Every time you hear able to noble causes of financial freedom afforded by Bitcoin, it's good to remember the very 21st century parable of Sebastian. The man who, having invested his family's future in cryptocurrency to get rich quick on the fossil fuel powered gold rush, was blinded by the promise of doubling his riches by someone pretending to be a egomaniac billionaire on social media.

> It is too easy to steal Bitcoin. All the exchange platform websites should know who their customers are and know if a particular wallet address is being used by thieves.

Where are the centralised security processes and authorities to protect my speculative investment when I need them?

I'm not really sure this guy ever actually lost £400k. The 10 BTC are from when he bought in 2017 (for £40k and he'd cashed out that original investment already) and I don't see any plausible reason someone like this was actually planning to cash out at the current price. It's not like the £400k was money he had earned and plowed into BTC.

In many ways this is a facet of being an investor in BTC and should be a message to any BTC investor sitting on top of what has become an astronomical sum- take a look at your portfolio. Take a look at all the risks of being invested in a single product like BTC (scam risk, risk of hack, risk of adverse regulations, extreme volatilty, perfect correlation of your entire investment portfolio), take a look at how much of your portfolio is invested in that single asset, and decide whether you should rebalance. Because no offence, if your savings are 90% BTC, you're not investing, you're gambling on BTC.

Is the image in the article real?

The image shows a real Elon Musk tweet with a reply by another Blue-Checked Twitter user @joshymcb (Josh McBride), except he changed his display name to Elon Musk (with Unicode variations). His reply had the link to the Bitcoin scam.

If Josh McBride really did that (and wasn’t hacked), how does he still have his Twitter blue check? I was under the impression that Twitter came down hard on people intentionally misleading others by abusing their blue check.

Ie, if have your blue check, you cannot pretend to be someone else.

Update - Josh says his account was hacked : https://twitter.com/joshymcb/status/1371660418444316673?s=21

Changing your twitter display name should arguably immediately in software invalidate your blue-tick ""verification"" just as you can't rename a website without getting a new certificate. Of course, the real problem is that the blue tick is both arbitrary and meaningless!

This would've also caught the UK conservative party's trick where they set their Twitter name to "Fact check UK" or similar during a debate. Clever but morally reprehensible.

Somehow crypto currencies have this strange effect on people who should know better: they see some random claim that sounds impossible and directly invest ridiculous amount of money they would _never_ spend that easily in a different context. I don't get what makes people trust such things but there is something deep at play here, somehow the FOMO makes people take crazy level of risks.

Feel like it’s mostly driven by FOMO and social pressure right now. I have a friend who told me that his accountant adviced him to invest in crypto (bitcoin) “because a person that his following with his job recently purchased a Ferrari after a Bitcoin investment”.

Oh dear. Reminds me of a friend who, with a straight face, suggested I take the advice of “wealthy millennials on YouTube.”

What did you answer?

The Nick Young meme is probably closest to what happened: https://s3.amazonaws.com/hiphopdx-production/2016/06/nick-yo...

This person simply does not understand that anything “works” in a bull market. The next recession or cryptocurrency market pullback will be their first since they started speculating, and after that, I think their advice will be better.

It’s sad but true: seeing your “investment” based on youtuber lose 90% of its value in a crash is the only true way to learn how the world works.

I think when you make crazy promises for return on investment something clicks on people’s brains. Thinking goes from ”how much I earn if I invest” to ”how much I loose if I don’t invest”.

In my theory this is why these only work with ridiculous promises. Loosing 10% profit does not feel bad, different thing when you might loose that 100% profit.

I think part of the appeal of crypto's crazy returns comes from the loss of faith people have that the economic system as it is will provide stability like it did for their parents' generation.

Millions of kids in college are wondering how their school is getting away charging regular tuition when classes are via Zoom. Older kids are wondering how a house their parents bought for $100k is worth 15x now when salaries haven't increased by anywhere near that.

Putting money into an index fund that offers 5% (ballpark) seems ridiculous when you consider what things cost today. Why not take a punt on something that could appreciate 10x in a week? It does sound too good to be true, but in an economic system distorted by endless quantitative easing and effectively interest rates for savers, maybe this is the new normal.

If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

I have sympathy as this man lost a lot of money and it will have a lasting impact on his life. But the scammer took advantage of his greed, so I hope he learnt a lesson. Only greed could make you believe someone when they suggest you let them hold your 400k for a few minutes and they'll send you back 800k, without appearing to gain anything from you doing so.

I see theses posted all the time. Are people naïve enough to think that their favorite celebrity just sits on social media giving out $1000 to everyone that likes their post?

Apparently, yes. We need the equivalent of a Darwin Award, but for your own finances.

As the saying (and the song) goes: You can't con an honest John. The mark thought he was the one taking advantage of Elon Musk and his looney marketing scheme, that he would be getting something for nothing. This opportunity was obviously so good it couldn't possibly last, so he'd better hurry take it, or the sucker Musk would wise up.

I can't help notice that they describe a website that "looked professional", with an image that looks very similar to this array of sites:

https://imgur.com/a/c9S2jRp