It's naive to begin adoption of the most failproof and performant settlement layer (especially with L2s), like MasterCard and Visa have made moves toward?
I didnt read much of the thread but I will assume that most of the people here is aware of how every single NFT game is just a ponzi.
But I've lived myself, what the author mentions as a "way to lift people out of poverty.", from the era before NFT or "play to earn" games existed.
I come from Venezuela, a full 3rd world country and I was "lucky" to play an MMO (lineage 2) during my young days and somehow I was good at it, i invested so many hours on it and managed to get into top tier guilds and worlds 1st event, and somehow, my character and my items were worth thousands of dollars in the market, and suddenly i went from being a 14 y.o boy sitting in pc, to bringing more money in 1 week to my family, than my entire family together for 1 year.
I could understand that, while all other people on the game were playing for fun, it became my job, a job that actually got me and my family out of poverty...
At the time (2007) there were a lot of chinese "farmers", and people used to make fun of them, not only fun but the rest of the players were blantantly denigrating towards them, at 1st I didnt understand but once that I became a non-chinese farmer, I realized how It was a really good thing to do.
Eventually I started botting, I bought more PCs and had a full army of bots, I kept making more and more money, and it helped me and my family leave the country and pretty much bought a house, a car and paid my family expenses for like 4 years out of lineage 2 adena farming.
Also, scripting the bots pretty much got me to learn programming and english, so what I am now it's pretty much the result of some guy from chicago offering me 20$ in paypal for an item i had in my inventory that i got it while killing a monster, it all started there, that litle forbidden transaction in an MMO, changed my life completely
So, even tho it was like a job for me, I never saw it like a job, even tho it gave me a lot of money, i never got into the game as a way to get money, i was just a young kid trying to have some fun..
But now, I get really sad everytime I see those ponzi NFT games, that only sell the idea of getting rich, and I get even more sad when I see tons of venezuelan youngsters fall for it, honestly, they are just playing with their desperation.
That's an awesome story. While I've never lived in poverty, I got my first taste of making money by making bot for a FaceBook game in 2008 (WarBook, if anyone remembers that). I only made around 2,000 USD but that experience really changed my life.
Esa era la mejor era para ese tipo de juegos, entretenidos y se sacaba un rialero, por aqui haciamos lo mismo, con Silkroad y Mu.
Esos de ahorita son diferente, parece hasta macabro. Dan "becas" para que otros "jueguen" y ganen por ellos prometiendoles una parte de la ganancia, eso si, siempre y cuando el nft no caiga.
De vez en cuando conocidos me preguntan que si es bueno entrar en esos juegos nft a todos les digo que ni locos se metan ahi, da mas plata y es mas estable sembrar.
It seems like a bold statement to claim every NFT game is a ponzi. Some existing games are looking into incorporating NFTs to help facilitate the kind of transactions you previously needed paypal for. It seems a bit dismissive to hand-wave any games that want to incorporate the technology as not being able to operate sustainably.
Not really. Yugoslavia, another socialist country, was probably the most prominent European country that identified as "third-world".
"Second world" was basically the Warsaw Pact, China and their other satellites, not just any socialist state.
so the guy went ahead and stole 154 millions from a business bank account, deposited it in coinbase and he just casually bought almost 4k btc and then withdrew it and coinbase didnt even say a word?
and then I see poeple defending btc price action being legit
if this guy was able to do that, in a company that is part of nasdaq, has sec watching it and so on, imagine whats happening on binance and all those others offshore/shady exchanges
The guy was caught in short order so he really wasn't able to do it. You can steal money pretty easily in the traditional financial system with a simple forged check. Money will likely go through initially but you also will likely be caught in short order.
He already had the BTC in a cold wallet, meaninig that the whole process was completed (deposit USD into coinbase, exchange to BTC, withdraw it)
My point is, coinbase still allowed 154millions USD to be washed on it's exchange. By a random guy who clearly didnt even bother cover his back, imagine what actual organized crime is doing with offshores exchanges.
You can't use "someone being caught" as evidence of "how easy it is not to get caught" - because you would also treat NOT getting caught to prove the same thing. This would mean that no matter what evidence you observe you would reach the same conclusion... which means the article made no difference to you.
To go into more detail, claims like "he was only barely caught" shadow the possibilities of him being caught later, which never had a chance to be realized. i.e. it may appear that he was caught randomly but we owe it to truth to at least dig into what would have happened if that had failed - and that likely requires a domain expert to know the actual security measures in place.
In my highly regulated and audited work, there are cases where people on money laundering lists initiate a transaction, and we can’t block it because it would tip them off that they have been detected, in theory some other department or organization is supposed to follow up
They traced him, because, it seems that he wasn't the smartest criminal in the planet.
Just the fact that he was in tokyo (japan), instead of a non US aligned country, such as Russia or China, that he had his private keys easy accesible and that he stayed in BTC instead of going for another crypto more anon friendly, says a lot of the stupid nature of this "criminal"
But once again, my whole point is, coinbase allowed a random person to deposit 154 millions USD and withdraw 3.8k btc with absolutely no problems? and in a quickly way, according to the original article
I think its safe to assume that the banks said, okay the money went to coinbase, and coinbase just said yeah about that, he used the money to buy BTC and withdrew it to this wallet and thats about it
the guy was located cause he didnt even try to hide himself, the rest is history.
my point remains, if this, that was a such dumb crime, managed to convert the stolen funds into BTC using coinbase with absolutely no problems, then its easy to assume that real and strong money going to biggest offshores exchanges is from illicit sources.
Im not holding anyone responsible, im just mentioning that, it's obvious that a lot of the money flowing into crypto its not legal, this sets a clear example of how easy stolen money was washed using coinbase without much problems, its a clear indicator for the big picture, when exchanges like binance has 10x more volume, where do u think that money is really comming from? and that is actually happening on those exchanges with money flowing?
You're making a point about how it was so easy for the perp to get money into crypto while seemingly ignoring the fact that it was equally easy for him to move the money around via the traditional banking system.
Must has been a really shitty bank. And they do exist for sure. Lot of people were at fault here. I know if it were my bank, I would be getting a call from them asking them if something is up. "Hey, just wanted to make sure, you are actually authorizing all this cash right?"
Exactly. This is probably the best outcome for the owner of the money. I remember reading a story about how the government recovered supposedly millions of dollars worth of diamonds but was unable to unload those diamonds for anywhere the amount the criminal bought it for. I would have thought the government would force the people who sold the diamonds to take it back and reimburse the government in full.
> Just the fact that he was in tokyo (japan), instead of a non US aligned country, such as Russia or China,
Coinbase does not serve PRC citizens or Russians (see https://www.coinbase.com/places). Exactly so that any money laundering can be caught by US government.
What should have coinbase done? $150m is not a biggest of sums they handle daily for random persons. All you have to have is a bank account and a succesful deposit. Why should coinbase even care, if all regulatory rules were fulfilled?
Why should I care that some people I am helping are sometimes criminals, maybe
Don’t put words in a mouth that never said it.
And as a person (citizen), yes. As a business, one doesn’t care if bread or guns they make help potential criminals to live or murder. If you don’t ask your customers if they are “bad guys who have all the paperwork but still stolen this money” at the doorstep, don’t blame others. Regulations are there for you to not trouble your head about it, just follow them.
I’d like to see statistics on businesses doing beyond-regulatory investigations on who their clients are. Even anecdotal ones will do, just to learn what you mean.
Do note that the Coinbase business account was created by him fraudulently in the name of the subsidiary of the company (Sony Life) , but actually he had no authorization to do so. [0]
Because the fiat was easily recoverable in the traditional financial system. If they had not caught the guy, or he had already moved the BTC to a mafia-run account, not one he still controlled, it could be lost forever - The great 'benefit' of BTC is that the government has a hard time seizing it.
> Because the fiat was easily recoverable in the traditional financial system
This is a downright lie, I’m not sure why people keep repeating it. Doesn’t stand to the least bit of scrutiny, BEC schemes are stealing billions and billions via the traditional financial system. Once that money gets sent overseas, nothing is easy.
Hard work to stop it? There was a global insurance company that sent an international wire, at least two banks with multiple transactions, and coinbase which is a KYC compliant publicly traded company. Despite ample opportunity, no one stopped this, rather they all facilitated it. This all originated from an email containing fraudulent wire instructions, trying to pin all this on cryptocurrency is less sound than blaming email.
Despite all the deflection, law enforcement was able to recover the Bitcoin. Contrary to your point law enforcement and regulators alike have successfully brought legal actions (civil) and prosecutions (criminal) in the blockchain space just as they have against traditional institutions.
The insurance company, banks, and coinbase are all to happy cryptocurrency was involved at some point so they can do some magic hand waving, and blame cryptocurrency. I would ask why bother, but obviously it’s a successful PR campaign to excuse their own ineptitude.
I worked at a company headquarters and some guy in accounting just switched the banking info for one of the vendors to his own bank info. He stole money for literally years. I don't know how it worked for so long because somehow the vendor must've been getting paid, maybe he was also falsifying invoices or something. I dunno. Anyways, no crypto and this was the corporate headquarters for a company most Americans would know.
I don't think ppl appreciate just how big crypto is. $150 million is tiny compared to how big crypto is ($2.3 trillion). We're taking $60 billion of BTC being traded daily. And same for tether and eth. It's just insane. So it's possible that $150 million could slip through. Crypto is huge. Way bigger than online gambling, sports betting, etc.
The company I work at trades crypto deposited/withdrawn from real USD and EUR bank accounts as it would be with any stock exchange broker account, all legal. You may now reduce your fiction percentage to 99.9…9% at least, unless I’m lying for some conspiracy reason.
multiplying the current price by the number of coins just doesn't mean anything
It is also true for any regular stock. “Market cap” is just an indicator value of a stock at a given time, not the value, and no one expects all of it to be sold at that sum, because of market dynamics. The resulting number doesn't represent anything real regardless of the asset class. The only difference between crypto and some stock market traded company shares is that the latter has usually a known non-zero value at the assets level, everything else is just a thin air of trust and expectations. You may see cryptohead-ance as crypto’s base assets.
Yes, The market cap of a company is an indicator, but it is an indicator of something real: Acquiring the full ownership of the company.
The market cap of crypto doesn't even indicate anything. "Buying every bitcoin" doesn't mean anything. There's no value in doing so, unlike buying an entire company.
I think you err in this part. It doesn’t mean anything to you, if you’d buy that. Well, buying all of rice doesn’t mean anything to me (I can’t eat it for unrelated reasons and have no other uses beyond that). But other people value some properties of crypto, in the same way they value e.g. Intel much more than its raw factory floors and assets. Nobody would buy crypto if they thought it is worthless. But they have thought otherwise. They bought it at 0.00001, at 0.1, at 100 and at 60000 USD. You are basically saying that you don’t need crypto, even all of it for zero money. Well, this is a personal choice, not something one has to argue with or prove to others. People define value by supply and demand. Market cap is an aggregate indicator of their supply/demand equilibrium times the circulation volume.
No, it still means nothing. The essential difference here is that if you buy all the stocks of a company, you own the company. The company still exists, it is still working, but it is now all yours, and you can control it as you'd like.
If you buy every bitcoin, you have nothing. I don't meant that in the sense that bitcoin isn't backed by anything, I mean that in the sense that bitcoin is only meaningful when it is traded between people. If you buy every single bitcoin, bitcoin is dead. It is a nonsensical thing to do. Trying to figure out the price for which it can be done is nonsense, as well.
A person drained money from my account with a forged check. I obtained an image of the check. The payor name did not match mine. The address was in another state. The check paper was very different from mine. The signature was not my name. The handwriting was not mine.
The only thing that was mine on the check was the account number.
Yet the check sailed through and was honored and my account debited.
The bank insisted this was all my fault. The bank insisted they couldn't do anything about it. The bank insisted I call this number, which simply gave me more runaround. So I decided to camp out in the branch manager's office, until they gave up and refunded me the lost money.
The cake topper on all this is they then tried to sell me expensive check "security" paper.
I had a check stolen in the mail. It was cashed in the Dominican Republic. It was a real check but not to them. My bank stopped it, alerted me and blocked the transfer. I guess it depends on the bank a bit, but that had to suck.
What was surprising to me, is that my legacy account# were still in the system (My bank was bought and then bought... 4 times.. over the years).
The traditional similar thing would be the bank account that is emptied.
A forged check would not be sufficient at all. Even for 0,05% of the amount stolen here and it would only be where checks are valid ( would be worthless outside the US)
"Thirty-five fraudulent instructions were issued by security hackers via the SWIFT network to illegally transfer close to US$1 billion from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York account belonging to Bangladesh Bank, the central bank of Bangladesh. Five of the thirty-five fraudulent instructions were successful in transferring US$101 million, with US$20 million traced to Sri Lanka and US$81 million to the Philippines. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York blocked the remaining thirty transactions, amounting to US$850 million, due to suspicions raised by a misspelled instruction.[2] All the money transferred to Sri Lanka has since been recovered. However, as of 2018 only around US$18 million of the US$81 million transferred to the Philippines has been recovered.[3] Most of the money transferred to the Philippines went to four personal accounts, held by single individuals, and not to companies or corporations"
Not sure if you are trying to make a joke that I'm missing? If not..no, the GP comment is referring to traditional financial institutions improperly wiring money.
I get that joke, basically people that criticize the entire concept of crypto assets frequently point to thefts of crypto assets and never apply the same standard to financial systems that they respect because they are completely unknowledgeable of the frequency and size of unreversible transfers in the traditional financial system.
and then they point to the user experience of how banks at least pretend like the money was returned, which is convenient for the user, something that is also possible to do with using an optional bank custodying crypto deposits.
>people that criticize the entire concept of crypto assets frequently point to thefts of crypto assets and never apply the same standard to financial systems that they respect because they are completely unknowledgeable of the frequency and size of unreversible transfers in the traditional financial system
My comment was not intended to promote the idea that the existing financial system is comparable in the frauds and crimes that happen, just that it's an overstatement to say people never steal millions in an irreversible way.
He opened the Coinbase account under the bank's name, as a business account, with forged documents. A regular Coinbase account would never be able to do this. Coinbase was fooled in this scheme, but so were both banks, so this is not a case of Coinbase being uniquely vulnerable. And the Bitcoin shenanigans did not help this guy at all in the end, so this is not a case of crypto being useful for crime either.
What about this was supposed to raise questions? Large corporations engage in large transactions all the time. Elon Musk decides Tesla is going to buy $1.5 Billion in Bitcoin, so Tesla buys $1.5 Billion in Bitcoin. An electronics manufacturer needs millions of dollars worth of gold in order to make gold contacts for millions of electronic devices, so a truck appears containing millions of dollars worth of gold. It's not even weird.
The difference in this case is that he allegedly wasn't authorized, which means he's going to jail. But how is the bank supposed to know that?
Given the number of garbage companies that have managed and continue to manage to get themselves listed on Nasdaq or NYSE via reverse mergers, a listing on a US stock exchange just ain't what it used to be.
In the Chinese reverse merger fraud of the late 2000s/early 2010s there were hundreds of bogus companies that walked off with at least half a trillion dollars. Roughly 10X the size of the Madoff fraud.
Nasdaq currently has 4,826 listed companies and NYSE has 3,163. So yes, I would say it's significant when the frauds are within one order of magnitude of the total.
UDPR is definitely your friend. Your domain info should have been private anyways, too late now. One question is what content do you have on the domain today and does it relate/similar to the .net domain? If your .com is being used for something beyond a parking page, the .net don't really have a chance so let them file a UDPR.
For all that lag, I was expecting a lot more than some simple animations. And that scrolljacking is by far the worst I've ever experienced. I have to scroll three times to switch to the next section. Can't even manually drag the little scrollspy thing. Atrocious.
Here’s the developer https://www.laniche.com .
Their other websites don’t seem to be as laggy but there is a theme of animating *every* element and embedding videos.
> But this video could be about any new game (online mmorpg) nowdays and be still the same
Let's go ahead and address the smaller point here first. Genshin Impact isn't an MMORPG. But that's not the biggest issue here.
The biggest issue here is that Genshin's gambling model is not the same as any new game.
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The difference between Genshin Impact (which I played for a week, and spent about $100 on) and other games, is that you must gamble for a chance to progress in a meaningful way. To say this is an issue endemic to all new games simply isn't correct.
Most games these days to have some sort of microtransaction model. That's true. However the core gameplay and progression system in Genshin is locked behind loot crates. This isn't the model 'any new game' uses.
There are two main ways games use microtransactions: cosmetic, and game-impacting.
Cosmetic microtransactions make cosmetic changes in your character or the world around it. No impact on gameplay other than you find something new more aesthetically pleasing.
Then we have the game-impacting transactions. Most games that allow game-impacting transactions (i.e. are 'pay 2 win'), allow you to essentially sacrifice time for money. You can spend hours in game grinding for an objective, or you can spend real life currency to automatically unlock the objective.
What Genshin does is different from most games. There are certain important ways in which you simply cannot progress without spending money. And everything is locked behind a loot box. That's the problem. The problem is with the loot boxes and gambling; not exchanging time for money.
There was a game that I spent over $2,000 on. It was an online 'free-to-play' game with over 70 characters. Each character was around $15-20. Or you could play the game for about 40 (real) hours to grind up enough currency to unlock one. This was fine though, because you picked which character you unlocked and it was unlocked.
Genshin makes you buy boxes with a chance to drop what you want it to drop. That's what makes it pernicious.
Which parts are inaccessible without paying? Maybe I haven't progressed far enough (haven't finished the Liyue Archon quest) but all the money I spent so far is just for weapons and additional characters. They make it easier to defeat enemies but defeating enemies without those upgrades is still doable.
I don't mean that the game is unwinnable (to the extent that such games are winnable) without spending money. But the core mechanic is swapping between different characters for combos and synergies. You're severely hampered without paying to get other characters and increase your weapons.
I remember getting Hu Tao when she was just released. She was (and I guess still is?) one of the best characters. But I didn't have the roster to really play her to her full potential. So it's back to the loot crates to try and pull other characters that synergize with her and help her reach her potential.
Being unable to maximize a specific character's potential is pretty far from where you said "there are certain important ways in which you simply cannot progress without spending money."
There's nothing in the main content that requires you to have a 5* character/weapon, even though it's certainly easier with them.
Hm? I'm super-lazy game mechanic wise. I spend money. But 3 of the chacters on my team are free, and I almost never use combos because I can't be bothered to do complex stuff. I'm sure I don't maximize my damage-per-second but I still enjoy the game and defeating nearly all enemies is completely doable even with casual gaming skills.
If the critique is "I can't maximize to the absolute highest stats without paying" -- then sorry, I think that's an attitude full of false entitlement.
Heck, look at this frickin video about how they produced the Liyue OST: https://youtu.be/pFrKZxStL_U
They commissioned a massive Shanghai orchestra team to produce excellent music. And we get all this amazing stuff for free.
Pay-to-win and pay-to-have-fun are actually pretty distinct game-design philosophies. There are a lot of free-to-play games that are pay-to-win for at least some element of the game; but where the game can still be fun without paying.
What usually happens in pay-to-win designs is that the game can be played, if more slowly, in a fun way, for as long as you’re playing against other regular people who also aren’t paying-to-win. This lasts until you get good enough to end up on the competitive-ranked top leaderboard; at which point the only way to advance on that leaderboard is to pay for extra-fancy items/equipment, because everyone else on it already did. (Analogy: doping in sports. Nobody in the minor leagues dopes, because nobody else does, so there’s no need to do it. But everybody at the top does, because everybody else at the top does, and so doping is the only way to even stay viable in the major league. The sport is “fun”, without doping, right up until you hit the majors. Then, suddenly, having any more fun requires doping. That’s traditional pay-to-win.)
With traditional pay-to-win game design, you can still extract fun from the game without paying, if you treat “the game” as being just the subset of the game that lasts until you end up in the major league with all the doping players. If you think of that point as the point where you “beat the game”, put it down, and don’t play it any more — and the game up until that point was fun and worth playing — then it wasn’t a waste of time to have played it.
Genshin Impact is apparently not this type of game, though. It’s the other kind of free-to-play game: the kind where you’re at no point having fun if you’re not paying. (But, of course, which tries to give the illusion that you can have fun, sort of like a casino tries to give you the illusion that you can have an edge.)
It takes a pretty deep dive into a free-to-play game to figure out whether there’s a subset it that is fun to work through without paying. So I don’t fault the author for needing to spend an hour on the topic to properly prove their thesis out.
Haven’t clicked the link or even played Genshin but I believe the novelty is it’s:
1) a proper singleplayer JRPG style game,
2) in “App” format with gacha mechanic.
Previously 1) and 2) didn’t occur in a same title. If it’s an App, it would have extremely simplistic gameplay with gacha, or if it’s a JRPG, there were at most DLCs and certainly not gacha. But they just made it no longer the case.
and even if it was available to register, they can reserve words for their own usage before launching it
and if you mean, someone else actually doing the paperwork to get the .bing tld for them, it wouldnt ever be approved.