Crypto, it’s where con artists go to convince bleeding-heart-libertarians they were unfairly banned from the financial system and should have a second chance at running their scams.
If you could own color on the blockchain—and earn royalties from it each time an NFT that uses those colors trades, which colors would you mint? This is what we're going to make possible at the upcoming @colordotmuseum NFT market.
Okay so I watched that whole video, and the entire thing is terrifying from beginning to end, but here is my biggest takeaway from the whole thing:
The stupid ugly monkey image isn't even part of the NFT? It's just a link to the image?! He talks about "link rot" which is a very real thing, and a problem even in the free (as in free beer) web. If I'm spending large amounts of dollars on a token which points to a URL, I want to fucking know, who owns the server of the URL? Who is responsible for making sure it doesn't move or change or go away?
What the fuck? How stupid are these people? Am I missing something?
I’m not really awake so this could be wrong but from a bit of searching it would appear that the data block size of an Ethereum token is 32 bytes.
While there appears to be a linking system that allows you to store gigabytes of data, it’s done in 32 byte chunks and each chunk has gas fees attached. So images *could* be stored on the chain but the fees to process them would be astronomical.
Yes, they are paying for a link to an image and hoping everyone will agree that that means the image that was at that link when they paid is also ‘theirs’.
Which really hits home some of the self-selecting aspects. Some of this is meant to be dumb to weed out those who ask questions and sow negative thoughts instead of getting in the lambo rocket to the moon!
I'm just spit-balling here, but maybe a 32-byte hash of the image? I'm even wiling to give the benefit of the doubt that people much smarter than I more knowledgeable about this topic have already figured out why that won't work. But that benefit does not extend to anybody that suggests a URL as a viable alternative. I'm going to need to see a white paper or something at a minimum.
I'm just spit-balling here, but maybe a 32-byte hash of the image? I'm even wiling to give the benefit of the doubt that people much smarter than I more knowledgeable about this topic have already figured out why that won't work. But that benefit does not extend to anybody that suggests a URL as a viable alternative. I'm going to need to see a white paper or something at a minimum.
I expect there's a hash that can be put into a URL, like boredapeyachtclub.com/ape/<hash>/, and that's how you access your NFT image.
So, that might just be a 32-byte hash of the image, or something semi-related, or not at all.
The blockchain is supposed to be freely available and can be read with the right tools, but I can't be bothered to research it.
Using a DOI would make more sense than a URL, do any NFTs at least do that?
According to the video and this thread (which combined make up 100% of what I know about it) you can have any data that fits in 32-bytes, and a URL is just one example of what people use. He also mentioned something that I think was a four-letter acronym beginning with the letter I? ISSP? Something like that, I don't remember, but it's supposed to be slightly more robust because it's distributed more like a torrent. So as long as someone still has it, it's good, even if the original gets taken down. Even that's still not 100% reliable, of course, but I'm still gagging at the thought that anyone at all would spend actual money on a token that just refers to a regular web link.
I am terribly simplifying it, but as close as I can get is: The image you see is, uh, like a receipt. It's not the item itself, it is a copyable proof of purchase of some other virtual item that was actually paid for. Except your monkey picture is not nearly as useful as a receipt.
The best part is watching Reddit accounts (which can be traced) give each other terrible tax advice which amounts to fraud.
People who have never had money before are discovering capital gains taxes and calling them unfair and it's *hilarious.*
— The Call is Coming from Inside the Nash (@Nash076) February 1, 2022
I mean, even if you're speculating on currency exchange rates on REAL currency - dollars, pounds, euros - and make a profit, *you still get taxed for that.*
Even I know that shit!
— The Call is Coming from Inside the Nash (@Nash076) February 1, 2022
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
If the criminals are jumping ship, should we be worried?
At the time of the 2016 hack Bitcoins highest price was 40x lower than today. Had the money been laundered soon after the hack they might have disapeared into the night, but after letting them sit, they got greedy, saw the literal billions they were sitting on and had to try to pull it out before the crash.
If that wasn’t criminal enough, Morgan went around convincing old white CEOs they should rap to be hip.
That Razzlekhan vid is certainly a thing that exists.
That is one of the worst things that ever happened.
Wow - just wow. Terrible people are just so very confident.
Considering that Bitcoin's records are public and traceable, why did they think that "laundering" through a series of BTC transactions would make it safe to cash out into accounts with their names on it?
That Razzlekhan vid is certainly a thing that exists.
That is one of the worst things that ever happened.
Wow - just wow. Terrible people are just so very confident.
Considering that Bitcoin's records are public and traceable, why did they think that "laundering" through a series of BTC transactions would make it safe to cash out into accounts with their names on it?
I haven't read the article, so I have no idea how they tried to launder the BTC. But there are ways to do it. There are decentralized exchanges where you can deposit BTC without providing any ID. Then you could use the BTC to buy one of the cryptocurrencies that do provide anonymity in transactions, like Monero and then send to another exchange, transfer back to BTC and withdraw to a brand new wallet.
I'm no expert, so maybe such things are also traceable somehow. I expect they did something stupid along the way.
I haven't read the article, so I have no idea how they tried to launder the BTC. But there are ways to do it.
I haven’t read any complex details but it does appear they tried to wash it around and the investigators traced some back as it doesn’t appear they tried to launder it once out of the crypto and just dumped to their own accounts, but what got them was they found and decrypted a file on cloud storage that linked a ton of addresses they were watching to them.
So it really sounds like they put their scheme into a document and uploaded it to the cloud assuming whatever encryption they were using was unbreakable.