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.

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.

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

Also, the reuse of email or any form of contact information on a service/ web hosting or DNS registration is another common opsec oopsie

[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/11/hacker-in-snowflake-exto...

The CFAA[1][2] is an arcane and ancient piece of legislation that could use an overhaul, especially with some of the vague language it contains. A person would definitely want to make sure they are authorized prior to touching a computer or even data that may not have authorization for.

Unauthorized use of a computer is the easiest felony to commit accidentally it would seem. Although in this case I don’t think that’s a legitimate argument to be made. This person or persons knew they were committing crimes.

I’m not defending the hacker either, the quote at the end of the article rings true.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/jm/jm-9-48000-computer-fraud

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

Very chicken and egg this entire field- defending against the spammers while simultaneously operating a “free” system. How to do it without making it prohibitively expensive to join the system…

Any free system will be abused yada yada yada

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_work

Prices aren’t coming down