Bonum Certa Men Certa

Just Because Common Currencies (Including the US Dollar) Are Considered Uncertain Doesn't Mean People Should Adopt Volatile Multi-Level (Pyramid) Schemes

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 05, 2025,
updated Mar 05, 2025

Bitcoin

One of my best friends, a university professor, lost all his money (after selling the house) to some so-called 'crypto' scammers, who had approached him in Microsoft LinkedIn. I mentioned this many times before. He wanted me to mention this in my sites, but I told him I just didn't know enough to cover it properly and meaningfully. Why was he so gullible? He didn't even want to tell anyone for about a year (shame or fear of mockery). Apropos, the wife of Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation is one of those scammers.

Well, the scammers are trying to "go mainstream". They got their Cheeto and MElon in the bag (they now participate in the scam). Having already received so many bribes to buy the "top seat" - a nazi oven office - and then reward those who gave the bribes, even the 'crypto' (not) Ponzi schemers, they and anyone else can expect a bailout (i.e. handover from taxpayers to scammers).

Issue 78 – President on brink of bailout for bitcoin

As an associate explains in very simple terms:

1) the max number of bitcoins is finite

2) the max number of bitcoins is somewhat small

3) storage media containing bitcoin wallets get lost

4) bitcoin wallets get lost or deleted

5) bitcoin wallet passwords get lost

6) the number of bitcoin lost that way is unknown and unknowable

Thus, the number of available or working bitcoin can only decrease and will eventually cross a tipping point. Given point 6, the date of that tipping point is unpredictable and may have already been crossed. Ergo the bailout is a scam, nothing more, nothing less... unless one counts the unmitigated environmental disaster caused by releasing so much fossil carbon into the air for no reason.

I never dabbled in those things, never felt tempted to even try them, and will never touch them. From what I've heard and read, even if some 'fakecoin' is considered 'stable', what about the exchange one uses to buy them through? What if it collapses? If one mines [sic] one's own, what are the chances of a house fire or even some bad sectors in the drive/s?

The world is in a position of growing uncertainty because of wars and NATO becoming mostly Europe (Cheeto prefers his neighbour to the "west"). But that does not mean abandoning the 'traditional' currency/bartering tokens is the best option. A friend of mine said he bought gold. I asked, where is that gold? How do you trust those who claim to "keep" it for you?

Remember that any online portal that claims you "own" something can just go under (offline) any day for all sorts of reasons. Anything can just vanish very suddenly. It happens all the time. People come and go. Regulators can step in.

If you think the "drugs don't work" because they're too mainstream and/or a price-fixing cartel, trying some "alternatives" or "traditional" ones might make things worse. In science, replacing one evil with another does not guarantee that the latter (the unknown evil) will be better and there's risk that it'll be a lot worse.

Money is a bit like a religion. But if the clergy is several governments and not some Scam Altman in a T-shirt, which would you choose?

As Ryan puts it: "I can talk about the exchanges a little bit. Most of them are not based in the United States. They have varying degrees of compliance with United States law. And the people who run them are often stealing from you and try to escape from US law enforcement when they try to do something about them. They got Sam Bankman-Fried back because he was in an extradition country. What about the rest?"

"I call Uphold "Hold Up" for a couple reasons. Brave Software partnered with Uphold to be their official crypto exchange. But Uphold flouts US tax law. They issue form 1099-B as a 1099 composite, however they miss the deadlines. Therefore you may end up having to request a tax filing extension and pray Uphold eventually gets a form that was due to you by 60 days before tax day. Sometimes they're not out until a few days before the deadline."

"They also do a "cooldown period" and what that is, basically, is this thing where you can't have your money back sometimes for over 100 days. They never say why, or if they do they say they want to make sure fraud isn't happening. Disturbingly, many people in Reddit end up with their account frozen entirely and can't get their money, or their money just disappears."

"And it can be very hard to contact anyone about it, and I have never seen anyone tell me they got this problem resolved. As we've seen with Celsius and FTX, sometimes there's just no money at all. The guy is buying himself Ferraris and living like a rock star and running a Ponzi scheme."

"My sister-in-law was opening accounts in the names of her children, on an exchange in Panama. What legitimate reason is there to do that? I never make financial decisions without my spouse. It's just not done. I always explain what we're doing and why it needs to be done. I mean, I may shop for groceries or something without going over the particulars, but I'm never opening investment accounts or credit cards in someone else's name like some sort of a criminal would. That's how the in-laws live. I don't roll that way."

If only my friend asked me (and others) about those 'crypto' scammers before it was too late...

"In the UK," Ryan recalls, "someone offered to buy an entire dump so he can go looking for some hard disks that have bitcoins on them."

"Your concern is similar to hoarding cash in the house. There's risks with lots of cash. You risk someone could hit you over the head and take it. Inflation. I like the USD because it's a store of value, or at least has tended to be. You can usually at least earn enough interest somewhere that you'll beat or mostly offset inflation. Bitcoins don't do that. They can be worth half of what they are today by noon tomorrow. Almost no millionaires or billionaires like bitcoins. It's not that they're stupid. It's that they're concerned you trade valuable stuff for an entry in a digital ledger. And when people insult you by saying "It's totally real, you're just too stupid to get it." That just makes it even more suspect."

For the time being the consensus is that "BTC", for example, was some failed experiment. Some people still re-attempt this experiment, wishing that it would become something more real one day. But it just does not scale.

Other Recent Techrights' Posts

Advocacy of Software Freedom Changed, LUGs Became Less Relevant
The way we see it, support groups like LUGs sort of outlived their usefulness when it became easier to install GNU/Linux
For the Second Time in a Few Weeks Microsoft Lunduke Makes False Accusations Against Senior Red Hat Staff to Incite a Despicable 'Troll Army'
Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims or says can be trusted
Compromised by NVIDIA Proprietary Library
Meanwhile in Boston there are "[r]oundtable talk with FSF volunteers (both in-person and online)"
How Software Patents Were Viewed or Their General Status Changed Over Time
A rough summary
 
Watch the FSF Party Live (via Livestream)
It's in WebM format, which is widely supported by now
When Microsoft "Integrates" Something With "AI" It Means It's Losing Money and Is Generally Hopeless
how did Bing fare after 36 months of LLM slop being hyped up as "replacement" for search?
Most Certificates Don't Improve Security, They Mostly Increase Downtime (for No Good Reason)
The 'Gemini sites' (capsules) are a growing force
The statCounter Site Has Data Integrity Problems
Maybe we'll get back to statCounter when its data becomes more "stable" again
10 Ways to Combat Software Patents
software patents are loathed also by proprietary software developers
"Just a Little Bit of Meat..."
Free software "absolutism" is not a radical stance, more so if the only "radical" belief the user possesses is that he or she must be in control of his or her software, and by extension his or her computer
Red Hat is Ignoring the Free Software Community, It's a "Fortune 1000" Vendor
Red Hat's blog also participates a lot in promoting of Wall Street's latest pump-and-dump "AI" scheme
Free Software Foundation Party Has Begun
We shall be focusing a lot on software patents today
Former Head of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Lina Khan Knows Whatever Microsoft Touches Will Die
Just like Skype (as recently as months ago) [...] When Microsoft grabs things, or when it buys things, it almost never ends well
Slopwatch: Fake Articles About LibreOffice in Austria and Wine 10.16
very short
Links 04/10/2025: "attempted Coup" Noted in Facebook, Russia Kills Journalists via Drones
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/10/2025: Anesthesia and Baudpunk
Links for the day
Links 04/10/2025: "Privacy Harm Is Harm", Criticism Outlawed in US
Links for the day
Garmin Uses Linux for Some of the Garmin Products, Now It's Sued by Strava Using Software Patents
Software patents should never have been granted in the first place
Richard Stallman Will Give a Talk in Sweden in 6 Days
Dr. Stallman, despite his battle with cancer is still alive and mentally sharp
FSF Turns 40
We'll be focusing on patent-related topics this weekend
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 03, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, October 03, 2025
Gemini Links 04/10/2025: Distro Hopping and "Part Time"
Links for the day
We Are Turning 19 in One Month, FSF Turns 40 in 3 Hours (CET)
For our anniversary next month we still have no concrete plans
Patent Docs (or PatentDocs) Learned the Wrong Lessons From the Death of TypePad
Had they gone ahead with an SSG, they'd become a lot more future-proof
USPTO Patent Bubble Already Imploding, After Decades of Artificial Inflation, Entire Offices Close for Good
we can deduce that financial pressures (lack of "demand" for monopolies) play a role
TikTok is Not Harmless (Being CheeTok in the US Will Advance Orange Agenda)
Social control media isn't "fun and games"; it's a digital weapon that lets hostile groups or nations infiltrate others, then turn them against themselves
Andy Farnell and Helen Plews Explain What "Modern" Tech Does to Old People
Imposing terrible tech "religion" on people is not helping them
Tomorrow the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Turns 40 and Its Web Site is Still Slow Due to DDoS by LLM Slop Bots
For an advocacy group, uptime is important (for its message to remain accessible)
Slopwatch: Google News as a Firehose of LLM Slop About "Linux"
Google News is really bad
Datamation, Where I Used to Publish Articles, Appears to Have Been Sold to TechnologyAdvice Only to Become a Slopfarm
I'd prefer to not associate with that site anymore
Links 03/10/2025: "NPR’s Economics Lessons Come With Neoliberal Spin" and Canada Post at Risk
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/10/2025: Panic Attacks and Food Adulteration
Links for the day
Links 03/10/2025: Lawyers Caught Using LLM Slop Explain Why They Did It, LibreSSL 4.1.1 and 4.0.1 Released
Links for the day
FSF Board Grew 50% Since Last Year, Has New President, Turns 40 in Two Days
It's a good move for the FSF and - by extension - for software freedom
Links 03/10/2025: Conflicts, Death of TypePad, and TikTok/CheeTok Gives a Boost to Far Right Groups in Europe
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 02, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 02, 2025
Slopwatch: Linux Journal, Google News, and LinuxSecurity
They carry on polluting the Web with fake articles
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: Kubernetes With FreeBSD and robots.txt
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: 'Open' 'AI' Resorting to Gimmicks and Fake Funding, Europe’s ‘Drone Wall’ Discussed
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: Brave Passes 100M Users Milestone, Kodak Selling Its Own Film Again
Links for the day
Michael “Monty” Widenius: It Started in 1983 With Richard Stallman (RMS)
The other co-founder of MySQL is a bit notorious for confronting RMS rather viciously
su lisa && rm -rf /home/ibm/power
Novell was ruined by another person from IBM, Ronald Hovsepian
A Record Demand at Microsoft: Demand to Cancel
What we're witnessing is a very ungraceful destruction of XBox
Microsoft is Losing Europe
Hence all the "support" and "discount" offers that are limited to Europe
The Free Software Foundation Starts Fund-raising for 40th Anniversary
New pop-up 2-3 days ahead of the 40th anniversary event
Systemd Breaks Networking in Debian and Microsoft Staff Rushes to Make Face-Saving Excuses in LWN
Microsoft's bluca is already there in the comments, his Microsoft money pays for LWN to let him leave comments early
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 01, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 01, 2025
What the End of XBox Will Look Like: a Fiery Crash
XBox is the next Skype. It won't last much longer. Expect many more layoffs.
Richard Stallman is Going to Finland to Give a Talk Next Thursday
A day later he speaks in Sweden
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: SMTP Pipelining and End of ROOPHLOCH 2025
Links for the day