I wonder if/how much this has to do with the situation Russia is in?
A number of sanctions has made Russian money harder to move around, likely making it more difficult to pay said hackers. Couple that with crypto falling apart, the entire ransomeware thing is not near as profitable as it used to be.
Then we have a large amount of cyber attacks focused on Ukraine that appear to be occurring at a military level. Its it possible the people that were busy spamming the world at one point are now caught up in this war and not working on external money making endevors?
They look amazing when you consider 10 years ago bitcoin's price was ~$13/coin and now it's >$20k/coin. No other market or stock with that kind of massive growth.
That's always the risk with someone else holding your money. The brilliance (the curse and the blessing) of crypto is that you can be your bank that way, self custody.
In what way is the chart helpful? The article is from 2017:
> Then again, there already has been deflation from the peak of a little more than 19,900 to 17,600 dollars per Bitcoin. But nobody knows if the puncture will let the balloon slowly deflate or it will rip it apart, crash landing the Bitcoin.
I think that person was being very reductive when they said "making things up", the person they replied to was extrapolating a lot of things based on a faulty understanding of the crypto space, hacking groups and Russia.
Many people are not open to the concept of a working and legitimate aspect of the crypto world. Or "legitimate"/"use case" is something that people will play devil's advocate on forever ad nauseam, as opposed to learning or understanding why people are willing to keep building there (somebody will ask, name one legitimate thing, and then argue about why all the replies are not legitimate as opposed to how individuals are and could address various problems). So people get tired of talking to those kind of people.
Can you please name what these specific use cases/'legitimate things' are? I'd take literally 1 example. My experience (full disclosure of priors: I don't think they exist) is that crypto enthusiasts always vaguely reference them, and then when you look at it it's a tiny project used by virtually no one. I am unaware of any mass-market crypto product that's used by say millions of people, but you certainly prove me wrong by naming one or two.
As far as I can tell crypto is a place for speculation, ponzi schemes, and (to be fair) is a mild upgrade in the field of illegal payments. Other than that, there are no legitimate use cases 15 years after its invention. It's just a technological dead end with an unusual amount of hype
The most obvious way I can see a disconnect is that I view financial services as a legitimate use case, because outside of crypto it is a large industry already that exists solely because there are finances to service. Speculation to be made easier. Its the underpinning of the global economy as the largest industry and every service provider involved takes a tiny cut and is largely invisible. Every other industry and non-financial innovation is smaller and operating within this reality.
The same occurs in the crypto space.
What I mostly see are people that were fundamentally uncomfortable with speculation and serving speculation, and were either redirecting that energy towards the crypto space, or completely segregated from the financial services reality they live within. Unaware that their chosen criticisms applied equally to things they respected.
Okay, so one use case: the Uniswap application and its code base has over million users. You can look at this dashboard to see just Uniswap’s monthly users which seems to peak at 800,000
you can further extrapolate that to all the clones on Ethereum and other blockchains that have higher throughput
Uniswap’s “liquidity pool” concept solved a big need, while also introducing new problems that people rapidly try to improve upon.
Otherwise, crypto exchanges have been a large extortionate gatekeeper in commerce, and attracting liquidity even after being listed was a major challenge. The liquidity pool concept solved that.
I said peak, which was 2 years ago. the traffic quickly went to clones, which I also pointed out. there are plenty of other dashboards to find as well. Dune Analytics is a service for creating these dashboards, and sharing them.
I know, you don't have enough interest to look. But it comes across as a bad faith effort, no different than the kind of person I pointed out earlier.
The difference is that there were people that said "hey lets create this tool within 'useless crypto land' that could attract a million users", while over the last 15 years you were like "this is useless there's nothing with a million users", someone else said "hey lets make this better so an additional several hundred thousand more people can use it", while you were like "this is useless because there's nothing with a million users"
anyway, now its here and you don't even want to count it
there are plenty of people building, it is very lucrative to do so, primarily by taking small basis points of the volume flowing through the application you deploy, just like in the non-crypto financial services world.
With numbers peaking at 800K and with crypto existing for almost 15 years, I would have expected significantly higher numbers given crypto has had a 'head start' to find a use case.
Something like UPI payments (which is what crypto was supposed to achieve but completely failed) already has hundreds of millions of users in drastically less than 15 years, I can see why hash's POV remains unchanged and mine too.
800K is still close to 0 with almost nobody using crypto at all compared to over 500 million users using UPI payments.
a) you are not able to separate a single program from the entire concept of crypto. but compare a payments solution to that single program which is not a payments solution at all. they asked for one popular program and I provided it. there’s nothing for me to defend about that, its probably just a dashboard for Uniswap V2 activity and doesnt include Uniswap V3. its weird that this is not the level of discussion you would be willing to have. Why is the depth of discussion so low that I have to explain the limitations a random user made dashboard from Dune Analytics that I found on Google, in a forum where people are otherwise much more analytical. lets check back in 5 years.
b) its unclear the purpose of your observation. people have made billions of dollars converted to actual dollars in their bank account by servicing just those 800,000 users that are familiar with that one program, Uniswap. People will make another billion dollars servicing the next 500,000 users. There are millions of programs deployed on blockchains. Thats… attractive? The programmer and builder perspective is very attractive. Like I said, its the financial services industry. What exactly does everyone else do here? Making ad speculation programs for democracy destabilizing adtech conglomerates? Or some much more useless side project like owning the compose button in gmail? Its really hard for me to see such reductive understanding applied to the crypto sectors when there’s so much to build that is more lucrative than so many other things to build.
c) “15 years”, Uniswap V2 launched 3 years ago. On top of those other years of technology releases to make that possible. There is a clear chronology, that took many people just being willing to see it and where the technology is going. When the tools mature, applications are developed. It is impossible to have a discussion that conflates a specific application with being representative of anything except that application.
I remember when the pandemic happened all of a sudden robo spam calls suddenly completely stopped for me. So even the pandemic hit cyber criminals! Also for whatever reason spam calls for me have greatly decreased in the past 6 months, for a while I was getting 3-4 spam calls a day and now its 1-2 a week.
Omg, I was remembering Lenny [0], the incredible automated trolling machine.
Turns out that he/it still works and there's a phone number that you can call -- or rather forward/3-way-call spammers to!! It's 347-514-7296. You can hear past recordings here [1].
I wish there was a way to pay for this incredible service, and can't wait to start using it!
I've had tremendous success ending them for me. My main number is with a VOIP provider and I set up the IVR to say "Please dial 1 to continue the call" and wait for it. No spam calls have gotten through since then.
The trick is to pick up and immediately mute your phone. They will hang up and eventually flag the number as inactive or unscammable (like maybe it’s a machine picking up). If you don’t answer, they can call back later. If you pick up and say something, then they know there is a human behind the number and that it is actively used.
Back in the land line days I bought a nifty gadget that you plugged in between the phone and the line. It had a button that when pressed would inject the intercept special information tone [1] that the phone company used to tell calling equipment that the number was no longer in service.
I pretend to do as they ask but purposely stuff up the instructions until they get frustrated. It's amusing how many creative insults they have. Most are directed at my mother for some reason.
A little town I know has maintained their antique telephone exchange for going on 40 years, and one of the features is that they have a block of numbers that lead to all the error messages. (541-447-0054 for example) For a while I redirected my phone number to one of their error messages, and now I rarely get robocalls, because the spammers presumably blacklisted me.
I haven't answered my phone except for family members for coming on 3-4 years now and still get 3-4 spam voicemails a day. That number goes way up when I start screening the calls though, so maybe there is something to answering vs not.
I haven't gotten any for years, because I block all calls that come from any number that isn't already in my phone book. They go straight to voice mail, where only a small percentage even leave a message.
I set my voicemail to be 2 minutes long (the max AT&T allows). It's just me telling jokes I found on the internet so it isn't terrible but man it's effective. I still get the spam calls but now I don't get a little voicemail I need to delete.
For me, they’ve moved on to spam texts. I get 5-10 variations of “Hey”, “How are you?” a week. No provided names, just social engineering attempts if I were to reply.
Funny you mention it. Last couple of months I've gone from getting a handful of "account suspended" SMS phishes a year to getting a handful a week. I assumed it was something that broke at AT&T; never considered it might be a global economics driven phenomenon.
I got a new phone about a year ago and requested an area code that’s not from around here. All the spam calls come from that area code, and I have no business there, so it’s simple to filter out which calls are legitimate just by seeing if the area code is my actual one or the other one.
Because the calls are being enabled by absurdly weak security on the part of the telecoms. You think they can't stop spoofed numbers? They're making money allowing it is all
Thought exercise: a law is passed personally charging the CEO of your phone company $20. How many hours would it take before they’d magically announce that it is in fact technically feasible to block spoofed phone numbers and de-peer the shady VoIP providers who originate most spam?
They don’t do this now because it’s more work and they aren’t legally required to do so. The money they get from the spam outfits is greater than the cost, so the phone companies didn’t have an incentive to stop it. Make it uneconomical and that can change very quickly.
English is a great language for scammers because it scales well worldwide - that one language covers the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and others, so an English-based scam operation has a much larger addressable market than other languages which would usually be limited to a single country.
Is it common for the services typically impersonated by those scammers (local tax authority/government department, bank or major retailer such as Amazon)? If not, it would still be a potential red flag for the victim.
Hrr. I once got such a call in Germany while reconfiguring my Voip, so my usual filters were down.
But I've never heard of Microsoft germany calling endusers, nor doing that in english.
Was funny btw. I picked up, asked 'Wer stört?/Who is disturbing(me)?' and got an Indian accent bubbling something about calling from MS customer service, that they had to clean a virus.
Me in a mix between giggling and sighing: 'Could you stop your fucking script, PLEASE?!'
...You want me to open some page which tries to download some remote access tool, camouflaged as something else, hoping that would fly because my explorer doesn't show real file endings? While there is nothing from MS running here at all? Not even in a virtual machine?
He bubbling 'What is your name, what is this company?'
Me: 'I'm just the facility manager, doing house keeping stuff, and you don't need to know.'
He bubbling something about me being impolite.
Me countering with something about no need to be polite to fraudsters.
He flustered.
Me telling him about criminal acts, and our 'Bundesnetzagentur' where one can report such attempts, which leads to termination of such faked numbers, fines, and on occassion seized equipment, which makes the rounds in such circles, which leads to less and less acceptance of such 'businesses', because it's bad for their business. Too much hassle to be worth it.
About 10 minutes of hilarity ensued, where I asked why they are even trying it(in Germany), who would fall for it, if ever?
In the end, enraged gibberish, which I countered with 'Ja. Ja. Du mich auch, Arschloch!/Yes, Yes, the same to you, asshole!'
Germany is big, but it wouldn't be so unusual for a Dutch (or Norwegian, Swedish etc) person to phone a support helpline and find it's only in English. It's not that unusual to find staff in a small bar, restaurant or shop who don't speak the local language.
Yes. I know that. But 'ze Görmänz' have this special concept of Amtssprache/legal/official language in which you have to conduct business.
Which especially applies to larger businesses, which in turn leads to such strange experiences with outsourced hotlines in all over south-eastern Europe, Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Portugal insisting to speak in their sometimes not that good German to you, while you could be done with it much faster and less ambiguous in English.
Because of that I'd say it's very uncommon to have the hotline talk to you in English. Another reason would be that no hotline is ever calling you, without you having asked for that call(back). That just won't happen.
I guess it's a cultural thing, as evidenced by dubbing of movies/tv-series, and not just subtitling them like it is done elsewhere. At least in the past. Getting blurry with things like Netflix.
I tried have it written like a "mafia boss" and "gangster" to "hackers" but ChatGPT did not like that.
Prompt: Write a layoff letter to my penetration tester employees in a heavy Italian accent.
Dear [Employee Name],
It is with a heavy heart that I gotta tell ya that we gotta let you go. It's nothing personal, it's just business, capisce?
I wanna say, youse guys have been great at what you do. You really know how to get into those systems and find all the weak spots. But, unfortunately, things ain't looking too good for our organization right now, and we gotta cut back on some expenses.
I wanna let you know that we appreciate all the hard work you've done for us, and we're gonna make sure youse guys get a decent severance package. We also wanna help you out in finding new job opportunities, so if there's anything we can do to help, just let us know.
Again, I wanna emphasize that it's nothing personal. Youse guys are some of the best in the business, but we gotta do what we gotta do to keep the organization running.
Take care, and good luck with your future endeavors.
I'm honestly some what surprised that reading about this is that disturbing. In a world where Saw 18 is being made, and all of the other gore trash that get lapped up the description of a Colombian necktie just seems tame to me. Who says people don't get desensitized again?
(On a vaguely connected note, the guy who DJ’d my wedding had a squealer’s scar. Lot of outfit guys still around in Chicago, although most of them are not so active anymore.)
Here's hoping they undercut their employers by offering victims a reduced fee... or I guess if they were interested in ethics they could blow the whistle.
It would be hilarious if the hacker hired by a ransomware group extorted the ransomware group by threatening to publicly release a master key. Probably a dumb idea because of the lead-pipe department but still hilariously ironic.
As someone who does incident response for a living, the return to investment on offensive tactics is not so great now. The competition is fierce, organizations are slowly caving under regulatory pressure to improve infrastructure defenses and ultimately, crypto is not doing great right now.
I am sure Nigerian email scammers had a similar problem. At some point, there is maximum saturation of the market and no more victims left. Companies, individuals beefing up security, refusing to pay ransoms either by having it decoding by security researchers or having data backed up.
Bill was extremely self-motivated and thrived working in a cross matrix organization. He consistently met quarterly revenue targets, even while helping to onboard and train junior extortionists.
A number of sanctions has made Russian money harder to move around, likely making it more difficult to pay said hackers. Couple that with crypto falling apart, the entire ransomeware thing is not near as profitable as it used to be.
Then we have a large amount of cyber attacks focused on Ukraine that appear to be occurring at a military level. Its it possible the people that were busy spamming the world at one point are now caught up in this war and not working on external money making endevors?