Coinbase saying the quiet bit out loud, you love to see it https://t.co/9hPhwO4SiR
— Sean Tuffy (@SMTuffy) August 6, 2023
At least when the Beanie Babies bubble burst, a lot of shelters and afterschool programs were able to give cute stuffed toys to kids who appreciated them. Try doing *that* on the blockchain…
crypto guys constantly have to go in front of lawyers and say things like "imagine, for a moment, a widget. or a tiddlywink."
— Ashwin Rodrigues (@shwinyo) August 9, 2023
ANALYSIS: This crypto trader says the industry needs to focus on attracting new people who don’t understand the spacehttps://t.co/cWSMyIJVRK
— Blockworks (@Blockworks_) August 8, 2023
Marketing, it’s a science:
… Ansem says he likes what Drip Haus is doing to attract new users. The Solana-based platform provides free NFTs from popular creators to subscribers, recently described to Blockworks.
“Instead of doing mints, they do free drops for people every week. They give out all this art to people who subscribe to different artists on their platform. And then you can tip the artist if you really like their work and then share it with other people.”
Ansem notes that the platform has sent out NFTs to “something crazy, like 700K, 800K wallets.” Approximately 250,000 of those new wallets, he says, have proceeded to use other Solana apps. “So they’ve done a pretty good job of onboarding completely new people.”…
people with dementia, economically desperate refugees struggling with english as a second language, children who have stolen their parents credit cards: these are all growth markets
— flglmn (@flglmn) August 8, 2023
Chump harvesting industry decries lack of fresh chumps
— Neil Sporran (@KiwiPie74) August 8, 2023
SiubhanDuinne
I guess I’m their target market, then, because I still (after how many years?) don’t get this at all.
HumboldtBlue
That is a harsh penalty against Japan, and Sweden lead 2-0 and on the way to the semis.
Tony Jay
@HumboldtBlue:
A LOT of people were hanging their hats on the inevitability of Japan at least reaching the Final. If they don’t find a way to pull this one back it’s going to leave the Tournament even more wide open than it was after the group stages. Literally anyone left in it could win it
ETA – Christ! I’ve just seen the first Swedish goal. What’s Japanese for “Just kick the ball THAT way!!”?
Ruckus
@SiubhanDuinne:
It’s a scam. 10000000% a scam.
The perpetrators have developed a monetary system that is built around getting people to purchase a worthless currency for a lot of real money, based upon the bullshit that they will make a lot of real money by getting other people to pay them for the worthless crap they bought. I believe the term is a round robin scam. One side screws the other and then the second side screws someone else etc, etc.
sukabi
@SiubhanDuinne: nope, you’re not…if you were it wouldn’t matter if you understood it or not, you would have jumped on that “gravy train” when your favorite celebrity was pushing it on TV…
Tony Jay
Some nice passing and work down the wings from Japan, but when 90% of your end product is ‘high to medium height balls lofted into a box dominated by a phalanx of 7ft blondes’, you really need to make the 10% of balls to feet pay off better than they have been. At least get your shots on target!
Tony Jay
That’s more like it! Japan pass through the Swedes, some nice angled lay-offs to let the striker get a shot away and the extremely attractive Swedish keeper – just – tips it around the post for a corner.
I have a feeling that if Japan are going to get back into this it’s not going to be from a header. They just need to drill down on getting that final ball right
ETA – Penalty to Japan! It’ll go to VAR, and it looks VERY soft…
Tony Jay
It’s given. Crossbar! But did it cross the line? The referee is checking…
Nope. Still 2-0. That’s going to kill the Japanese.
prostratedragon
RIP William Friedkin. Soundtrack, To Live and Die In L.A., by Wing Chung
Tony Jay
Fuck me sideways with a pineapple! After seeing yet another set-piece bounce off the woodwork and away Japan work the ball back in with quick passing and rifle it home from the edge of the six yard box to make it 2-1 with 5 mins to go!
ETA – Bloody hell. The Japanese free kick hit the crossbar again, the ball rebounded against the back of the Swedish keeper’s head, hit the post, then went out of the box. You’d think with luck like that the Swedes would never concede
ETA x 2 – 10 minutes of injury time!
Tony Jay
That was a terrible free kick by the Japanese. You’re almost all 5 ft and pennies, who do you think is going to get first to a gently lofted ball along the width of the box when you’re playing against the Varangian Guard?
That said, the Swedes look blown here. They’re just hanging on against the waves of Japanese attacks and trying to break when they can to eat up time. If this goes to extra time…
NotMax
Anyone who says onboarding deserves to meet a pie, face first.
Tony Jay
Times op! Sweden hold on. Japan out 2-1.
Thought they were going to do it there. They totally took over the game for the last 20 mins. Football, eh? Bloody hell.
Barney
Or tulips. I think tulips definitely need to added to Coinbase’s list of sales opportunities.
NotMax
Just come clean and call them Ponzicoins.
//
Maxim
@Tony Jay: Thanks for the color commentary!
eclare
@Ruckus:
Never heard the term round robin. I call it either a Ponzi scheme or an MLM.
eclare
@Maxim:
@Tony Jay:
Yes, thanks!
TS
@SiubhanDuinne:
I’m there as well but I’ve never forgotten the only investment factor I heard from Warren Buffet – invest in things you understand – and that sure isn’t cryptocurrency.
eclare
@TS:
It’s amazing to me how many people have a job where they cannot describe or define what their employer does.
Shalimar
People with dementia are a constantly growing market because they forget the last time you scammed them, as assholes preying on senior citizens have known forever.
p.a
Digital buskers?
Cameron
So how about that Biden impeachment thingie that’s supposed to roll out today? Florida congressman says he’s going to bring a bigly basket of charges.
Baud
@Cameron:
Chimps fling poo.
Splitting Image
I’m old enough to remember when people were funding their children’s retirements by buying dozens of copies of The Death of Superman and X-Force #1.
I don’t know if any speculators made money on those books, but I know that many of the creators did, especially the ones with a royalty agreement.
Shalimar
Listening to Morning Joe talk about Hunter Biden and his comparison to other embarrassing Presidential family members. What is frustrating to me is that no one mentions the most important point. Does anyone know what Hunter Biden is doing now? Republicans aren’t even investigating anything from the last 6 years. All of this bullshit that they can’t connect to Joe Biden at all is very old. None of it is current. None of it is from when Joe Biden was President.
different-church-lady
A client who owes me $1600 just declared bankruptcy, and I can’t help but wonder if he got lulled into the crypto scam.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Your own fault for not accepting Bitcoin.
Tony Jay
@Maxim:
@eclare:
I’m underemployed this morning, so I thought I’d just dive right in. 8-)
Wait until the European Championships, you won’t be able to shut me up!
different-church-lady
@Shalimar: What he’s doing now is trying to plead guilty. But don’t expect them to give him a bit of credit for it.
different-church-lady
@Baud: Actually, my own fault for not pestering him for payment two months earlier. I’m way too lenient with my clients.
different-church-lady
@eclare: “We factorize synergy for expanding global footprints.”
Baud
@different-church-lady:
You’re a big softie.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Media can’t resist a story that the GOP wants to push.
lowtechcyclist
At least Beanie Babies weren’t an environmental catastrophe. IIRC, that incomprehensible process of ‘mining’ more bitcoin required enough electricity to power a small city.
p.a.
They went after Joe. Struck out. Going after Hunter, not moving the needle, even with the MSM’s help and it’s a fart in the wind. I guess the scumbag ghouls’ next move is to invent something abt Beau and call for disinterment?
eclare
@different-church-lady:
Ugh. Sorry to hear that.
eclare
@different-church-lady:
Hahaha…exactly! I once heard someone use the word boutique as a gerund. They were “boutiqueing” something.
I loved when I worked at Southern Co., a public utility holding company. What do you do? Keep your lights on and phone charged.
Geminid
@Shalimar: The Trump campaign had high hopes that the Hunter Biden laptop story would blow Joe Biden out of the water. Instead their torpedo sank with barely a ripple. Then, they staked a lot of messaging bandwidth on it, in the critical last weeks of the campaign. Now they are throwing good money after bad.
But they have the same problem now that they had in October, 2020: they do not have an effective positive argument to make to the American people. So they resort to character assasination that only works with their base.
I think some Republicans understand that they can’t win purple states and districts if they don’t attract people outside the base, and that this stale Hunter Biden story won’t get that job done. But the rest are like lemmings intent on running off the cliff.
TS
@eclare:
I cannot even imagine that – unless it is illegal – what sort of work would they be doing?
Cacti
@p.a.: On a somewhat related note, I think the Dotard probably buried stolen NatSec information with Ivana on the golf course.
Frankensteinbeck
@different-church-lady:
He’s not pleading guilty to what Republicans are accusing him of: Accepting foreign bribes on behalf of Joe Biden.
Jesus fucking Christ, Republicans are so juvenile. Catch them doing anything wrong and they scream, “Nuh-uh, YOU!”
Baud
@Geminid:
To be fair, it worked on people who are not the base for many years. They’re just addicts to this strategy at this point.
Matt McIrvin
@Splitting Image: People had heard that you could get rich by owning a copy of Action Comics #1, and didn’t make the connection that that was because Action Comics #1 was extremely rare because people hadn’t squirreled away thousands of pristine copies as an “investment”.
eclare
@Cacti:
I do too.
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
It’s why all their pedophilia accusations are so frightening.
different-church-lady
@lowtechcyclist: We are soooooo good at inventing ever worse ways to be stupid.
different-church-lady
@Cacti: 🧐
eclare
@TS:
Various consulting firms in the early 00’s. One friend found out the company had folded by showing up for work and finding the doors locked.
lowtechcyclist
@Splitting Image:
I remember that too. I think the idea was that if you stashed them in a safe place for a few decades, they’d be worth a lot of money.
The problem with that theory was, if a whole bunch of people are all doing that, then in a few decades, they’re still not particularly scarce. What made the comics and baseball cards of the 1950s and 1960s worth a lot of money later on was that 99.9% of them got thrown out at some point.
Which reminds me, I’ve got a couple hundred campaign buttons left over from John Anderson’s 1980 campaign that were going to be thrown out after the election. (I was a volunteer. Don’t hate me, I was a Republican up until then.) I stashed them away and let the decades roll by without thinking about them.
My best guess from some Googling is that they’re worth at most a few thousand bucks, total. I really need to find someone who knows the collectibles market to sell them for me; I’d cheerfully let them keep 40% of the take, just to turn them into some modest amount of money without my having to do any work.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@SiubhanDuinne: I don’t get it either. To me, crypto is obviously a scam. Then I look around and people are buying it, and I look back at crypto to see if I missed something. And no. It’s still an obvious scam.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Well, projection is one reason the pedophilia accusations are frightening; another one is that even if it’s not remotely projection (and I think it’s not for most of the “OK groomer” copycats), accusing someone of raping children is a way of declaring them outlaw and inviting violence against them. Just about anything seems justified against such a person.
PST
@Shalimar:
How many members of Congress do you suppose have family members who benefited from a business’s hope of currying favor by employing or buying from the spouse/child/sibling/idiot brother-in-law? It is the most common thing in the world, really, in all spheres of life. All those senators who look in the mirror and see a future president now have to take into account that it is a future impeachable offense if your kid ever, at any time, landed a cushy job in an industry your committee oversees even if there was no explicit quid pro quo.
Ken
Also commonly called greater fool, because each buyer hopes they will find someone willing to pay them more.
marklar
Can anybody help me find the Tweet/X-cretion/Truth where the non-indicted former Japanese Prime Minister gloated about their team losing to Sweden? Thanks in advance.
JaneE
@TS: When I started writing programs for computers almost 50 years ago, it was difficult if not impossible to explain what I did to my family and others. Computers were “adding machines, only faster, right?”. Words like input and compile were literally unheard of at the time. I could describe what I did for 5 minutes only to have my cousin say “you know I don’t know what half the words you used mean”.
Not necessarily illegal. Just new and exotic. Illegal was the night shift programmers in a local business selling pot on the side. That story broke locally just as I was finishing my course and my father wasn’t really sure he wanted me to look for a job after he heard that on the news.
sdhays
@lowtechcyclist: This is what enrages me about crypto. They are converting vast amounts of energy into shit-money. The “work” the computers do is of absolutely no value except in made up “currency land”. It’s all made up, so they could have literally done anything else to backstop their scam, but no – it had to be something that puts and incredible burden on the world’s energy supply at the exact moment where we really, really need to be reducing energy usage.
Crypto is a crime against humanity. It really is. It should be banned.
Rebel’s Dad
I’ve had a little trouble wrapping my mind around NFTs, but I saw a meme that puts it this way: imagine you have a wife, and she’s getting drilled by everyone, and you can’t do anything to stop it
But you have the marriage certificate. That’s the NFT.
Rebel’s Dad
@lowtechcyclist: That’s why I keep a folder dedicated to memes on my computer. The angry lady/salad cat ones will be worth a fortune someday!
:)
Bill Arnold
@sdhays:
A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that nearly all computation done by/on behalf of humans is for bitcoin mining; SHA256 hashing computations on custom hardware, which is several orders of magnitude faster than (general-purpose) GPUs.
Monomaniacal from the point of view of hypothetical aliens.
Ivan X
I love Molly White, though it is humbling knowing that I’ll never be as smart or brilliantly sarcastic as she is.
Ivan X
@prostratedragon: Yup. Sad. He made some clunkers, but The Exorcist, French Connection, Sorcerer, To Live and Die in L.A., and Killer Joe all rank way up there for me among my personal movie faves. One of these days I’ll read his recent autobio though I am wary of the self-aggrandizement I’m likely to find within.
Ivan X
The subreddit /r/buttcoin is an excellent source of mockery of crypto fools and scammers, for those of us who need a little schadenfreude in our content diet.
Ivan X
@eclare: I’m amazed at how many companies can’t even describe what their own products do, so why should their employees be able to? It took something like a decade for Microsoft to come up with anything even vaguely understandable or coherent around 365.
I attribute it to a corporate culture being just that, a culture, and people within it understand it, so they forget that no one outside of the culture can follow it. See also: right wing media.
And crypto, for that matter. The shit they say sounds crazy to people outside their bubble. And when FTX and crypto crashed last year, the fact that it had no real impact on the broader economy suggests just how much of an disconnected, enclosed universe it is.
Ivan X
I’m just gonna keep posting shit on this dead thread. You can’t stop me.
Ivan X
@sdhays: I am far, far, far from being a crypto advocate, but I feel obligated to say: not all crypto is still an ecological catastrophe.
As I understand it, a year ago, the second largest blockchain, Ethereum, underwent a long-discussed technical conversion, because of environmental concerns, called “The Merge,” in which the “proof of work” model (whoever performs the most pointless calculations has the best chance of winning a lottery) changed to an idea called “proof of stake” (whoever owns the most of that blockchain’s currencies has better chances of winning a lottery). The pointless calculations are eliminated, reducing the energy required to run that blockchain to a small fraction of what it was previously.
As I understand it, the vast majority of alternative blockchains (that is, those that are not Bitcoin or Ethereum) are derived from the Ethereum blockchain; but I don’t know whether that means they also underwent the conversion to the “proof of stake” model that doesn’t light the world on fire. I would imagine that most new blockchains are based on the newer proof of stake way of doing things, though that’s up to the individual creator of the new blockchain.
The OG blockchain, Bitcoin, has the wasteful “proof of work” model built into its very philosophy, and it also has the highest quotient of libertarian-like true believers, so it will likely continue to be as destructive as ever, and your comments absolutely apply to it. That’s also true of Bitcoin-derived alternative blockchains like Dogecoin, though, as I said, there are not many of those compared to those based on Ethereum. (The reason for this is Ethereum based blockchains have computer logic capabilities called “smart contracts,” which makes them vastly more flexible but also vastly more hackable. Bitcoin and derived blockchains are just dumb currency and nothing more.)
Please do not consider any of this to be a defense of crypto, which I consider to be a scourge.
Math Guy
@Bill Arnold: Yes. There is a nice, succinct way to convey this idea: one bitcoin (or any other “brand” of blockchain crypto) = an increase in entropy (waste energy). Scams like this are based on ignorance of simple physics. People are betting against the second law of thermodynamics; that is a losing bet – you cannot make a perpetual motion machine.
azlib
@lowtechcyclist:
What a waste of energy trying to brute force the solution to cryptographic puzzles. I am waiting for either quantum computing to become available at scale to solve the puzzles quickly or some flaw is found in the crypto algorithm. At that point the whole integrity of the blockchain falls apart.
Ivan X
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I think of it less as a scam in and of itself and more of it being a very speculative (and, in the case of Bitcoin-type blockchains, environmentally destructive), but potentially lucrative, investment premised on nothing other than a shared sense of it being worth something. You know, like tulips, or penny stocks, but married to a now-fading sense of exciting (to some), transformational change in how we live our lives.
And, because it does (or at least did) offer the irresistable opportunity to get rich quick, it will always draw in its share of suckers, and also be swarming with scammers. And, because there’s nothing underneath it, and is nothing more than a trading market, it’s a zero sum game, and one biased towards those who are already winning.
So, is it all inherently a scam? No, though it’s a house of cards that could collapse at any moment, due to the need for greater fools. But, are there countless scams? Uh huh.
Bitcoin true believers like to call Bitcoin “digital gold” — which, despite all the ways in which goldbugs are insane or credulous, is apt. Humans have always valued gold well beyond its functional utility, but a) that has been true across cultures and eras, so you can at probably rely on it more than a decade and a half’s worth of crypto, and b) you don’t need a fucking computer to see and touch your gold.
I think normies have completely checked out of crypto following the FTX collapse, and the people who are still into it are those who a) hoping to get rich quick, b) are trying to salvage the value of their sunk-cost investments, c) a subset of technology dorks, and d) cult members who won’t, or who choose not to, see their beliefs invalidated.
Being that there is not enough new money coming in, and most of these people are just trading among themselves, it’s probably only a matter of time before some get tired of waiting for the next “bull run” and decide to cut their losses, which will bring down the market. But, as with any cult, there will always be some dead-enders living on, as they say in the crypto world, “hopium.”
Snarki, child of Loki
I keep my investments in the time-tested basics TULIPS.
And for cash? GIANT STONE WHEELS.
Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog
@eclare: I’m sure it’s a dead thread, and arguably that’s weirdly appropriate for this little story about the Problem of Employees Not Knowing What Their Noble Enterprise Does.
The Top Men in a company I knew pretty well decided that they had this problem. I’m not sure what the diagnosis was based on; they constantly bragged that the company was the Market Leader in its field – let’s say the field was closely adjacent to widgets – which argues that what they called “our people” did actually know what it was they did.
But for whatever reason, they decided that the thousands of employees needed a uniform way to describe what the company did, and needed to repeat it, group-wise, in internal meetings (think of those sad sarari-men singing the Song of the Sales Crow), and then tell all their relatives, friends, and neighbors, “this is what we do at the Market Leader.” They spent a lot of money on this.
Why? it was a mystery to me, but I’m not awfully social. Do people do this?
Well, they did. They came up with a short and to-the-point description. The company, they said, helps widget-people find, acquire, and protect their widgets.
Besides the dollar cost, which became the subject of talk within the ranks (“no budget for raises but they spend money on //this//?”), there were two leetle issues that the Top Men didn’t catch until later.
The first was that they had trouble spelling “acquire” – they put the slogan on trade-show materials (I know there were T-shirts FedEx’ed out to employees, and I believe there were mugs and mouse-pads and so on) and on the mandated computer wallpaper – but they spelled it “aquire” about half the time.
The other was that apparently none of the Top Men knew anybody younger than, say, 40. So they didn’t know that when they created graphics for everyone to use so that the employees could show off What We Do All Day … help widget-people :
FIND their widgets,
ACQUIRE (or AQUIRE) their widgets, and
PROTECT their widgets
… they were spelling out “FAP”.
Kids These Days had a slang term “fap” with an unambiguous meaning. It means (or meant, these things change quickly) “masturbate.”
The Top Men wanted their thousands of employees to tell all their relatives, friends, and neighbors, this is what we do all day.
I mean, maybe this //was// what they did all day. Top Men … who knows?
After they found out how “acquire” is spelled, and after a lot of people who //knew// some contemporary slang raised concerns about “FAP,” they changed the slogan and junked the inventory of trade-show merch.
I heard that the FAP t-shirts were a big hit at various people’s kids’ high schools though.