentionally make their scam emails/letters super obviously scams so that the only people who reply are those who are scammable. It's likely that something similar will develop in crypto scams.
Half of Facebook (that's an exaggeration) is stories that are gathering lists of suckers it seems. Presumably, if you like on of those "like to win $100 from Microsoft" type stories then you get a "you won, give us your bank details so we can pay you" message?
And weirdly, many of those curated sucker lists were built up with hundreds of millions of VC funding, so they’re going to be treated like ordinary corporate assets.
Take OpenSea. Assuming the NFT hype doesn’t suddenly resurrect itself, there’s no way the company can ever reach 2021 revenues and the lofty valuations it enjoyed in its Series C round. VCs won’t have endless patience for funding down rounds. But the sucker list can be monetized by less-than-scrupulous actors. Maybe we’ll see a special brand of private equity operators who buy these distressed former crypto high-fliers and milk the remaining user bases for years to come.
We can't discount MLM. I believe that a large motivator is the desire to transcend a middle class lifestyle.
I harbor a certain schadenfreude - a hope - that these folks burn out and develop a drug addiction, are forced derelict in the divorce, eventually succumbing to the horrors of the underclass that they struggled so hard to avoid.
I guess I would be more concerned with all the crime that crypto "investors" are facilitating by providing liquidity to the crypto market. I mean, "concerned" in an academic sense, since I know full well nothing is going to change.
The Seth Green NFT theft was a malicious hack. It could just as well have been targeting his bank account. I think it’s a disservice to the process of calling out scams like rug pulls to categorize that incident as a cryptocurrency scam.
The fact that the NFT platform does not provide a way to rollback such thefts does not mean it’s a scam either. Is a car made by a scammer if the manufacturer doesn’t provide a way to shut off the car remotely if it is stolen?
> The fact that the NFT platform does not provide a way to rollback such thefts does not mean it’s a scam either.
Maybe not a scam, but utterly useless for any true value store.
Reconciliation is ABSOLUTELY FOUNDATIONAL to a monetary system of value.
Literally some of the oldest writing we have is folks arguing over the details of a deal (~1750 BCE: Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir).
If you have a system where "Code is law" and trust can be violated and that violation literally cannot be addressed, then you don't have a system that works. Exchange literally requires some form of trust.
This is kind of a strange question, a bit like asking if you can buy something priced in pounds with euros.
Cryptocurrencies differ from fiat in all sorts of ways, but ready conversion at the point of sale is not one of them.
Edit: maybe it's more like asking if you can gamble at the casino with dollars instead of chips, either way there's some kind of misunderstanding involved.
Sort of. BAYC is actually doing a bit more and is granting the owners of various NFTs a license to use the image of the associated ape. It is much easier to steal an NFT than to steal other forms of copyright license.
I know. But stealing a BAYC NFT does steal the right to use that particular image, according to how BAYC is set up. This is supremely stupid, but it is how the project is set up.
Would that hold up in court? If I sell you a car via a contract that says "if anybody steals the keys they now legally own the car" I suspect that would be difficult to enforce. And the thief would have to reveal themselves to assert their contractual right to own the car, thereby inviting criminal charges.
In this case, Green apparently thought that possessing the NFT implied controlling the copyright for the artwork:
"Green was planning to use his ape as a character in an upcoming animated show."
What's stopping him? The image is still there at the same URL where it always was, and if he had a copyright license to use it before the NFT was stolen, then he still had it afterwards. There was no need to reacquire the NFT.
Green was targeted as he attempted to mint a GutterCat clone NFT, but the unlucky celebrity had inadvertently used a scam website that raided his wallet. [0]
And
Thought I was minting GutterCat clones- phishing link looked clean [1]
And
In a follow-up tweet, Green went into more detail about the scam. The attack had taken place after clicking on a phishy link to an NFT minting platform, attempting to mint GutterCat clones. [2]
> If you buy a painting in real life, how exactly do you roll it back if someone steals it from you?
Generally, if you manage to track down a painting someone stole from you, you don't have to buy it back for a six figure sum like Greene did for his beloved ape.
Buying or possessing stolen property is a crime, so police intervention is the closest equivalent to reconciliation that we have in the world of physical goods.
I buy insurance for my car. I guess the Toyota dealership could provide a private security force to recover my car in case of theft. I wouldn’t say the current system doesn’t work, though.
Sounds like you're projecting, the article does not say that crypto is inherently a scam, it's saying there's a lot of fraud going on within the crypto market.
If the title had said "We’ve only scratched the surface of how bad the credit card crime wave has gotten" that doesn't mean they're saying credit cards are a scam.
It's really the same thing isn't it? If your Tinder date asks for bus money, and then ghosts you (and probably wasn't the person they claimed to be to begin with) is that a scam or a hack?
If Seth Green goes to NotAtAllSketchyNFTTrader.com and confirms their ToS, only that was a transaction transferring his NFT to them, is that a scam or a hack?
could just as well have been targeting his bank account
It could have but only in a narrow technical sense. They didn't and don't because those types of direct abuses of the consumer-facing financial system are pursued with great vigor and perpetrators punished severely. It's the same reason it made sense to deploy 0 day exploits to thieve WoW gold but not actual money.
> He called for cryptocurrency exchanges not to allow further sales of his stolen art as he tried to track down the buyer who ended up with one of his most prized possessions: Bored Ape #8398, a drawing of a sad monkey with a halo in a Phoebe Bridgers-style skeleton shirt
> Since the NFT was stolen, Green lost the right to use it in his show.
Under what law or other principle does using a picture in a show rely on an entry in a blockchain? Or is the risk that ignoring the NFT and the using the IP anyway might further pop the NFT bubble?
But not intrinsically, if it was stolen then you could just use the image to mint a new NFT, declare the other one as stolen -- maybe make an affidavit, or use some legal instrument -- then you've "unstolen" it. They're choosing to consider it as non-fungible, continuing that choice in order to deny yourself legal use of your property is not just drinking the cool-aid but bathing in it too.
Of course this could be intentional, as others have said, it furthers the narrative that NFTs are genuinely non-fungible.
They could construct a sale transaction to themselves, which leads to the charge being mere possession of stolen property. Of course, if the recipient of the property had no knowledge that it was stolen, and just thought they were getting a good deal, I'm not sure a crime would have been committed at all.
That would also result in the return of the property to the original owner once identified.
Maybe no one gets prosecuted if they’re clever, but they would be compelled to return it (or then face possession of stolen property charges and contempt of court)
> not just drinking the cool-aid but bathing in it too.
It's a sticky situation. If they don't pretend they've lost the copyright by losing the NFT, then the NFT is demystified and no longer has value. Since the value of this particular copyright is almost entirely derived from the perception of NFTs being special, the NFT being demystified means they lose out anyway.
It's like you have a Picasso and all your friends are very impressed. Then somebody steals it, and to get it back means going to the police and inevitably admitting that it was never a real Picasso in the first place. So either way, you've lost. So instead you don't go to the police, never admit it was fake in the first place, and instead hope that it will be returned to you through some extrajudicial means that won't necessitate an admission of fakery.
I'm in way over my head here, but in your painting example, the thief would steal the object, not the ownership proof. In the Ape case, the NFT is the owernship proof, so it's like the thief stole whatever document said you owned the painting. Since there's no 3rd party to verify that a legitimate transaction happened, the thief owns the Ape now.
This sounds like the same level of understanding about copyright law that led one NFT group to spend $3m on a rare Dune art book thinking it would give them the IP rights to the art.
Yes. The thief is unlikely to make a copyright claim.
Green probably won't be able to get into NYC Apefest, which starts Monday. Which is the only actual benefit that comes from holding a BAYC NFT. Although, at age 48, he probably is too old for a rave.
A lot of this is basically gambling. When people gamble, they are (subconsciously) willing to suspend rationality for some emotion born out of desperation or greed. Same as any other type of gambling where the odds are stacked against you, you're willing to be a little more naive in exchange for some (potentially unlikely) path in which you make lots of money.
But the amounts being gambled are staggering. How many people gamble $400,000 away at a casino? I would think very very few. Sure, it happens. Addicts gamble away their entire livelihoods and businesses. But does it happen this often?
> How many people gamble $400,000 away at a casino?
One could imagine that it's just about the same amount of people who buy NFTs for $400,000, maybe a bit less as it's easier to buy something online than doing physical actions.
People who have that kind of money to gamble away, and want to gamble it away, will gamble it away no matter what kind of things exists in the world.
Well it funded the North Korean nuclear program. They got smart and put in miners that only use like 5% of CPU to avoid alerting consumers spread far and wide paired with exploiting blackmail material against folks who thought they could treat life like it was the hit 1992 film sneakers.
(Did anyone else have to threaten to put an agent of a foreign power through a Starbucks window, or is that a very "this city has no embassies and COVID has made people particularly antisocial in October 2020" situation? Can't wait to talk about that one on a stage not dedicated purely to comedy someday soon!!)
I feel like the "Crypto Crime Wave" is really about NFT foolishness.
I had a lot of friends reaching out to understand more. A lot of them didn't really like the reality of how simple it would be to lift and mint a new thing. They were convinced they were holding a winning lottery ticket and I was a bad guy for saying it wasn't what they thought.
I've never encouraged people to buy crypto and if someone does, they are not as smart as you or they think. I personally invest in crypto because fundamentally I believe something deeper that I hope works.
Parasites live in the real world, the digital world, on the internet attached to whale buyers, and in the real ocean attached to real whales.
I've been burned so many times in crypto but I've been burned equally, if not more, by options offers, RSU bonuses and blackout periods, company mergers and subsequent outcomes of my shares, 401k/, etc etc.
We are constantly outrunning this wave and we are asking for transparency. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't but we need to be expecting this public nature of failure and not being able to hide the juggling of balance sheets to hide insolvency
I think you're misquoting, though I had to read it a few times myself. I would read the first quote more along the lines of "if someone does [try to convince you to buy crypto] they are not as smart as you or they think."
When quoting someone please use the full statement. You've paraphrased and injected your own meaning which is incorrect.
> I've never encouraged people to buy crypto and if someone does [encourage people to buy crypto], they are not as smart as you or they think.
> I personally invest in crypto because fundamentally I believe something deeper that I hope works.
I've implemented my own blockchains, I have produced patents in the space, I have spoken and worked in this space for a significant amount of time.
Pumping and dumping is a get rich scheme which is destroying the perception with very real victims. I feel bad for people young and old that attempt to play in the stock market options space and lose it all because they are gambling thinking they will get rich.
I feel equally for those getting hurt in crypto despite the sad reality that they should have come in with questions not hope of a windfall.
These two things are more alike than different in my opinion
The difference is that buying crypto is like buying a pet rock or a bottle of air. In fact it's less than that.. It's literally nothing. It's a greater fool market and it's certainly not currency. In addition there's companies (lenders, exchanges, issuers, etc) which build their businessesn on schemes built on schemes that you are supposed to trust which you can't because no one person understands the code or the infrastructure and systems that the code is built in. All in a totally unregulated market that can be shut down in bits and pieces or even all at once by the government. And then you have people touting it as a legitimate asset class deserving investment. And now it's all coming tumbling down.
The fact we have currency that fluctuates on a day to day basis despite not being tied to anything beyond our trust in the system is not much better of an argument.
There was a point that the U.S. based it on the gold standard which locked in how much could be produced. This would be similar to how certain crypto lending exchanges claim they are backed 1:1 with dollars to create this concept of stablecoins.
The crypto is easy to determine, the dollars not so. Some are having audits to provide trust and transparency.
The clearing houses and financial levers are more complex than many understand. Our financial systems operate on trust, credit, and risk more than they do on having everything working in proper order.
I'm not saying crypto is THE solution and maybe in it's current state it isn't. I have learned a lot more about what exists today because I have something to contrast it too and I understand different pros/cons that I didn't see before.
>The crypto is easy to determine, the dollars not so.
I don't think we can use such excuses anymore. Luna was supposed to be backed by $3b worth of btc. We have absolutely no idea if this capital was actually used to defend its peg or if Mr Kwon pocketed it all. Crypto is just as hard to determine if not more so
> The fact we have currency that fluctuates on a day to day basis despite not being tied to anything beyond our trust in the system is not much better of an argument.
Translation of what you wrote: "I've never really thought about economics for more than a couple of seconds, and therefore I cannot see the difference between the US dollar which literally supports a 21 trillion dollar economy and is guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the richest government in history, and a cryptocurrency backed by no one, which performs perhaps 0.01% of the transaction that the dollar does."
I'm quite familiar with the economics and it has served me well enough.
I'm talking about the actual systems and physical infrastructure.
I have been fortunate to work with some of these larger institutions which carry the "full faith and credit of the richest country in the world".
Save Dunning-Krueger in your back pocket, I learned that quite some time ago in college, you may not be finished with it just yet.
If you are serious about learning look into FedNet. Bump that against the white and yellow papers and you'll have a better understanding of what I mean.
Parent pointed out that I misinterpreted an ambiguous phrase, that the “not as smart” people are those encouraging others to buy crypto.
Mea culpa, although if anything this is an even more extreme example of attribution error:
(paraphrasing) “I invest in crypto for grand and philosophical reasons, and would never dream of promoting it to others (except by regularly claiming that it will save our supposedly broken financial system). Others who promote cryptocurrencies are opportunists or fools.”
Far from increasing your credibility, having been involved in cryptocurrency development more likely than not has hopelessly biased you towards this kind of messianic “crypto will save us” thinking.
- BTC has fallen below $19k USD (from a peak of near $65k)
- ETH has fallen below $1k USD (from a peak of ~$4600)
Once you get into the altcoins ("shitcoins") it's even bleaker. NFTs by their nature are harder to get a picture of (that's the "non-fungible" part) but it seems to be a bloodbath.
This Seth Green story is particularly funny because on top of the price-crashing you're actually getting no utility. Why? Because copyright ownership still has to be enforced through the traditional IP and legal system.
And on top of that lack of utility you see how reversibility of transactions in the non-crypto financial system is a feature not a bug.
There's really no reason for any of this to exist. It's all a massive waste of energy that is driven by nothing other than speculative fervor. It's not belief in the technology. It's just greed.
More to the point, the only thing holding up the value of any of this is the collective belief in it and every day the price crashes again that belief is eroded. I really have no idea how low this can go but it'l be interesting to see.
This is the greater fool theory [1] in action and the best defense seems to be it isn't a pyramid scheme; it's a trapezoid [2].
"Because copyright ownership still has to be enforced through the traditional IP and legal system."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it even worse. There is no transfer of any rights whatsoever on the common trading platforms so I assume copyright ownership is rare. Consequently in most cases there probably is nothing to be enforced. At least that is how I understand NFTs.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadhttps://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Alt-right_glossary#Fren
Mostly people talking about it, not using it.
"The idea is to talk like a small child or intellectually disabled person"
That's effectively an ignorant description of the entire doge meme.
RationalWiki's "source" for this information is a Reddit post with 6 upvotes and 5 comments. It's remarkable that anyone on hackernews even knew about this.
What is this subculture that watches for any slang to be used by an objectionable group so that it can be proclaimed a cultural characteristic of said group?
Not for any "extremely online" person. Hell iirc, the original honkler subreddit or whatever the hell it was called even made in to mainstream media.
It predates the co-opting by the alt-right though.
So does the "OK" gesture. The swastika existed for almost 2000 years, and was a good luck symbol, even in the west, until 1930s. The sonnenrad, the othal rune, the Celtic cross, and the triskele.
P(uses the OK gesture) dwarfs P(is alt-right). Plug it all into Bayes theorem and you'll find that P(is alt-right|gestures OK) must be small.
In other words, you're falling for a manufactured hysteria. One that is designed to make people jump at shadows, level unjustified accusations, and generally make you seem uncredible and neurotic.
The swastika, on the other hand, was used in living memory by an organization that murdered millions of people. Like the toothbrush mustache, it will be generations before that can come back in style.
I think it's a cute way to say the word "friends" for most people. I know it has another meaning. Alt-right folks can try to co-opt it and others can co-opt it right back.
As indicated by the deliberate use of the word "adjacent", it's a sign that the crypto space and the alt-right have sufficient contact that there is horizontal memetic transfer (in both the original and modern senses of "meme") between the two.
It's just dopey Internet slang, like lulz and omgwtfbbq, and alt-right (whatever that means) is also an Internet thing.
And considering that Richard Spencer himself called Bitcoin, "the currency of the alt-right" it's not surprising if there's cultural cross-pollination.
For example, pretty much everyone I hear saying this word is a liberal. But that says more about who I spend my time with than who uses the words. It has more to do with being Extremely Online than with any specific political affiliation.
That's a nice theory, and until a proof has been constructed, presented and validated it'll keep being a nice theory.
P(alt-right|fren) = P(fren|alt-right) P(alt-right) / P(fren)
You have tunnel vision for P(fren|alt-right) and are confusing it with P(alt-right|fren).
But it probably isn't. It's a cutesy term adjacent to pet-speak and baby-speak. Do an image search for "frens" and most of what you'll find is cute animals, 10-to-1 vs frog cartoons.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/uyhno1/frens_chilling_...
https://www.google.com/search?q=frens&tbm=isch
Very wholesome.
The alt-right has a meme of 'appropriating' popular terms and symbols in an attempt to make people overestimate P(alt-right|symbol), to make their critics seem unhinged as they level accusations against innocent people, and to make themselves seem more popular than they actually are. They've done this with 'frens', the 'okay gesture', and even drinking milk. You have unfortunately fallen for this, and become their tool.
The same search on Google gives me pretty much nothing but Pepes - only 7 images in the first 30 results are not Pepes. Google is pretty convinced "fren" is an alt-right signifier.
1: I am proposing "duckwent" as the past tense for "duckduckgo".
Even as someone technical who understands a bit of the ecosystem I feel uncomfortable making transactions without double- and triple-checking everything, including looking at the contract code. I can't even imagine doing anything as a non-technical person in crypto.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30958870
A lot of friends of mine were "playing" it. Regular people.
I didn't play not because I was smarter then them, but because I didn't care and I didn't have much money to play around with, but in the end it's all about mixing:
- how you're introduced to the game by people you trust (like friends);
- the prospect of wins;
- naivety;
I'm sure the large majority of the people that bought NFTs didn't even thought about the technical part of the game. And you just need to attend some communities on discord and reddit to understand the level a lot of people were playing.
Some people actually believed that complex games were going to be created, that would bring NFTs ingame - similar to Ready Player One movie - and everything would interact with that world. Everyone was having fun, and some even made money, how can kids understand it was all a scam?
So the question might even be, how didn't more people get scammed? Like, what stopped people from hopping in this frenzy?
Maybe the reality was that they were just busy with other stuff.
Social engineering alone was enough to perform criminal activities with little to no repercussions.
Though - to be fair - that old pyramid scheme costed only little money[1], so it was "affordable" to many, when we are talking of NFT's (or of those people that get burned because they put all their savings in a cryptocurrency that goes down to 0 or similar) and of hundreds of thousands (or millions) it is perplexing (to me) how they can risk all that money.
[1] taking into acoount inflation and what not it could have been at the time the same as 100 or 200 Euro, or if you prefer a dinner or two at the restaurant.
People love free money and are bad at math.
If you are next positive in NFT world, you are either a scammer or profiting indirectly from the scam. The funds are coming from people getting scammed.
Aren't buyers the ones holding the bag over those losses?
Because that is one of the key traits of a scam.
Disagree with your use of the future tense here. NFTs were Nigerian prince emails from the beginning.
Take OpenSea. Assuming the NFT hype doesn’t suddenly resurrect itself, there’s no way the company can ever reach 2021 revenues and the lofty valuations it enjoyed in its Series C round. VCs won’t have endless patience for funding down rounds. But the sucker list can be monetized by less-than-scrupulous actors. Maybe we’ll see a special brand of private equity operators who buy these distressed former crypto high-fliers and milk the remaining user bases for years to come.
I suppose Masayoshi Son will be at the top of the sucker list?
I harbor a certain schadenfreude - a hope - that these folks burn out and develop a drug addiction, are forced derelict in the divorce, eventually succumbing to the horrors of the underclass that they struggled so hard to avoid.
:)
If only.
The fact that the NFT platform does not provide a way to rollback such thefts does not mean it’s a scam either. Is a car made by a scammer if the manufacturer doesn’t provide a way to shut off the car remotely if it is stolen?
Maybe not a scam, but utterly useless for any true value store.
Reconciliation is ABSOLUTELY FOUNDATIONAL to a monetary system of value.
Literally some of the oldest writing we have is folks arguing over the details of a deal (~1750 BCE: Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir).
If you have a system where "Code is law" and trust can be violated and that violation literally cannot be addressed, then you don't have a system that works. Exchange literally requires some form of trust.
If you buy a painting in real life, how exactly do you roll it back if someone steals it from you?
Cryptocurrencies differ from fiat in all sorts of ways, but ready conversion at the point of sale is not one of them.
Edit: maybe it's more like asking if you can gamble at the casino with dollars instead of chips, either way there's some kind of misunderstanding involved.
That's an apt metaphor for cryptocurrencies, for sure.
"Green was planning to use his ape as a character in an upcoming animated show."
What's stopping him? The image is still there at the same URL where it always was, and if he had a copyright license to use it before the NFT was stolen, then he still had it afterwards. There was no need to reacquire the NFT.
And
Thought I was minting GutterCat clones- phishing link looked clean [1]
And In a follow-up tweet, Green went into more detail about the scam. The attack had taken place after clicking on a phishy link to an NFT minting platform, attempting to mint GutterCat clones. [2]
[0] https://www.btcc.com/en-US/coin-news/market-updates/seth-gre...
[1] https://nitter.net/SethGreen/status/1526693106606809088#m
[2] https://insights.masterworks.io/nft/seth-greens-stolen-bored...
Generally, if you manage to track down a painting someone stole from you, you don't have to buy it back for a six figure sum like Greene did for his beloved ape.
Buying or possessing stolen property is a crime, so police intervention is the closest equivalent to reconciliation that we have in the world of physical goods.
Ummm have you heard of this public agency called "the police"?
If the title had said "We’ve only scratched the surface of how bad the credit card crime wave has gotten" that doesn't mean they're saying credit cards are a scam.
If Seth Green goes to NotAtAllSketchyNFTTrader.com and confirms their ToS, only that was a transaction transferring his NFT to them, is that a scam or a hack?
It could have but only in a narrow technical sense. They didn't and don't because those types of direct abuses of the consumer-facing financial system are pursued with great vigor and perpetrators punished severely. It's the same reason it made sense to deploy 0 day exploits to thieve WoW gold but not actual money.
The jokes they write themselves.
> Since the NFT was stolen, Green lost the right to use it in his show.
Under what law or other principle does using a picture in a show rely on an entry in a blockchain? Or is the risk that ignoring the NFT and the using the IP anyway might further pop the NFT bubble?
Of course this could be intentional, as others have said, it furthers the narrative that NFTs are genuinely non-fungible.
Mint it.
At which point they're open to theft charges.
Bathing in kool aid indeed.
Maybe no one gets prosecuted if they’re clever, but they would be compelled to return it (or then face possession of stolen property charges and contempt of court)
It's a sticky situation. If they don't pretend they've lost the copyright by losing the NFT, then the NFT is demystified and no longer has value. Since the value of this particular copyright is almost entirely derived from the perception of NFTs being special, the NFT being demystified means they lose out anyway.
It's like you have a Picasso and all your friends are very impressed. Then somebody steals it, and to get it back means going to the police and inevitably admitting that it was never a real Picasso in the first place. So either way, you've lost. So instead you don't go to the police, never admit it was fake in the first place, and instead hope that it will be returned to you through some extrajudicial means that won't necessitate an admission of fakery.
Green probably won't be able to get into NYC Apefest, which starts Monday. Which is the only actual benefit that comes from holding a BAYC NFT. Although, at age 48, he probably is too old for a rave.
One could imagine that it's just about the same amount of people who buy NFTs for $400,000, maybe a bit less as it's easier to buy something online than doing physical actions.
People who have that kind of money to gamble away, and want to gamble it away, will gamble it away no matter what kind of things exists in the world.
(Did anyone else have to threaten to put an agent of a foreign power through a Starbucks window, or is that a very "this city has no embassies and COVID has made people particularly antisocial in October 2020" situation? Can't wait to talk about that one on a stage not dedicated purely to comedy someday soon!!)
Edit: grammar stuff.
I had a lot of friends reaching out to understand more. A lot of them didn't really like the reality of how simple it would be to lift and mint a new thing. They were convinced they were holding a winning lottery ticket and I was a bad guy for saying it wasn't what they thought.
I've never encouraged people to buy crypto and if someone does, they are not as smart as you or they think. I personally invest in crypto because fundamentally I believe something deeper that I hope works.
Parasites live in the real world, the digital world, on the internet attached to whale buyers, and in the real ocean attached to real whales.
I've been burned so many times in crypto but I've been burned equally, if not more, by options offers, RSU bonuses and blackout periods, company mergers and subsequent outcomes of my shares, 401k/, etc etc.
We are constantly outrunning this wave and we are asking for transparency. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't but we need to be expecting this public nature of failure and not being able to hide the juggling of balance sheets to hide insolvency
> I've never encouraged people to buy crypto and if someone does [encourage people to buy crypto], they are not as smart as you or they think.
> I personally invest in crypto because fundamentally I believe something deeper that I hope works.
I've implemented my own blockchains, I have produced patents in the space, I have spoken and worked in this space for a significant amount of time.
Pumping and dumping is a get rich scheme which is destroying the perception with very real victims. I feel bad for people young and old that attempt to play in the stock market options space and lose it all because they are gambling thinking they will get rich.
I feel equally for those getting hurt in crypto despite the sad reality that they should have come in with questions not hope of a windfall.
These two things are more alike than different in my opinion
The fact we have currency that fluctuates on a day to day basis despite not being tied to anything beyond our trust in the system is not much better of an argument.
There was a point that the U.S. based it on the gold standard which locked in how much could be produced. This would be similar to how certain crypto lending exchanges claim they are backed 1:1 with dollars to create this concept of stablecoins.
The crypto is easy to determine, the dollars not so. Some are having audits to provide trust and transparency.
The clearing houses and financial levers are more complex than many understand. Our financial systems operate on trust, credit, and risk more than they do on having everything working in proper order.
I'm not saying crypto is THE solution and maybe in it's current state it isn't. I have learned a lot more about what exists today because I have something to contrast it too and I understand different pros/cons that I didn't see before.
I don't think we can use such excuses anymore. Luna was supposed to be backed by $3b worth of btc. We have absolutely no idea if this capital was actually used to defend its peg or if Mr Kwon pocketed it all. Crypto is just as hard to determine if not more so
Translation of what you wrote: "I've never really thought about economics for more than a couple of seconds, and therefore I cannot see the difference between the US dollar which literally supports a 21 trillion dollar economy and is guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the richest government in history, and a cryptocurrency backed by no one, which performs perhaps 0.01% of the transaction that the dollar does."
https://www.verywellmind.com/an-overview-of-the-dunning-krug...
I'm talking about the actual systems and physical infrastructure.
I have been fortunate to work with some of these larger institutions which carry the "full faith and credit of the richest country in the world".
Save Dunning-Krueger in your back pocket, I learned that quite some time ago in college, you may not be finished with it just yet.
If you are serious about learning look into FedNet. Bump that against the white and yellow papers and you'll have a better understanding of what I mean.
Mea culpa, although if anything this is an even more extreme example of attribution error:
(paraphrasing) “I invest in crypto for grand and philosophical reasons, and would never dream of promoting it to others (except by regularly claiming that it will save our supposedly broken financial system). Others who promote cryptocurrencies are opportunists or fools.”
Far from increasing your credibility, having been involved in cryptocurrency development more likely than not has hopelessly biased you towards this kind of messianic “crypto will save us” thinking.
> I'm not saying crypto is THE solution and maybe in it's current state it isn't.
Your quick admission and then doubling down is disappointing.
Ironically, you really are owning this attribution error with your textbook self-serving bias.
- BTC has fallen below $19k USD (from a peak of near $65k)
- ETH has fallen below $1k USD (from a peak of ~$4600)
Once you get into the altcoins ("shitcoins") it's even bleaker. NFTs by their nature are harder to get a picture of (that's the "non-fungible" part) but it seems to be a bloodbath.
This Seth Green story is particularly funny because on top of the price-crashing you're actually getting no utility. Why? Because copyright ownership still has to be enforced through the traditional IP and legal system.
And on top of that lack of utility you see how reversibility of transactions in the non-crypto financial system is a feature not a bug.
There's really no reason for any of this to exist. It's all a massive waste of energy that is driven by nothing other than speculative fervor. It's not belief in the technology. It's just greed.
More to the point, the only thing holding up the value of any of this is the collective belief in it and every day the price crashes again that belief is eroded. I really have no idea how low this can go but it'l be interesting to see.
This is the greater fool theory [1] in action and the best defense seems to be it isn't a pyramid scheme; it's a trapezoid [2].
[1]: https://www.altfi.com/article/9398_bill-gates-dismisses-nfts...
[2]: https://frinkiac.com/meme/S03E12/872714/m/VGhpcyBpcyBub3Qgb2...
Even beanie babies have more utility.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it even worse. There is no transfer of any rights whatsoever on the common trading platforms so I assume copyright ownership is rare. Consequently in most cases there probably is nothing to be enforced. At least that is how I understand NFTs.
That should have been a clue.