A lot of this rings true for me. Myself and maybe 40 other individuals all participated in what now in retrospect was an obvious Ponzi scheme - see SEC vs. Shavers (0)
I even have IRC transcripts to this day where I would ask the dude “this isn’t a scam right?” and I would be reassured until the next day and I’d think about it more, ask more questions and then deposit more damn monies! The greed will subvert all logic if the daily vig is high enough. Or it did to me and I learned an extremely valuable and costly lesson.
Don’t be greedy. Anything that’s too good to be true in investment terms is exactly that: too good to be true. Anyone that can pay 1% interest daily doesn’t need your money. In retrospect it’s obvious and some of the people participating back then were screaming “ponzi” while depositing more and more possibly trying to break it to prove the point. Eventually it got too big and broke.
“Break it to prove a point” would be an accurate description of your average Bitcoin dweeb in 2012-2014 or so. I spent considerable time Sybil attacking and dusting every namecoin address I could at one point. Not for any specific reason just because I could.
After the smoke cleared I punished myself for years, volunteering for things I had no business getting involved in. I hated that I allowed myself to be scammed but it was a multi-year “friendship” that developed pseudo-anonymously over IRC. I don’t make new friends on the internet anymore because I can’t verify authenticity or identity these days unless I can touch you and see you.
Back then it was $7500 I didn’t actually work to earn and I was just letting it ride for 1% interest daily, compounded. I was famously asked on IRC how much I lost and my answer was and still is “more than car, less than a house” - not an attempt to minimize it but to quantify it.
Trendon did his 18 months and if he’s reading this - Yo dawg please stop skipping out on your apartment rent and stay out of small claims court bro, seriously grow tf up.
Court transcript is a wild read if you can find it. Bitcoin is possibly money today because of this case (and by extension, my actions) was filed in Texas where this guy wiped his AWS account, stonewalled both the SEC and FBI on discovery and attempted the defense “Bitcoin isn’t money, I did nothing illegal”
That defense didn’t work.
In any case the parent comment rings true:
-Escalation of trust
-Pushing boundaries to find if they exist
-Friend-like communication in what should be a business relationship
-Trust networks and/or referrals to participate
-“sold out” “sorry not accepting new customers” are the best “For Sale” advertisements
-Betting bigger or digging a deeper hole
I went off script a bit here, apologies, but the comment triggered a brain dump. People get scammed for different reasons.
Still rocking my iPhone XR with zero plans to change or upgrade phones. If I did or were forced to upgrade I would most likely go for something like this or an older 12 or 14 with a few features as possible.
Yeah unfortunately I've spent a good bit of time talking to Grok (v2 I guess) and I agree with you. The commenter asking people not be political would be the same commenter that seems the most dismissive of any criticism and coincidentally also the most political. Grok is generally dismissive of any criticism(s) against certain parties, even when presenting facts.
I realized there’s more to lose personally and less to gain by putting my thoughts and writing and how to’s out there for free on the internet. Especially now that AI is stealing (that’s harsh, maybe ingesting?) anything that isn’t nailed down.
What really changed everything was all the Chinese web traffic around 2014 on the blog posts that included command by command instructions on how to mine Bitcoin headless under Ubuntu.
My paranoia is singular and began 10+ years ago but I do not see the benefit to blogging (for free) on the internet.
I’m also not job hunting or looking to network with anyone. I’m not interested in elevating my e-status and I have no wares to hawk. I understand though that other people do need to “sell themselves” for whatever reason on the internet.
This would be my elegant solution, something like an endless recursion with a gzip bomb at the end if I can identify your crawler and it’s that abusive. Would it be possible to feed an abusing crawler nothing but my own locally-hosted LLM gibberish?
But then again if you’re in the cloud egress bandwidth is going to cost for playing this game.
Better to just deny the OpenAI crawler and send them an invoice for the money and time they’ve wasted. Interesting form of data warfare against competitors and non competitors alike. The winner will have the longest runway
It wouldn’t even necessarily need to be a real GZip bomb. Just something containing a few hundred kb of seemingly new and unique text that’s highly compressible and keeps providing “links” to additional dynamically generated gibberish that can be crawled. The idea is to serve a vast amount of poisoned training data as cheaply as possible. Heck, maybe you could even make a plugin for NGINX to recognize abusive AI bots and do this. If enough people install it then you could provide some very strong disincentives.
I will consciously alter the way in which I write wordz on le intranetz to make it more difficult to single me out as a Vietnamese female. I’m guessing not everyone puts this much thought into making words for posterity :-)
It used to be a fun lab prank to set text filters on browsers of unattended laptops, like swapping all gendered words. A colleague spent a week in an alternate universe before he realized something was amiss when he read a movie review for "The Lady of the Rings".
The previous Krebs article [1] on this walks through the opsec mistake(s) but it always comes down to email address re-use and nickname/ handle re-usage. As more data breaches happen the likelihood of an opsec mistake increases. Once a handle is burned it’s best to never re-use it again… ever. Even if it’s been a decade.
Also, the reuse of email or any form of contact information on a service/ web hosting or DNS registration is another common opsec oopsie
I even have IRC transcripts to this day where I would ask the dude “this isn’t a scam right?” and I would be reassured until the next day and I’d think about it more, ask more questions and then deposit more damn monies! The greed will subvert all logic if the daily vig is high enough. Or it did to me and I learned an extremely valuable and costly lesson.
Don’t be greedy. Anything that’s too good to be true in investment terms is exactly that: too good to be true. Anyone that can pay 1% interest daily doesn’t need your money. In retrospect it’s obvious and some of the people participating back then were screaming “ponzi” while depositing more and more possibly trying to break it to prove the point. Eventually it got too big and broke.
“Break it to prove a point” would be an accurate description of your average Bitcoin dweeb in 2012-2014 or so. I spent considerable time Sybil attacking and dusting every namecoin address I could at one point. Not for any specific reason just because I could.
After the smoke cleared I punished myself for years, volunteering for things I had no business getting involved in. I hated that I allowed myself to be scammed but it was a multi-year “friendship” that developed pseudo-anonymously over IRC. I don’t make new friends on the internet anymore because I can’t verify authenticity or identity these days unless I can touch you and see you.
Back then it was $7500 I didn’t actually work to earn and I was just letting it ride for 1% interest daily, compounded. I was famously asked on IRC how much I lost and my answer was and still is “more than car, less than a house” - not an attempt to minimize it but to quantify it.
Trendon did his 18 months and if he’s reading this - Yo dawg please stop skipping out on your apartment rent and stay out of small claims court bro, seriously grow tf up.
(0) https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...
Court transcript is a wild read if you can find it. Bitcoin is possibly money today because of this case (and by extension, my actions) was filed in Texas where this guy wiped his AWS account, stonewalled both the SEC and FBI on discovery and attempted the defense “Bitcoin isn’t money, I did nothing illegal”
That defense didn’t work.
In any case the parent comment rings true:
-Escalation of trust -Pushing boundaries to find if they exist -Friend-like communication in what should be a business relationship -Trust networks and/or referrals to participate -“sold out” “sorry not accepting new customers” are the best “For Sale” advertisements -Betting bigger or digging a deeper hole
I went off script a bit here, apologies, but the comment triggered a brain dump. People get scammed for different reasons.