This is a scam that has been going on for years that has adapted its techniques over time.
We used this botnet as a case study back in 2018 when doing analysis on finding Twitter bots at a large scale. You can find the paper here [0] - the cryptocurrency scam botnet starts on page 28. You can also find the talk here [1] where we go into a little more detail. In full irony, someone tried sharing our research on Twitter, and one of the bots replied to the thread trying to spread the scam.
It's very disappointing that Twitter has allowed this to go on for so long. The scam is so successful that it is now attached to pretty much every prominent tweet and drowns out actual replies.
All it really takes to solve this is better UI. This is costing some users money and making the experience worse for everyone. Sad that Twitter isn't willing to take this seriously.
It's not just Twitter. Fake SpaceX "live" streams with a couple thousand viewers regularly pop-up in my YouTube recommendations. They're peddling the same kind of crypto scams.
So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.
No, not quite. Total new investment into the space is falling. But it’s nowhere close to zero.
It will probably never totally die. Instead, like baseball cards or beanie babies, it will atrophy into obscurity.
There are enough people who have sunk enough into the project—financially, reputationally—that, barring a depression, it will continue to have backers for at least another few decades. As long as Tether doesn’t overplay its hand, prices should keep the illusion going. It’s a cautionary tale regarding the staying power of purposeless institutions.
The cryptocurrency space is quite alive, and is thriving. As much as people like to hate on it, the whole space rife with engineering, social, and economic challenges that attract geeks. Unfortunately, it attracts a lot of scammers too.
As a Canadian consultant working for US clients, I can assure you — the worst Cryptocurrency usability problems are better than the typical Canada/US wire transfer Banking experience.
It's not dead, but it's not mainstream either. It's a bit like quidditch - there are a bunch of people interested in it, and they have their own ecosystem, but don't expect the Olympic Committee to be calling anytime soon.
OTOH, the regulators are getting quite serious in recognizing crypto - including reporting requirements and enforcement. The era where it was tiny enough the IRS basically didn't care except for tiny amount of outlier cases is gone.
Far from dead. It's been growing rapidly, particularly the decentralized finance (defi) space. Number of transactions has been steadily going up in Ethereum: https://etherscan.io/chart/tx
I was a Bitcoin skeptic for years so I understand this point of view. This point of view makes sense if you assume that the financial system works properly which is what the vast majority of people still assume.
The vast majority of people are wrong. The financial system doesn't work; it's easy to exploit. It's no coincidence that many cryptocurrency enthusiasts are hackers; they found vulnerabilities in the system and are exploiting it. In the context of our corrupt, dysfunctional system, the value is solid and price will always go up in the long run.
Corporations are also exploiting the financial system using many of the same tricks, but cryptocurrencies have the advantage of being completely faceless and totally unaccountable. It's the next phase in the evolution of corporate personhood; which was a horrible but very successful idea. It's all about reducing liability. Whatever financial instrument is best at reducing its liability will win.
Don't forget anonymous payments. Lots of vendors selling legally questionable (or illegal) things only take cryptocurrencies. I see that as a huge boon for these industries, who would otherwise have to figure out credit card processing, bank transfers, or being repeatedly shut down by Paypal/Venmo/etc.
One data point: we're launching the NuCypher Ursula service on ethereum mainnet tonight at UTC midnight. So, quite far from dead in some people's minds. :-)
Theres people who use it for certain things, like PornHub just started accepting BTC payments.
But there has never been more institutional and high net worth interest in BTC than now as a value store and adoption for a global reserve currency (we can see this from the institutional gateway inflows). Some recent examples: Microstrategy invested $425 million in BTC over treasuries. Twitter bought $50 million the other week (and Jack Dorsey owns BTC personally). Paul Tudor Jones bought in with about 2% of his total assets. Its gaining traction in this area as a value store.
The idea that the financial system works seems to be a contradiction when you consider that cryptocurrencies (which exist within that system) have been performing extremely well for over a decade. If scams can thrive so well in our system (to the point of becoming worth hundreds of billions of dollars), then how do we know that the biggest corporations are not scams too? How do we know they're not all empty shells? Their earnings (P/E ratios) are very low... And on top of that, I would question the source and legitimacy of these modest earnings.
What kind of system allows scams of this scale to thrive for over a decade? What kind of system supports bailouts of big corporations every few years? Corruption of the media? Corruption of politics?
I don't think any of these fit the description of a 'working system'.
EDIT And what kind of system supports downvoting (thus trying to censor) such a logical comment as this one?
People who are desperate are easier to scam because they 'want to believe.' They're looking for miracles because they think that's all they could hope for. I think it's less a matter of crypto people being gullible and more a matter of desperate people being gullible and consequently becoming crypto people. Organized religions often target the same demographic for the same reason. Born-again preachers love reaching out to broken junkies and alcoholics.
Are these scams hitting "crypto people" or noobs who buy some BTC just to get in on the scam? The gift card scams aren't targeting existing gift cards; they tell people to go out and buy gift cards.
Because it's almost plausible? He's an eccentric billionaire known for his erratic behavior. Maybe one day he really does decide to shower the masses with a paltry (for him) $100k of Bitcoin. "It's weird and tech-y, just like him!"
In the last "doubling" scam I've seen a lot of people literally saying "I don't really believe it but the sum is low enough I'd send it anyway just to see what happens". Get a million of those, and you have some money. I personally don't understand what moves those people but I guess I have to recognize they exist.
So the new thing is that hacking bluecheck account basically gets official Twitter stamp of approval on anything on that twitter account. And since display name and bio can be easily changed, basically the only think bluecheck is confirming is that the handle at one time belonged to a real person. And if somebody chooses a "witty" handle which does not identify the person clearly, you won't even know which one.
Can someone help me here, how do these alarmist articles pop up occassionally as if this hasn't been happening for years.
Why does my twitter experience, logged out, consistently show me the fake crypto scams as the first response to any public figure, with heavy activity and evolving responses, while others get to act like they've never seen this before and must warn everyone.
Any theories?
One theory I have is that most people actually falling for these don't talk about it. Similar to most scams, people just feel too dumb.
I'm seeing an increase in Youtube scams as well where 5k bitcoins are "given away". The video and content look very legit and casual content browsers are easily susceptible.
I observed something similar that began earlier this year. I wrote about it on the Tenable blog. They impersonate many of the people following Trump and engaging with his tweets, irrespective of party affiliation.
jwcrux|5 years ago
We used this botnet as a case study back in 2018 when doing analysis on finding Twitter bots at a large scale. You can find the paper here [0] - the cryptocurrency scam botnet starts on page 28. You can also find the talk here [1] where we go into a little more detail. In full irony, someone tried sharing our research on Twitter, and one of the bots replied to the thread trying to spread the scam.
[0] https://duo.com/assets/pdf/Duo-Labs-Dont-At-Me-Twitter-Bots....
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQsRg0VsYoo
aeternum|5 years ago
All it really takes to solve this is better UI. This is costing some users money and making the experience worse for everyone. Sad that Twitter isn't willing to take this seriously.
pg_bot|5 years ago
From a technical standpoint these types of scam tweets should be easily identified as spam and the fact that they aren't is damning.
avian|5 years ago
coldpie|5 years ago
JumpCrisscross|5 years ago
No, not quite. Total new investment into the space is falling. But it’s nowhere close to zero.
It will probably never totally die. Instead, like baseball cards or beanie babies, it will atrophy into obscurity.
There are enough people who have sunk enough into the project—financially, reputationally—that, barring a depression, it will continue to have backers for at least another few decades. As long as Tether doesn’t overplay its hand, prices should keep the illusion going. It’s a cautionary tale regarding the staying power of purposeless institutions.
zeroxfe|5 years ago
pjkundert|5 years ago
smsm42|5 years ago
OTOH, the regulators are getting quite serious in recognizing crypto - including reporting requirements and enforcement. The era where it was tiny enough the IRS basically didn't care except for tiny amount of outlier cases is gone.
miguelmota|5 years ago
seibelj|5 years ago
cryptica|5 years ago
The vast majority of people are wrong. The financial system doesn't work; it's easy to exploit. It's no coincidence that many cryptocurrency enthusiasts are hackers; they found vulnerabilities in the system and are exploiting it. In the context of our corrupt, dysfunctional system, the value is solid and price will always go up in the long run.
Corporations are also exploiting the financial system using many of the same tricks, but cryptocurrencies have the advantage of being completely faceless and totally unaccountable. It's the next phase in the evolution of corporate personhood; which was a horrible but very successful idea. It's all about reducing liability. Whatever financial instrument is best at reducing its liability will win.
KMnO4|5 years ago
crumbshot|5 years ago
And there remains plenty of interest in academia, there are still many fascinating areas of research in this space.
Shared404|5 years ago
thom|5 years ago
jMyles|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
trident1000|5 years ago
But there has never been more institutional and high net worth interest in BTC than now as a value store and adoption for a global reserve currency (we can see this from the institutional gateway inflows). Some recent examples: Microstrategy invested $425 million in BTC over treasuries. Twitter bought $50 million the other week (and Jack Dorsey owns BTC personally). Paul Tudor Jones bought in with about 2% of his total assets. Its gaining traction in this area as a value store.
cryptica|5 years ago
What kind of system allows scams of this scale to thrive for over a decade? What kind of system supports bailouts of big corporations every few years? Corruption of the media? Corruption of politics? I don't think any of these fit the description of a 'working system'.
EDIT And what kind of system supports downvoting (thus trying to censor) such a logical comment as this one?
fortran77|5 years ago
bigbubba|5 years ago
shoes_for_thee|5 years ago
wmf|5 years ago
Xavdidtheshadow|5 years ago
smsm42|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
smsm42|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
vmception|5 years ago
Can someone help me here, how do these alarmist articles pop up occassionally as if this hasn't been happening for years.
Why does my twitter experience, logged out, consistently show me the fake crypto scams as the first response to any public figure, with heavy activity and evolving responses, while others get to act like they've never seen this before and must warn everyone.
Any theories?
One theory I have is that most people actually falling for these don't talk about it. Similar to most scams, people just feel too dumb.
benvineyard|5 years ago
1MachineElf|5 years ago
sat_nam|5 years ago
https://www.tenable.com/blog/cryptocurrency-scams-fake-givea...
joegaebel|5 years ago
hooper2019|5 years ago
[deleted]
aokiji|5 years ago
[deleted]