Cryptocurrency enables a big part of this. Not saying that there weren't any wire scams before crypto, but crypto has made it much easier for average people to make anonymous international money transfers that can't be reversed.
Not to start a big argument, but to my eyes the main usecases of cryptocurrency are to bet on them as a speculative asset or to use them for various forms of crime. Someone will probably tell me about some theoretical situation where it is a positive force, but I still think those are by far the two most common daily uses.
Totally agree, I think crypto is cool from a technological standpoint, but I don't think I've seen one common genuine use of BTC, etc.
And before someone comes in with very specific, anecdotal examples - notice I said "common", ie not buying your indie music from a retro-Serb band that plays using the concept of instruments as instruments and from abandoned sewers; but only on Mondays.
I definitely feel like the majority of crypto traffic is primarily due to bubbles/moneymaking/bets/pumps+dump and then the secondary/next closest use case is for criminal activity. And then after that perhaps the myriad of much smaller use cases like people paying for Proton using crypto.
> I've seen one common genuine use of BTC
One of my favorited comments/threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410
Even that technically falls under the crime umbrella (though I don't believe it is immoral or unethical). It's basically the getting around government imposed capital controls.
The comment (and thread) isn't about getting around capital controls, which is why it is so powerful.
The comment argues that for people in stable, wealthy countries, Bitcoin can seem unnecessary or overhyped. But for those living in countries with dysfunctional banking systems, currency controls, or even mild corruption (like Argentina), it solves very real problems.
Traditional financial systems often restrict access to dollars, limit foreign transfers, and are vulnerable to government seizure or devaluation, leaving people with few safe options to save or send money.
Bitcoin offers a practical alternative for remittances, savings, and financial autonomy in places where the local system fails to protect or empower its citizens. While Bitcoin may look inefficient compared to ACH transfers in the U.S., it’s a lifeline elsewhere, and one that could become more relevant globally in times of instability.
You’ve literally just described getting around capital controls.
In some countries, there is nothing to get around.
I guess citation? Provide a list of countries that don’t have any control over their own currency? Because unless they don’t control their own currency, it’s impossible to not have capital controls in place. That’s a basic function of every sovereign nation.
Anywhere people are unbanked. If you're not part of the system, then there is no system to get around.
Nomads are often unbanked too. When I was living in Vietnam for years, I was certainly under US laws and I obviously have to pay my taxes and follow Vietnam laws.
But, as a foreigner (especially one who doesn't speak the language), I'm still quite outside of the system there. If you've ever been a nomad, you'll understand that difference.
You aren't describing a situation where there is a lack of capital controls.
The most surprising part of that thread is the claim that they’re using Bitcoin rather than a stablecoin. But perhaps things have changed in four years?
To be fair, the article for the thread is about how Tether was forced to end in NY.
Oh, it's making a comeback, repackaged and repurposed just the way the key players want it. BTC, NFTs etc. introduced groundbreaking new ideas, but faceless entities and lots of press outlets shunned and butchered them in every way possible. This clearly delineated the current state of affairs.
Just this week, I received a bug bounty from a company in bitcoin. No BS with banks or anything!*
*: until I convert it to fiat
That sounds like more hassle than receiving a straightforward deposit into my bank account.
For whom? In which country?
I'm interested in that band if you have recommendations, though!
use them for various forms of crime
It's not a coincidence that a guy who was found liable for financial fraud is reducing regulations around crypto currency and then launched a meme coin.
The banks here have said that if you get scammed and money has been transferred (no cryptocurrency involved), there's nothing they can do. It was a bit surprising to hear since you only hear cryptocurrency transactions being irreversible.
The (dumbass) finance department in my last company was phished out of about $50k. They received an email "from another company", that we happened to do business with, that was asking to update the account information. The FD didn't do any verification cause it was over a weekend and it was 'urgent'. Basically ignored all the classic signals.
The bank refused to return the funds. The concept that just because it is a bank and it must be irreversible, is totally wrong. Another very good example of this is the whole corrupt Zelle service.
interested to hear more about zelle
IIRC zelle is designed to be reversible for the banks but not the customers, it is the worst of both worlds.
Zelle is effectively DNS for your ACH bank account and the address is your email or phone number. It is notoriously used by scammers because they know that it isn't reversible.
Just google "zelle fraud" and go down the rabbit hole...
The difference is, crypto makes irreversibility a fundamental part of the system, making it impossible for any party to unilaterally reverse a payment without having to first take over the entire chain. With regular fiat money and banks, such reversals are perfectly possible on a technical level. The banks are usually unwilling to do them, and an individual may not be able to force them to in practice, but it's still possible in a way it's not possible with crypto.
This seems like the correct way to go though.. if you want reversibility, then introduce escrow into the situation, the foundational building block should be irreversible.. as there's no way to make a means of transfer _more_ irreversible if you're inherently giving control to a 3rd party with no choice.
Why?
Irreversible transactions are not desired by anyone in payment networks. Consumers don't want to get scammed out of money. Merchants want customers to feel like transactions are low risk so they are more willing to make them. That's a big reason why merchants put up with the outright hostile to them system of chargebacks. Sure, you will lose some money to chargebacks you might think were not valid, but you have made much more than that back from liberalized spending habits.
Nobody benefits from irreversible transactions except fraudsters and other bad actors. And they benefit soooo much from transactions being irreversible. Why would you build and advocate for a system that explicitly empowers bad actors over anyone else?
An escrow is not a solution. The escrow itself could be a bad actor.
I've intentionally used irreversible crypto payments to a merchant that is an an industry with high chargebacks. It is highly useful in transactions where the merchant is highly trusted but the buyers tend to be weasels. Such merchants tend to charge high premiums for reversible payment methods.
In such cases it is win-win for both the merchant and customer, the customer doesn't have to foot the reversibility overhead and the merchant is able to offer goods at the same profit margins but lower price which should yield more sales.
The existence of wire transfers, cashier's checks, and, you know, CASH undermine your claim that people in payment networks don't desire irreversible transactions.
Basically everybody who's ever sold something in person wants to know they get to keep the money when the other person walks away with their stuff. It's the fraudsters in those everyday transactions who want reversibility.
I am much more likely to buy something if I can pay with a credit card. Making a wire transfer is stressful; I'm worried that I got the wire instructions wrong, and my money will go to the wrong place and be gone forever. Paying with a cashier's check is stressful; I worry that I will get mugged between the bank and wherever I'm spending it, or that I'll just lose it on the way. Cash isn't quite as bad, and I almost always have some cash on me.
But given the choice of paying with cash or credit card, I will almost always choose the credit card. I like the idea that if I walk away from that transaction and then later realize that the merchant sold me something defective or outright fraudulent, I will have some recourse in getting that money back.
I get that a merchant will prefer an irreversible transaction, all else being equal. But I don't think all else is equal; I absolutely buy the GP's argument that purchasers will be more liberal with their spending if they don't have to worry so much about the merchant being a scammer. And regardless, there are many many more purchasers than merchants, and most (if not all) purchasers would at least have a slight preference toward a reversible transaction.
That just kicks the can of trust to the entity performing the escrow, and there have been many, many cases of fly by night escrow companies (or companies pretending to be escrow companies) who just take the money and run.
So introducing another third party to trust makes it more complicated than the alternative of allowing transactions to be reversable.
Banking reversibility is also kicking the can to a trusted third party.
Several years ago my credit card was stolen. I contacted my bank, who then accused my wife of cheating on me in another state (I know this didn't happen because there is no way she left 1000 miles away for several days multiple times between me seeing her, unless she has a hidden personal jet). By 'lying' about it being a fraudster instead of my wife who 'had cheated on me' the bank then accused me of bank fraud.
The bank then obtained fraudulent invoices, which were used to 'prove' I owed the money. They just buried me in false paperwork to the point I could never win. When the bank was done with all that, they closed my regular checking account too, because they had now flagged me as a criminal.
I will take anyday, an 'irreversible' crypto account over a banking system where they just close my other accounts because they think one was fraudulent because I was defrauded.
Bank of America decided I really had been in rural France buying tires when I had proof I was at work, at my desk, in Boston at the times of the purchases, and the card was in my hand. It's been 20 years and I still won't ever do business with them again.
It was much more fun, at least, when Amazon tried to tell me one of my children must have taken my card and made the purchases. I took it to mean the children I have not conceived yet will have access to time travel, in which case I'm not even mad. Pranking me in the past deserves whatever trinket they bought!
I agree. Smart contracts or other functionality integrated into wallets could also improve usability e.g. regarding irreversibility and user mistakes. Base layer doesn't have to be the final way to use cryptocurrencies and it isn't.
This just bring in new problems like people thinking they got paid but there being a refund trick.. This happens in the traditional system too, but at least when it exhibits total indifference to an account serving no purpose besides refund scams it is violating KYC principles instead of running as expected.
The point is that trade-offs are a fact of life. Some problems get solved, other problems appear. I'm not saying the new problems shouldn't be addressed, I'm just talking in general and I believe there are many kinds of solutions that can mitigate many kinds of problems. Just like in traditional banking. I just think it's pointless to try to invent and flesh them out here.
You could still decide what kind of use suits you the best. Regular people wouldn't (and shouldn't) need to know all the technicalities. A trusted party, maybe a bank, could provide their own integrated solution with whatever features they want to offer.
There are plenty of options in bank settlement protocols. I think the point under discussion is not banking improvement but bankless user sovereignty via technical means.
The smart contract writers sometimes fool themselves when working on the problem full time.. That's a bigger problem if the code is the contract instead of code attempts to honor the contract and a system with judgement can undo things that obviously fall bellow our ethical expectations like account ID swaps, supply chain attacks, kidnapping/intimidation and so on.
The thing is, crypto IS reversible, and has been reversed in the past. The people affected just need to be rich and/or powerful enough. And you and I are not in that club.
> The banks are usually unwilling to do them, and an individual may not be able to force them to in practice, but it's still possible in a way it's not possible with crypto.
Generally they're unwilling to do that because it involves losing money for them.
Transfers work in a multi-step process to ensure money isn't created.
You tell Bank A to transfer money to person X at Bank B.
Bank A tells an intermediary bank C to move funds from Bank A's account to Bank B's account. (This step is unnecessary if either A or B are large enough to be an intermediary)
Bank C lets Bank B know that it's gained funds
Bank B moves funds internally from Bank C to customer X.
If you want your money back and Bank C says it's already been withdrawn then somebody in A,B,C is going to take a loss. Personally I think we should have an easy way to pay in a 7d settlement or something. Who really cares if somebody sends a 7d settlement when buying a house as long as its done 7d before closing.
Right. Still, the whole thing is plugged into society at large, including court system, so ultimately the courts have the power to force anyone in the chain to give money back and eat the loss or argue to take it from elsewhere.
To the unending dismay of crypto fans, the same is true about cryptocurrency - but its design fundamentally gives the law less leverage and actual points an intervention could be made. That, plus the whole thing is very new. But that's just a transient state; this kind of immutability is not compatible with society or real life, so the only cryptocurrency-based systems that'll survive long term will be the ones that give up on the whole cryptoanarchy thing.
If Bank C is forced to take the loss, it'll be more careful in opening accounts for scammers to withdraw money. If Bank C is in a country that doesn't care to enforce such losses, then Bank B (or A if A is big enough) will think twice about deciding to do business with Bank B. Moving the cost of the scams onto the banks will strongly incentivize them to prevent the scams.
There's some kind of circular reasoning going on here.
Banks are more careful, and that's why they don't deal with certain kinds of transactions. And that's where crypto comes in to "disrupt banks" and "democratize finance".
Long term, crypto will be no different than regular currency and finance because people don't like getting ripped off and defrauded. We'll have a period of time with people pulling old scams but with crypto, and eventually it'll be regulated just like normal finance.
The problem is that crypto is designed to evade regulation. You can put lipstick on a pig and regulate the centralized intermediaries (which, remember, crypto aimed to disintermediate): exchanges, custodians, ETF providers, ...
The dilemma is that you can either escape those regulations by going to unhosted wallets (self-custody) and transacting on the blockchain, or you keep everything (by regulation) entirely within the regulated intermediaries, but then there's no need to waste 1% of world electricity on some slow "decentralized" database.
How is it designed so? You pass a law that puts anyone running a node 10 years in prison and anyone accepting or paying through it as well. You see, easy.
For this to not be possible it would have to be widely in use and government-backed.
> Moving the cost of the scams onto the banks will strongly incentivize them to prevent the scams.
And then less people have bank accounts.
The scammer isn't necessarily the person with the final bank account. Its often somebody who was told they're managing payroll for some made-up company and they're going to get a 2k transfer and to keep 500 of it and withdrawal 1.5k of it as cash to do payroll.
While you may think that now only people who aren't scammers won't get bank accounts what actually is happening is that anybody that can be fooled doesn't get one.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
Doesn't that already happen? I've read stories from people in the US who are fooled, and as such, are marked as high risk and have their accounts closed. The rate it happens might be greater, but the total increase in harm from fewer people having bank accounts due to risk of scams might be less than the harm reduced by fewer people getting scammed. If scams are reduced enough, the number of people having bank accounts might go up because less people are losing them after being scammed.
But you know who customer X is and if he obtained the money fraudulently then the bank (or police, courts, etc) can go after him to recover it. It might not happen but it's possible.
Same statement could be said about you no?
You're the one that was defrauded. The bank processed the transfer exactly as you told them to. So therefore, if person X isn't providing the service you expected then you should have to go to the courts to get it back?
The general problem is that it takes a lot of leg work. Often Customer X was being defrauded through some payroll scam (they take out ~500 and forward the remaining 1500). So now you have to recover $500 from them and then trace the 1500 again. Possibly through multiple countries and their courts (who may see this as beneficial for their country; jury nullification goes both ways).
Correct, but there are possibilities and established processes (however unlikely or inconvenient) to get the money back.
This was mostly true of v.1 cryptocurrencies, but it's not like it's inherent to the system. It's just as easy to design cryptocurrencies where there are control mechanisms, governed however you'd like them to be. USDC, for example, can be frozen in any wallet at any time, and has still become hugely popular.
IF reversibility is a desired feature of digital currencies, the market will bear that out. People can and will choose those currencies.
As with any "feature," there are tradeoffs, and it might well be that people en masse decide they would rather everyone control their own money than have central powers supervising, just as it might well be that people opt back into a system very much like the one that exists today, but with new efficiencies.
Adding programmability to money in the digital age was necessary. I don't know why anybody is surprised it hasn't reached some sort of final, settled state this early in the digital age. It basically only came into practical existence after the launch of smartphones and ubiquitous internet access. Give it a minute.
USDC is only popular because it can be easily used to evade taxes while retaining its value
This comment just isn't even remotely connected to U.S. reality. Transactions into and out of USDC are taxable just like transactions into and out of USD, and the IRS can every bit as easily find the owners of these accounts as they can offshore bank accounts or anything else someone might use to try to evade taxes.
I'm confident that any other country who cares to (i.e., anywhere people bother to try to evade taxes) can also do so.
Reversing stolen crypto transactions in practice is done the same way you reverse stolen cash transactions.
You find the criminal, and the cash and give back the cash to the wronged party. With cash, the criminal can hide the cash in some random location, and nobody can say if they spent it or they lost it. With crypto, everyone knows where the money is. You just have to figure out the passwords to the wallet in some way.
Right, my mistake for using too broad terms. I meant specifically electronic payments, which have this reversibility aspect that neither cash nor crypto have.
Stellar XLM has reversibility but no one seemed interested in that
How do you reverse yourself mailing $1000 USD cash to some scam outfit?
I meant electronic payments specifically; my error in using terms that implied cash also counts.
Obviously, you can't just reverse a cash transaction. It's one of the reasons people try to avoid using it in many situations.
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Banks aren't perfect, but they also aren't anonymous.
If you feel wronged, you can take appropriate legal recourse.
Crypto offers no such thing.
Banks are good if you live in a functional democratic country with sane politics.
If you don't then you'll easily get the bad side of it since abusing the power is not that hard.
How is paypal / venmo / cashapp different?
you can sue them
modulo all the ToS / arbitration clauses, that is still the fundamental difference
and although not a recourse available to most people, still not nothing
KYC
Good luck taking legal action against an off shore entity, especially when the legal fees is more than the money transferred, and the money most likely moved to three different accounts in as many countries from that first off shore account.
You’re right that you don’t have guaranteed recourse for foreign fraud. But at least the banks play whack-a-mole and make it somewhat expensive for criminals to set up accounts; crypto undoubtedly makes money laundering substantially easier and cheaper.
Whether you see international money transfers outside of the government control as a positive or negative force largely depends on how much you trust your government. How much it should limit things for your own safety?
I suspect that for majority of the earth population the trust level is rather low, even though in some countries it could be different.
For the majority of the earth population, this is not a concern. Yes, things may get fuzzy around an inflection point, but for most people, their concerns fall way short of that.
lots of people live in countries with severe governance problems and a bad monetary regime.
If I had to throw out a number describing how many more times I trust the FDIC than I trust some cryptobro, the first thing that comes to mind is "ten billion".
And my trust in the current administration is rather low.
Sure. But not everyone in the world shares the same FDIC with you.
To complicate things further, international transfers require cooperation not only between the sending and receiving states but also from states that control the transfer system. Any hiccup along the way and you may lose your money, sometimes forever (true story).
> And my trust in the current administration is rather low.
Again, I'm not sure you realize what the "low trust into the government" means for the rest of the world.
Well, that only works until bank accounts of somebody disloyal become frozen.
And if you compare chances of that with chances of being deported to El Salvador prison... Well let's say frozen bank accounts doesn't sound that impossible.
Well, they're pretty comparable in many parts of the world (and I despise cryptocurrency, btw). Despite what you might think, the current US administration is far from the worst compared to what some of us live under. Americans simply lack a proper "zero point" to be able to properly gauge this.
I place exactly zero trust in what our administration says, because they've lied about the country's economic situation and what they're planning to do about it four times during my lifetime, and several more times during our parents' lifetimes. Our savings were cut in half (or more) several times because of this, and so much of it was lost, the total amount of time wasted working for effectively free is in the decades now.
There's really no reliable way of saving money long-term here, unless you scrounge enough to buy real estate or something else that is unlikely to be devalued to 30% of its original value with a stroke of a pen.
I can imagine why some people would resort to cryptocurrency and extracting money out of the country asap.
These are all good points. Like others here, I will preemptively state my dislike of the political classes.
Perhaps if financial regulations were not so onerous, traditional payment processors like PayPal would be able to handle more types of transactions with a lower overhead. As it is, the large number of prohibited categories creates a demand for cryptocurrency. As you noted, inflationary monetary policy is another source of discontent. Perhaps if central bankers had exercised a bit more restraint, there would be less demand for cryptocurrency. The same can be said for capital controls and more...
So there is a bit of irony when posters appeal for even heavier regulations and prohibitions. These are the forces which have created demand for wholly unregulated markets. It shouldn't be hard to see how these overreaches have created a counterbalancing force. Tragically, these overreaches generate a safe-haven for additional bad actors.
the point is that you don't have to trust 'some cryptobro' to hold USDS and you certainly don't have to trust Şahap Kavcıoğlu to keep your lira safe or Olayemi Cardoso's stewardship of your naira.
> Someone will probably tell me about some theoretical situation where it is a positive force
Challenge accepted. My positive use case for cryptocurrency pertains to someone like me being over sixty and worried about being swept up into the guardianship system. With most of my assets in crypto and assuming decent opsec, they would be inaccessible to the guardian. If a judge ordered me to grant access, could I be cited for contempt by refusing to comply given that I had already been legally ruled incompetent? If I were cited regardless, would the threat of incarceration carry any weight given that I would be already incarcerated in an old age home? Unless there's some principle the guardian is trying to uphold, the rational course would be to choose a different victim.
> With most of my assets in crypto and assuming decent opsec, they would be inaccessible to the guardian.
The flip side of this is that there’s also a decent chance of your assets becoming completely inaccessible to anyone, including you or any of your successors (if applicable), unless you’ve made careful preparations involving time locked contracts or similar.
And yes, you’re probably safer against the enforcement of court rulings you might disagree with, but you are extremely vulnerable to blackmail or cyberattacks compared to traditional bank accounts.
Elder abuse is certainly a real problem, but the guardianship/conservatorship system also does address a real problem: many seniors actually do become mentally unable to manage themselves.
You're worried about falsely being forced into a guardianship, but what happens if you actually do develop Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia and your family legitimately needs access to your assets to care for you? It's easy to say you'd just give them access before it gets really bad, but an insidious part of the problem is that someone suffering from such a decline either doesn't, or refuses to, recognize it happening.
Before she died, my grandmother couldn't remember where she'd hidden her most valuable jewellery.
She was an excellent card player 10 years before that, probably because she could recall most/all of the playing cards in the discard pile, so I'm sure she could have remembered a Bitcoin wallet passphrase — until the last few years.
I’ve unfortunately seen that as well.
Paranoia is a common side effect of dementia, and I’ve seen lots of anguish and money (legal/bank fees) spent on recovering non-life-changing savings that were just too well hidden. At least there was a fallback option to get them back – crypto would have been permanently lost.
Finding a middle ground between security and availability is hard even as a healthy adult and only gets worse with age.
whats the benefit to you though?
youre going to be incarcerated in an even worse kept old folks home, and anything you actually try to spend on will be both spied upon - you getting a nurse to type in the secrets for you, or confiscated an sold before yoy could enjoy the results.
i think you'd be better off trying to tackle the problem directly, and get legal changes to how guardianship works, since itll still screw over your crypto assets
That's what happened to my grandfather, and the same happened to a friend's father two years ago.
There are greater protections against elder abuse today, but often by the time their broker or finance manager finds out, the damage has been done.
> worried about being swept up into the guardianship system.
Functionally speaking you'd have to be incapable of calling a lawyer on your own, which means you'd already be under someone's care. Even if you're being scammed dry, the absolute last thing you want in that situation is a lack of funding.
Find someone who understands end of life financial planning and set up whatever trust-like scheme they recommend.
The biggest impact cryptocurrency has had on my life is the ability to pay criminals after they've taken your data hostage. It's awesome that we've invented a way to make creating and distributing malware profitable.
it definitely helps to motivate some people to consider security as a functional requirement
> main usecases of cryptocurrency are to bet on them as a speculative asset or to use them for various forms of crime. Someone will probably tell me about some theoretical situation where it is a positive force
When you don't agree with the laws that are being broken in a particular case.
So if 57% in a country agree with a law, the remaining 43% should be allowed to circumvent that law through these means?
Of course, the opposite argument is "what about north korea", but it's a package deal is my point.
Pretty much, yeah.
If almost half of the population disagree with something then it’s probably a stupid restriction to begin with.
But most laws in democracies pass with just about majority. The president in america was selected with just-about majority. Do you suggest changing elections so that we keep doing them until the vote skews to 100%? 90%? What's the threshold?
I suggest not having laws that 50% of people disagree with, e.g. if 49% of people like raspberry jam then the 51% who like strawberry shouldn’t ban it regardless of whether they are in control.
Basically, generally, live and let live.
What would be the threshold beyond which you would be OK with a ban? Because there would always be some people OK just about every single practice.
That’s kind of my point.
There is a difference between not being interested or disliking something, and wanting it to literally be illegal.
Generally speaking you shouldn't be able to impose your will on others
Sure, but in every democracy most laws pass with such just-about majorities.
I use crypto often. I am Russian, I left Russia when Putin started the war. For me, it is quite hard to open a bank account. So I use crypto. I work remotely for a Singaporian company. Now I'm in Vietnam, I can pay for my groceries with crypto using QR code. I can cash USDT crypto with a rate better than paper bills.
I have two bank accounts in Kazakhstan. Both card credentials were stolen after I used a popular hotel booking website, which, by the words of reddit, shares my card details with hotels. Some money was stolen. Seems like 3D-security only affects my payments, and theifs have a freedom to choose a website without 3D. Now I have to keep that cards always locked. Unlocking them for a short moments, when I need to make a card payment. Like booking an hotel, or buying an airline ticket.
It is wild how Vietnam really transformed from a complete cash society to a mostly digital one in just a few years. Covid did it.
Nothing more annoying than having your largest bill be worth about $20 and having to carry stacks of them around for things like just paying rent.
>Now I'm in Vietnam, I can pay for my groceries with crypto using QR code.
That sounds great. What do you use?
Fizen
In the past they might have asked you to mail them USD. Same risk there. Not like the post office is funded sufficiently to open all mail. And once that money is out of your bank account and out of your hands it is also gone.
> Cryptocurrency enables at big part of this
Interesting panel discussion on the state of crypto today at the Regan National Economic Forum event.
I believe it is the third panel in the stream:
https://www.reaganfoundation.org/events/videos/2025-reagan-n...
i bet heavily using crypto against AI progress on coding to hedge my career
Is your job developing AI coding tools?
no, but i do work in ML - i think there are two channels through which this derisking makes sense, but people on here get aggressive if you mention the other one.
How is crypto relevant to betting?
because it gives you access to binary options markets with deep liquidity that you can’t get access to in any other way. i guess it counts under various forms of crime because we criminalize offering useful financial instruments
Crypto is hard for most scam victims to buy. Ban gift cards. Gift cards have always been a lame thoughtless gift anyway.
This is what I'm wondering. How do you get the typical person to fall for a scam to open a crypto account, buy it, go through kyc, etc
A friend of a friend (doctor as well) got taken for ~20.000 eur while being kept on the phone for over 6 hours using the "security breach at your bank" story. She said they got her so into the story that she really saw no issues going to the Crypto ATM at the local mall and doing 15 (FIFTEEN!) purchases there because a "police inspector" told her that's the only safe place for her money. They had a fake website where she could "see" her deposits but she was with the guy on the phone and was telling him "I made another deposit" ...
I think they are doing bank transfers directly to the scammers, who give them a FAKE website that shows a crypto balance + great investment returns. I'm not sure crypto is involved at all; it's just the old Spanish prisoner / Nigerian prince scam with a new coat of paint.
>How do you get the typical person to fall for a scam to open a crypto account, buy it, go through kyc, etc
With spam like the below (note that the original contains mostly UTF8 characters to avoid spam filters). I get these every so often on the NOC and postmaster addresses of domains I manage.
It's not even phishing. Just spam blasts to find anyone uninformed enough to believe it, and insecure enough to be afraid of the (empty) "threat":
As you can see, the claims and threats are cartoonish. But folks who aren't tech savvy could be fooled by this.I'd expect that each spam recipient is given a unique BTC address, so that they can be identified for further "blackmail"[0] should they actually comply.
And to clarify, the above message was received by a "postmaster@domain" account on 23 May 2025. And since I've been seeing them for at least a few years I can only assume they are at least occasionally successful.
There are other scams that target folks with bitcoin demands too. Likely with similar claims.
[0] https://malwaretips.com/blogs/ive-recorded-many-videos-of-yo...
> I'd expect that each spam recipient is given a unique BTC address, so that they can be identified for further "blackmail"[0] should they actually comply.
They typically aren't, actually. Most of the time when you enter the wallet address into Blockchair or another BTC transaction monitoring service you'll see tons of payments for the demanded amount having been sent to that sole wallet.
Even thinking of it logistically, its a whole lot easier for a scammer to just send literally the same email to every victim, wait some months, then withdraw the funds from one BTC wallet.
It's such a simple scam, anyone who can make a BTC wallet and send emails could pull it off.
Fair points.
But if you use the same bitcoin address for every email, you won't know who the mark that actually paid was -- potentially leaving money on the table for the future.
I did (before posting the comment to which you replied) check to see if there was any activity[0] on the bitcoin address in the email I posted. There was none. Which strengthened my conclusion (I have no evidence) that unique bitcoin addresses were in use.
But I certainly could be wrong.
[0] https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/bc1qt30ya4...
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> various forms of crime.
Keep in mind that most of the world doesn't live in a perfectly functioning country with proper rule of law. Being able to use crypto to commit a crime in those countries is a feature. You never know when you will need this feature in your own. (Stupid example: tomorrow Trump wakes up and decide to block all bank accounts of non-citizen until they prove that they are in the US legally: will being able to make crypto transfers be good or bad ?)
But even assuming that all criminal use of crypto is bad, as our money become more digital, we are more and more dependent on a small number of payment processors that get to decide what is good and what is bad, regardless of the legal status (or decide that the legal status that matters is the one of the US, even if you live in Nigeria). This is particularly true for businesses that handle anything sex-related.
For an example of the latter, just a few days ago a payment processor suspended its services to Civitai [1] because it lets people to make ai-generated porn. "The company that had been processing credit card payments for Civitai made the decision to cease processing payments beginning May 23, 2025, due to their discomfort with enabling AI-generated explicit content."
[1] https://www.laweekly.com/civitai-ditched-by-credit-card-proc...
porn and fraud seem to be leading indicators of technological progress.
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Reason of most scams is the absurd level of trust existing in Western countries.
When i first saw Upwork where hours were paid by the tracker in a guaranteed manner and people SIGNED for it, i knew West was doomed. I still find it hard to believe people can be that easy to dupe.
Level of trust in the Western societies needs to be radically reduced through government propaganda, church and other channels. The world has become global. Westerners are now a small minority in an ocean of people where the manner of relationship that will be seen as sociopathic in the West, is the everyday norm and always have been. If they won't adapt, they will cease to exist. The cozy world where one could trust another because they all shared fear of God and had a reputation to lose, is gone.
A high trust society is actually a good trait, not a bad one. It’s rather easy, lazy even, for a culture to devolve into a low trust minima. That’s basically the default state that people have endeavoured to evolve out of.
I think it’s also the kind of thing that can easily overwhelm anxious minds. The kind where “what if it’s a scam?” leads them to never taking a risk, donating to a cause, doing someone a favour.
Not that there isn’t a fight to be fought here. But waving the surrender flag on fostering a trusting society is a very weak move.
"A high trust society is actually a good trait, not a bad one."
100% agree, and seeing it erode is painful (e.g., toothpaste now locked behind plexiglass).
But to steelman the parents point, while it is be good to be high trust society, that society may be poorly adapted when rapidly integrated into a low trust globalized world.
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The far right have a story, that ppl like you are duped to believe.
Sometimes cynical(/fear driven) people have such strong biases, they are the most easy to dupe.
Sorry, are you saying that the main reason immigrants from Eastern Europe and India become rich is through scamming hapless fools? Not through, say, hard work and educational opportunities? And are you saying this is a change, or how it’s always been?
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Japanese people are not very religious but are very high trust and high on the development index, much higher than the Middle East in my opinion.
Japanese people believe that are the Gods themselves, if we put it into Western perspective. They are indeed the most trustworthy people i got to work with (but also extremely procedure-driven, formal, slow on decisionmaking, and painfully anal when it comes to matching even the tiny details in requirements - so i found it really hard to work with them). Although it has nothing to do with trust.
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Man you've got some weird social darwinist perspectives on the evolution of trust. Play this game - https://ncase.me/trust/
As a reasonably successful immigrant from Eastern Europe, mostly not true in my experience. You do have some people, ahem roma/gypsies ahem, that abuse the hell out of social benefits for example, getting them from multiple countries at the same time, etc, but for normal people, the reason they succeed is the fresh start and being an outsider in my opinion.
For older immigrants it's an opportunity for a fresh start that kicks them out of the daily monotony and puts them in the sink or swim of early adult life again.
For younger immigrants, we're mostly the top X% of talent coming from mostly well off families. Couple that with needing to be at least better than the average to compensate for your immigrant background and we either do very well, or go back to where we came from... After all with the experience of being mediocre in the west you can go back and sell yourself as a top achiever with experience in the country where the company headquarters/clients are.
Why would they come here for those reasons? We actually have decently functioning courts and relatively much lower corruption. If they wanted to get rich dishonestly, they would be much better served paying off regulators and politicians in their home countries where those practices are more normalized and less subject to enforcement agencies given some measure of independence through public service unions.
There's little societal trust in e.g. Russia, and yet they're getting massively scammed by Ukrainian call centers every day. People selling their only housing, sending all their savings for “safekeeping” overseas, are daily news. Not just old ladies (but them too), but also middle-aged intellectuals who were supposed to know better.
It's all using the same schemes that have been explained in the news over and over again, there's little innovation on that front. You have to be living under a rock the for past few years to fall for them, and yet people do. I think there's simply a certain amount of marks in every society, regardless of how its members trust each other, and the only reliable way of protecting them is managing everybody's lives DPRK-style.
I think the only reason of why it works is that Ukrainians are an even lower trust culture, and they are better and more cynical at duping people. Plus, in Ukraine many people see it as their patriotic duty, and perhaps rightfully so, so these kind of jobs are likely to attract quite sophisticated people who will be able to pull off very believable scams, not some social rejects or worse, forced labor sitting in Myanmar jungle, as it is in Asia vs USA scams.
Trust is necessary for social development & advancement, and low trust countries & societies are also low on the development index. The development of advanced economies is predicate on the "absurd level of trust" in western countries.
The cost world you describe didn’t emerge because of fear of god (which has been prevalent for milleniums, mostly everywhere) but the abondance of cheap energy and goods, basically since oil starts getting processed but other minor factors helped too. Democracy and peace emerges when peoples aren’t scared to miss food anymore.
In the US food is plentiful. Poor people die of obesity related illness. But trust is plummeting because of a decline in social cohesion. Building a high trust society is hard, and there is no monocausal solution. You can't plug in god, or food, into a low trust society to flip it to high trust.
Food is plentiful here, but unevenly distributed. Childhood hunger is still a serious problem.
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/14/childhood-hunger-food-insec...
During the initial pandemic, great strides were made in the United States to mitigate childhood poverty, but these measures were quickly overturned. Now the administration wants to defund SNAP and other food security programs. Alas.
I think the underlying concept you're looking for is corruption versus rule of law. Blaming the victim versus expecting consequences for the perpetrator etc.
Classic Russian thinking that the only motivating force is fear. No wonder you get stuck with homicidal tyrants ruling over you time after time.
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>Not to start a big argument, but to my eyes the main usecases of cryptocurrency are to bet on them as a speculative asset or to use them for various forms of crime.
What argument can even be had? This is factually true. Whatever other use cases were hoped for when it was invented, they have failed to materialize.
The idea that someone could just beat you with a lead pipe until you open up your bitcoin wallet and surrender all the bitcoins and then there is nothing you can do about it in any kind of legal system or even cryptographically should terrify anyone into boasting about having any kind of bitcoin assets.
I wouldn't recommend boasting about owning bitcoin either but why couldn't you involve the legal system? They can go after the criminals who beat you with the pipe just as they could if they beat you to get to your cash/luxury car/art/jewelry/other valuable stuff.