News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by ronsor on Thursday April 25, 2019 @06:36PM (#19753143)
Cryptocurrency exchanges seem to be full of fraud and deception.
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by hendzen on Thursday April 25, 2019 @08:20PM (#19753771)
Speaking as someone who was deeply interested in bitcoin in ~2013, cryptocurrency today is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. When someone tells me today that they are working on something related to crypto I make a mental note to never work with them or take anything they do seriously.
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by asenna on Friday April 26, 2019 @12:10AM (#19754809)
This quite an ignorant comment. I've been working with Blockchain tech (Crypto by extension) for a while now and there's a lot of experimenting, genuine projects being built right now. A lot of smart people are in this space building solutions. Major companies like Samsung / Facebook have teams working on PoCs.

Unfair to imply that everyone in Crypto is selling snake oil.

Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by hocuspocus on Friday April 26, 2019 @05:21AM (#19755855)
> Major companies like Samsung / Facebook have teams working on PoCs.

Samsung has entire teams working on PoCs for just about anything. Including a lot of terrible ideas that end up in the trash (I personally worked on some of them :)

Facebook wanting to enter payments and money transfers through Whatsapp makes a lot of sense. But the fact it might be backed by some internal and centralized stablecoin is completely irrelevant to end-users.

Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by lalaland1125 on Friday April 26, 2019 @01:24AM (#19755046)
> Unfair to imply that everyone in Crypto is selling snake oil.

So, who isn't? Look throughout the blockchain ecosystem and all you will see are scams, illegal activity and get rich quick fools. I have personally yet to see a use of blockchain tech for useful legal purposes. Yes, you will see some companies "announce" that they are "investigating" blockchain or whatnot to get some free PR, but you don't ever see them actually release anything useful.

(I fully accept that blockchain has revitalized criminal enterprises such as child pornography, extortion, and Ponzi schemes, but I don't see any reason to celebrate that).

Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by tim333 on Friday April 26, 2019 @07:18AM (#19756307)
There seems to be a real project afoot with the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp but I'll give you that a) it hasn't released and b) they could probably do the same with MySQL https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2019/04/16/b...

It is hard finding legal and useful. There's a lot of legal but not that great like gambling.

Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by deveac on Friday April 26, 2019 @02:00PM (#19760216)
So, who isn't? Look throughout the blockchain ecosystem and all you will see are scams, illegal activity and get rich quick fools.

A tiny fraction of companies in the blockchain ecosystem:

Pfizer, Fidelity, Microsoft, Rutgers University, T-Mobile, National Bank of Canada, John Hancock Life Insurance, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, Ernst and Young.

If all you are able to see when you look at blockchain engineers are scammers, lawbreakers, and "get rich quick" fools, I'll humbly suggest that you haven't really been looking.

Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by avinium on Friday April 26, 2019 @02:34AM (#19755278)
I feel the same about 99% of crypto participants - but you can't deny there are a handful of legitimate areas. IPFS and Golem come to mind.
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by tim333 on Friday April 26, 2019 @07:22AM (#19756337)
I'm not sure IPFS uses blockchain? It seems to work like bittorent.

Golem I'll give you might be a legit use.

Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by avinium on Sunday April 28, 2019 @01:00AM (#19769443)
Sorry, should have been clearer. Filecoin (from the same company) sits atop IPFS, acting as a cryptocurrency for distributed file storage.

IIRC, their ICO was massively oversubscribed a year or two ago, so they're sitting on a great big pile of cash.

I don't think it's a viable business model yet, but it's definitely not a scam.

Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by magnamerc on Friday April 26, 2019 @10:19AM (#19757770)
I can say the same about people making sweeping generalizations. Maybe you're not as intelligent as you think you are, and you're in fact missing something due to your clouded judgement.
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by kilroy123 on Thursday April 25, 2019 @09:45PM (#19754151)
I feel exactly the same way.
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by LandoCalrissian on Friday April 26, 2019 @12:09AM (#19754803)
The books are all seriously cooked. There are few honest actors and it's shocking to me how many people are still willing to play the game.
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by tim333 on Thursday April 25, 2019 @06:43PM (#19753192)
It must be tempting to transfer the assets to some account you control as there's almost no way to prove who did it or catch you.
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by wmf on Thursday April 25, 2019 @06:47PM (#19753226)
Just ask Trendon Shavers, Charlie Shrem, or Ross Ulbricht.
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by woah on Thursday April 25, 2019 @07:46PM (#19753611)
Don’t ask Ross Ulbricht. You’ll have to ask the DEA agents who embezzled money while making unsubstantiated accusations of murder for hire. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/stealing-bitcoin...
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by wmf on Thursday April 25, 2019 @07:51PM (#19753635)
And those DEA agents are also in prison.
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by vkou on Thursday April 25, 2019 @08:08PM (#19753711)
The accusations were quite substantiated, his defense was about as laughable as 'my baby brother did it'.
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by jamoes on Thursday April 25, 2019 @09:19PM (#19754051)
Ulbricht never presented a defense for the murder-for-hire charge because the charge was dropped and never went to trial. Ulbricht has been sentenced to double-life in prison for all non-violent charges.
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by mikeyouse on Thursday April 25, 2019 @11:59PM (#19754747)
This isn't right - his attempted hits directly led to a longer prison sentence and he could have refuted the factual allegations if he had a defense for them.

See page 3/4 and then page 27:

  https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1391926/gov-uscourts-nysd-422824-142-0.pdf
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by MadSudaca on Thursday April 25, 2019 @07:30PM (#19753497)
Some say that this is what the world will become.
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by ahallock on Thursday April 25, 2019 @10:39PM (#19754404)
How is the a helpful or enlightening statement? You're just spreading FUD.
Re:Crypto Market Roiled by New Allegations Against Tether, B... by keithtom on Thursday April 25, 2019 @07:37PM (#19753538)
just the centralized ones...