Poll of the Day > "Web3 is the future!" (FTX scandal)

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWfuDeO9thk

This seems pretty fucking crazy. Possibly $10 billion stolen, a bigger fraud than Enron.
Maybe someone more versed in crypto can provide more detail, but the video was a pretty good summary for those of us who don't bother trying to "learn" the sham that is crypto.

They burned through 9.4 billion and fled the country with the rest.

Needless to say, I think we've proven using blockchains as anything but a corruption-resilient database that handles massive volume from many sources doesn't make sense.

Crypto is good for basically nothing but laundering money past governments if you are trying to flee a country. If at any point you have access to the USD you shouldn't touch it.

First thing you gotta do with new techmologies is start scamming.

https://twitter.com/jimcramer/status/1539532374463102980

lol

Exhibit # 1,236 of "why the fuck does Jim Cramer still have his job, and who are the fucking idiots that actually watch his show (for financial advice, not the ones watching just to clip stuff to dunk on him)?"

Haha crypto.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwXruCO3lXI

10 min video, if you don't want to watch it all, then at least watch from 8:05 to the end, for the epic rant. :D

Crypto dot com and Binance both published their wallets and what was in them. Then they proceeded to move assets out of those wallets, and "accidentally" sent their coins to the wrong wallets.

How the fuck does anyone think this shit is the future of finance?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2ZHs55TMZc

I hope him and his GF at Almeida Research both go to jail
This is hilarious, though

The funniest part is that I'm employed by a cryptocurrency company and am forced to dredge through this balding virgin trash dudebro technology daily. My boss is the definition of the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I can feel him getting more nervous the more I speak directly, but I obviously can't tell him what he already knows in denial.

He keeps talking about this shitcoin that stole all the coding from another shitcoin as if it's the next greatest thing and he has no fucking clue how despicable, scum of the Earth, low IQ shit I find that. Yet here I am, setting up a faucet for this. Most crypto programmers probably feel the same way, not kidding. We're smart enough to understand what's happening and how this works. The people who tell us what to do are not.

streamofthesky posted...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwXruCO3lXI

10 min video, if you don't want to watch it all, then at least watch from 8:05 to the end, for the epic rant. :D

Oh man, that guy knew he wasn't supposed to say that, but he had to. And everyone in the room smiled during Yahoo's "crypto corner". Must be a relief to finally be able to speak his mind like that.

It makes me question everything. Is this even good for my resume?

Why did you get into a crypto company if you aren't a believer in it?

dud posted...

Why did you get into a crypto company if you aren't a believer in it?

Yeah, I'm curious, too. Same for all the other programmers who "feel the same way".
Maybe they figure it's an easy super-high paying job while it lasts, and are just enjoying the ride? In which case...go you, I guess. But don't expect any sympathy when said jobs end as crypto crashes.

I mean, as long as they're getting paid in real money a job is a job.

Yellow posted...

They burned through 9.4 billion and fled the country with the rest.

Needless to say, I think we've proven using blockchains as anything but a corruption-resilient database that handles massive volume from many sources doesn't make sense.

Crypto is good for basically nothing but laundering money past governments if you are trying to flee a country. If at any point you have access to the USD you shouldn't touch it.

Deep down, I suspect everybody knew that in their heart of hearts. Anyway, maybe this will end the fad.

Unfortunately, a lot of assholes running investment portfolios -- including retirement funds -- have bought into crypto, so normal avoidance isn't enough.

dud posted...

Why did you get into a crypto company if you aren't a believer in it?

/story time

While working at a grocery store with no degree, my friends became rich with safemoon and started a company. I was into stocks and was into building my own trading bots for fun, just as an experiment and for fun with a little pipe dream.

I came up with all kinds of scrapers. I know all the tricks they use to derive public opinion, but the one I was into was deriving sentiment on stocks and analyzing if there was any correlation between the attitudes of traders and the movement of stocks. These traders were indexed as well, so any particular poster that was unusually good was picked up by the scanner.

I don't have many friends as I'd rather spend all my time programming projects, but in one discord channel my friend was in I posted my project. Someone was so impressed (my soon to be boss) that he wanted me on board with his new company.

My first task was to reverse engineer the ETH smart contracts involved for currency swaps. This was the most fun I've ever had programming, and I can't even begin to describe how difficult it was. I surpassed the compatibility of mainstream crawlers, by finding patterns analyzing chunks of hexadecimal. I cannot understate how hard this was, but I figured out every single contract I looked at.

The goal of this company was to make a 10% return every month investing. This was nonsense. No one can do that. I am frustrated and bewildered at this point, but I keep my mouth shut. Months go by and the only other employee gets fired for being downright useless. I am not let go, of course, I have promised no such thing. I can deliver software, not profits, so no amount of failure will be on my shoulders, and I refuse to speculate on any crypto purchases. When asked, I say to not buy, and I'm right every time.

At this point I decide to drop a bomb on them. I prove to them that the charts and patterns they use to trade are 100% random. There is no method to apply to the charts that could yield any results. And I have some great graphs I made that I might dig up, but they really are fascinating what I found. It all amounted to typical not-financial-advice crypto streamer chart-watching gibberish. Cup and handle. Death spiral. Breaking resistance. Witchcraft.

At this point, I insist that we need to create a product. If you're going to run a company you need a product. I also think we need to move away from crypto, and focus more on security, so that's what we do now. (without giving away too many details) I have developed a version of Bitwarden that's set to be superior in features and usability, all using local encryption. Sadly, the pit stain of crypto still exists on this product, and my boss's shitcoin fantasies. It supports crypto, which I gladly support, but it markets itself as a crypto product, which I'm not so happy about. It targeted a single small shitcoin community.

So yeah I could be a worse human being. I have more nonsense to touch on but I haven't, like being barked at for trying to share progress with our official Discord server, (which is now a ghost town), but that's not really objective. The dude is as dry and palatable to an audience as a propped-up politician, but insists he does all the PR.

I've done other things though. I made the mnemonic parsing library used by cryptos all over literally 10,000 times faster, using bitshift operations instead of the worst imaginable kind of "1" and "0" string manipulation.

Anyway, what FTX did, Binance does the exact same thing. They are a ticking time bomb as well, and when that happens... well, they are currently 8 times bigger than FTX ever was.

Then there's USDT, the same situation where a CEO is shamelessly sticking their hand in the cookie jar, so not even DEFI is safe from this. Eventually, all cryptos should meet their price correction to reach their true valuation, which is $0, the exact value of the service they provide. Can't even safely provide a proxy for the US dollar.

Binance was just exposed for literally the same thing, having half their assets in their own bs coin (though, they're all bs coins), right? Shouldn't that like...cause customers of theirs to rush for the exits, too?

streamofthesky posted...

Binance was just exposed for literally the same thing, having half their assets in their own bs coin (though, they're all bs coins), right? Shouldn't that like...cause customers of theirs to rush for the exits, too?

There are like different levels of crypto believers, each tier stepping further from reality. At tier one there's the bitcoin/mainstream cypto-currency bro. This bro wants cold offline wallets and will only stick to DEFI exchanges, maybe they buy something online with bitcoin for some reason. It is within the realm of reality, but it is the most difficult tier to get into as a layman.

Next step up is the altcoin believer. These bros think that blockchain will provide an entire ecosystem of separate currencies to serve a different purpose for each, they use DEFI swaps to connect to another user (actually a pool of funds used to represent the other user) to trade crypto. This is essentially every issue the bro had with the stock market, except this time the problems are exaggerated sevenfold. There's absolutely no reason you can believe an altcoin creator won't simply... what's the word... ah, yes, "withdraw", your money, and they have every legal right to. This is what happens 99.9% of the time. Realistically, they know this, and these bros treat it like a gambling habit.

At tier three the bro decides to trust an unregulated bank to replace DEFI, looping all the way back to embracing the supposed issues they had with national currencies sevenfold. It includes all the negative aspects of the last two tiers. This is where the bro has officially left reality and it can only end in one way. It doesn't even involve a blockchain for the most part. This is the most common place for a layman to get involved.

Yellow posted...

So yeah I could be a worse human being. I have more nonsense to touch on but I haven't, like being barked at for trying to share progress with our official Discord server, (which is now a ghost town), but that's not really objective. The dude is as dry and palatable to an audience as a propped-up politician, but insists he does all the PR.

So, help me out.
Is this mostly just people playing pretend being a corporation, or an actual group of people actually making things?

I'm really curious on the hard money side of things, instead of just cryptobros talking about making money, rather than making money.

I barely understood any of that and I work in software dev lol

I'm just your typical web dev JavaScript bitch. Well sort of. I wish I knew more about inner machinations of software like that, though not for something like crypto/Blockchain. I have thought it would be cool to understand how something like a compiler works or to be able to modify an emulator.

Anyways, on topic, I'm sure you could get some boring ass cushy web dev job if you wanted. I don't know if the crypto stuff is gonna become a poison pill for your resume but what you described at least seems like a good story for an interview

dud posted...

I'm just your typical web dev JavaScript bitch.

I'm not, so actually you know more about that than I do, making you probably more employable. I use MVC/Blazor for everything, UI, websites, apps, it's too easy. You could call it a C# bubble I have stretched to its limits. I know C++, Python, and even C, but with the little bit of Javascript I've used I wasn't happy.

C is awful to use, btw. A true dinosaur. My idea of "fun" is getting something done quickly. Really only good for programming some obscure custom hardware.

dud posted...

I have thought it would be cool to understand how something like a compiler works or to be able to modify an emulator.

A compiler simply turns your code words into CPU instructions that move memory around.

so for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { .. }

Converts to

mov 0 into an address that represents i
...
mov i into a cpu register a
mov 1 into a cpu register b
add a and b, output to register c
mov i into a cpu register
mov 10 into a cpu register
do < operation on those, output to register d
do conditional jmp based on whether d is true or false

This is how a compiled language like C or C++ does it. What modern languages do is more complicated, they interpret it and sometimes use a JIT compiler to speed it up while it's running. (Emulation community pioneered JIT)

If you are interested in learning how emulators work you could take a look into CHIP-8, which is a standard learning point for people who want to learn emulation.

I did a small emu for NES, which was very fun but harder than chip-8. I got donkey kong loading the game and getting into the menu select. You can do all this in Javascript, btw. I suggest using Typescript at the very least.

shadowsword87 posted...

So, help me out.
Is this mostly just people playing pretend being a corporation, or an actual group of people actually making things?

I'm really curious on the hard money side of things, instead of just cryptobros talking about making money, rather than making money.

It's two kinds of people. The first group is just people who see all the money being stolen and wish they could be the ones stealing. The true believers are wannabe Bill Gates who actually think crypto will be an entire sector. I've worked with both of these people. One of them basically begged me to make him his little scam project, but he couldn't pull himself away from PUBG for 3 seconds to learn anything other than Google Sites. I wanted to make a fun game and he wanted to keep explaining his revolutionary new economic plans.

Yellow posted...

I prove to them that the charts and patterns they use to trade are 100% random. There is no method to apply to the charts that could yield any results. And I have some great graphs I made that I might dig up, but they really are fascinating what I found. It all amounted to typical not-financial-advice crypto streamer chart-watching gibberish. Cup and handle. Death spiral. Breaking resistance. Witchcraft.

Here are the charts I made, btw. I showed them to each of them and asked them to find patterns, tell me which way the line was heading. They had a definite prediction, and recommendation on whether to buy or sell each time.

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmbBQL1VQwCokkE6Rw1bEkqCyjQ6k2VjNXG92axijhtU36?filename=RandomGraphs.html

On telling them the charts were random, that put a nail in the coffin of the idea they could make money off day trading.

Yes, these charts are completely random. At no point can you make money off any of these fake charts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20BEJouWBgY

Honest question, why does having control over $16 billion make someone a billionaire if you're essentially a bank holding $16 billion of other people's money? At least with normal money if a billionaire usually actually owns the shares that make them rich.

All he had to spend was the cut he got from the fees?

He's also the biggest thief in all of history, probably.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tdsv88mCTLE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJn6IiYid6A

The amount of shady financial bs the Fed's cheap money programs have enabled is incomprehensible. We're only scratching the surface, still