Vietnamese ICO scammers disappear with $660 million

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/16/vietnamese-ico-scammers-disapp.html

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The is the best reason yet I have heard to be an early adopter of an ICO.

/s

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This is one of the reasons I am support regulation of ICOs. There’s a reason the SEC and similar entities exist.

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Also, people doing this gives cryptocurrency a bad name. Not that they particularly care. They have 660 million dollars.

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In fairness, looking at the history of Bitcoin and Ethereum, people doing this give cryptocurrency the name it deserves.

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Well, looks like we have a new contender for “definitely least scammy video”: Seriously guys? A wall of known MLM drivel with some generic cash-money-gangsta stylings on top? (+3 subversion points to whoever convinced them that ‘Dubai skyline’ was the best choice; however)

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I need to figure out how to monetize Proof of Reputation.

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This is certainly one way that your “investment” in an ICO can turn out to be worth $0.

I don’t even see how such regulation could be done.

First, the draw of cryptocurrency is that it lacks the need for a centralized authority and people buying into it trust tamper-free legers more than they trust government. Cryptocurrencies with a government thumb on them will probably fail (why not just use money?).

Second they can be run from anywhere in the world. The SEC can do something about ICOs that are based in America, maybe. But in most places (maybe including America) this kind of money is easily enough to buy off a few regulators.

Third, I’m not sure this is even a “regulation” issue. It’s very hard to regulate against people taking money and running. This is a criminal law issue. Bernie Madoff made off* with billions.

* He didn’t, but I couldn’t believe I never noticed Madoff / made off before, so I said it.

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I wonder if the $660,000,000 is what “investors” put into it, or just what they thought they had after multiple doublings and commissions?

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Speaking of the name cryptocurrency deserves:

Craz-Y!!!

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The SEC exists because healthy (meaning, among other things, fair) equities markets make it possible for the public to fund businesses. In other words, the SEC regulates a useful thing. It isn’t clear that ICOs serve any useful purpose.

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Well nobody could have predicted that, and by nobody I mean everybody.

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You would think the 48 % per month return would have tipped people off. You don’t have to be particularly savvy to see that red flag.

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Greed can make your brain switch off.

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I would have thought the insurmountable problem of insane volatility and the ecological disaster of coin farming in combination gave crypto currency a bad name long ago.

“What’s it worth? Who knows. But it cost me like 40 megawatt hours to mine it.”

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Those sorts of ‘utopians’ tend to make traditional anarchists and other solidarity-types very sad and/or peevish.

Blockchains can(when correctly implemented and ideally with the silicon burning arms race of proof-of-work dealt with) be an interesting mechanism for cases where there is no trust; either in some authority or in the other parties.

This is modestly alien to current market standards; where one or more arbiters usually do the heavy-hitting norms enforcement(though much of the day-to-day non-fraud is probably cultural); but it’s very, very alien to most premarket or alternative-to-market arrangements of human affairs, where trust relationships have tended to be kind of a big thing. Cue techbros proposing trust-free arrangements as obvious modernizations of trust-based ones; for reasons that probably don’t reflect well on their character.

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