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Re:U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub by gzer0 on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @07:25AM (#30440287)
And equally so, they should mention that scammers around the world took home a record $14 billion in cryptocurrency in 2021, thanks in large part to the rise of DeFi [1].

This is a public information campaign; the sole purpose is to provide public awareness information on digital asset security and how to ensure it remains secure.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/06/crypto-scammers-took-a-recor...

Re:U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub by fullstop on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @08:10AM (#30440555)
I can't find a good number on this, but I would have to assume that scammers still take more fiat through phone scams and things of that nature.

I have to hand it to the cryptocurrency scammers, though, they are definitely more sophisticated than phone scammers.

Re:U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub by sharperguy on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @09:04AM (#30441020)
Most ICOs, NFTs and smart contracts are just more complicated versions of regular securities, that evade regulation simply by taking advantage of the time lag that authorities have in terms of understanding them and enforcing existing regulation.

If you look under the hood, each supposedly decentralized, non-custodial service tends to have a centralized component coordinating or in some way controlling the entire thing. For example, a platform that pegs the value of an asset on the Ethereum blockchain to the US dollar, could depend on a single server to inject information about the price of the US dollar in terms of Ethereum or smart contract tokens.

Re:U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub by thebean11 on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @09:51AM (#30441601)
Most do not depend on a single server for price feeds, they use a quorum of independent servers operated by different entities. The data is then combined on chain, and on chain code flags if there is disagreement on the price.

https://data.chain.link/

Re:U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub by nyolfen on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @08:51AM (#30440905)
fraud and scams are double-digit percentages of the 'real' economy