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0 pointsyieldcrv1y ago0 comments

I understood your point was that all participants including the token creators are scammers, and I didn't entertain you on it, shifting away from the semantics of that word as its an impossible standard for people that want to navigate that space

There is more nuance to it than that. The exchanges themselves will revoke a listing if it leaks in advance, turning the entire community against the founders for failing to get a listing and the door to that exchange being closed forever. The founders dont want it to leak that they paid or merely engaged a consultant, as a well done marketing campaign and “organic” results are what attracts people. The consultants therefore wont reveal who they worked with. and even if they did the founders will deny.

Many immature economies and sectors are like this. Crypto consultancy scams are not different enough for me to treat it differently.

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lolinder1y ago· 2 in thread

> shifting away from the semantics of that word as its an impossible standard for people that want to navigate that space

It's not about semantics, it's about the facts of what you're describing:

> The founders dont want it to leak that they paid or merely engaged a consultant, as a well done marketing campaign and “organic” results are what attracts people.

This is fraud. It's probably fraud in the legal sense, but it's absolutely fraud in the ethical sense.

"Organic" results attract people to a crypto project not just as some kind of personal preference, they attract people because a truly organic result is evidence of a project that isn't going to just be a money sink. Faking results in order to attract people is fraud (ask Elizabeth Holmes) and individuals who can persuade themselves that it's not will tend to be dishonest.

You can't distinguish between the scammers and the "legit" consultants because you exist in a world where dishonesty is the norm. They're all behaving dishonestly, it's just difficult to tell which ones are out to get you.

yieldcrvOP1y ago

yes and its really great that exchanges have been disintermediated by liquidity pooling systems. a lot of these extortionate practices were because projects use to need exchanges for any liquidity, so exchanges gatekept that. and now thats not necessary. anybody can spin up a permanent liquidity pool within 1 second.

regardless, purchasers should be more discerning as the technology provides the necessary transparency. many are discerning. many arent and those purchasers and the people they are influenced by have created a culture of strange metrics to judge a project by - such as growth of members in a chat channel, or mentions, or exchange listings. Playing along with that isn't fraudulent unless saying something happened for a reason it didnt. What you are describing to me is analogous to suggesting an organization directly tell all the technical analysis traders that their charts had nothing to do with anything, and if the organization didn't say that then its fraud.

In any case, crypto assets would work just as well if their creators said “they’re connected to this consultant” but for now thats just an omission thats necessary because the consultants tend to be in a position to harm the projects and its not clear they’ve delivered until the separate exchange moves forward with the listing.

I wouldn't consider that fraud on the project’s side in any sense, but I can see why you think that is - where either Ive created a protective layer of rationale for myself or the entire ecosystem is fraudulent and any individual’s way of navigating that is irrelevant. I don’t agree with that assessment, my contribution is to point out that there is a niche of scammers that absolutely will do meticulous, convoluted fraudulent things reminiscent of what the article has shown. And if you want to know about that niche, then I’ve detailed it. If you dont, this isnt really the thread for generalized crypto sentiment but I’m sure there will eventually be others on hackernews and you’ll find someone to entertain what you actually want to talk about.

lolinder1y ago

> If you dont, this isnt really the thread for generalized crypto sentiment

This isn't generalized crypto sentiment. I actually find the rehashed arguments about crypto on HN rather exhausting and don't tend to participate much.

What this is is a thread about crypto scams, in particular a crypto scam that preys on dishonest people by taking advantage of their dishonesty. You provided a great illustration of a similar type of scam by mentioning how you've seen how many scammers take advantage of the widespread secrecy in the crypto token world, which secrecy you say exists in order to better attract buyers by not letting on the various ways in which the creator is manipulating things behind the scenes with the aid of a paid consultant.

It seems to me that a discussion of pervasive dishonesty creating a hotbed for scammers is totally relevant to TFA and to your original comment.

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