ssokolow

ssokolow, 10 months ago

He recently did one about how he and his team set up a fake bitcoin site that would direct scammers to a fake support hotline when they try to withdraw the fake bitcoin, where they’d get stuck running in circles in a voice mail menu maze chasing the illusory bitcoin payout.

I Trapped 200 Scammers in an Impossible Maze

As one commenter put it, “I love how Kit has evolved over the years to find out the best way of making scammers go crazy is to treat them basically the same way Comcast treats their customers.”

ssokolow, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Lemmy hangs whenever I try to post my response (I suspect it doesn’t like the length), so here’s a link to it on Github Gist:

gist.github.com/…/16c9311573eabc7343ff7ff2cc3513b…

It begins as follows and I’ve tried to hyperlink my sources as often as possible:

I’ll try to fill in some of the knowledge gaps and respond to some of your answers from a more user-centric perspective.

ssokolow, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Moxie Marlinspike’s My first impressions of web3 is also a very relevant thing to share.

As a sampler of the points made, web3 is already re-centralizing around gatekeepers because the average person doesn’t want to run their own server (or, in the blockchain case, host their own full copy of the blockchain) and, if the supermajority of users can’t see you because the gatekeepers block you, then it doesn’t really matter that you’re technically still up.

The takeaway on that particular point is that pushing for more and easier data portability is probably the best route in the face of how real-world users behave. (eg. anything stored in a git repository, including GitHub project wiki contents, is a great example of that. You’ve got your data locally with a simple git clone and you can upload it to a competing service with a simple git push.)