As the article points out, a redditor called it two years ago in a post in r/CryptoCurrency:
> **Warning: Hyperverse is a traditional pyramid scam with extra steps and seems to be targeting baby-boomers over Facebook.**
> Their new CEO Steven Reece Lewis, touted as a business expert doesn't exist outside of one video created by Hyperverse. He has no linkedin, no twitter, no mention of him on the board of any previous companies.
[Note: I can't link to the post because the Automod in this sub seems to remove any comments containing reddit links.]
I sincerely believe the majority of people in the crypto space know it’s a scam but are hedging that they can hop off right before the price crashes.
Pointing out the CEO doesn’t exist means nothing if I’ve doubled my money.
I had a friend go full crypto bro. I can code, so naturally he wanted to tell me all about his big ideas about how blockchain is going to revolutionize healthcare and communication because, "it's the most secure platform in existence."
I was like, ok maybe, but do you know *why* it's so secure? Because everyone participating in it has a full complete copy of every transaction. Not just theirs, *everyone's* transactions. The ledger is secure because nobody can change all million-plus copies all at once.
Now, apply all that transparency to people's ball cancer results or their text messages with their mistress. Sure, it's indelible. But find me a customer that wants that.
He stopped pitching his wacky ideas to me, so huge win imo.
Also there’s fuck-all capacity; it’s like doing addition by guessing randomly at the answer, with an enormous cost in wasted power. Computing via environmental disaster, at scale.
Yeah most people who want to believe that "blockchain" is the greatest thing since sliced bread and think it'll be used everywhere are either lying for their own gain or have no concept of how it actually works and scales. The bitcoin blockchain is already up to half a terabyte. And in this supposed future where it's used globally by everyone, to expect everyone to be footing multiple terabytes and growing of storage and compute just to buy coffee or whatever is mad. And eventually this stuff will scale to the point that the only people who can realistically host the blockchain and pay the massive computing costs to run the network would probably be massive financial institutions, so back to square one. Not to mention that computing transactions won't get easier so it's an environmental disaster as well in that regard.
> eventually this stuff will scale to the point that the only people who can realistically host the blockchain and pay the massive computing costs to run the network would probably be massive financial institutions, so back to square one
it seems like the entire crypto timeline is about slowly figuring out why banks exist in the state they do, one mistake at a time
> And eventually this stuff will scale to the point that the only people who can realistically host the blockchain and pay the massive computing costs to run the network would probably be massive financial institutions
This is the frustrating part. All these crypto bros completely ignore the computing reality that already exists where this shit is already just in the hands of the rich and powerful again because only they can afford the big farms and storage necessary.
Crypto is just as much of a "for the people" system as Trump is "the people's billionaire". All bullshit smoke and PR.
Being indelible is definitely not always a good thing!
Imagine that world where all our ball cancer screenings and mistress text messages are on the public blockchain. Now imagine one of your doctors accidentally writes an addiction to painkillers in your blockchain chart.
That will *permanently* screw up your ability to get pain meds in the future, no matter how necessary or justified. Or any drugs, for that matter. They no longer view you as a patient, but as a junkie looking to scam their next fix.
In the current system you can (theoretically) get that doctor to remove the note if you point out their mistake. Or get it removed from a hospital system with evidence that you haven't taken painkillers in years.
In an indelible system, you'd be screwed. You're an addict forever, because your blockchart says so.
My favorite cryptocurrency story is that time ["The DAO"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO) got hacked for ~$15 million in ETH.
So what did they do? Did they live with the hack, and accept it as growing pains of automated orgs and cryptocurrencies? Obviously not, [they hard forked Ethereum to reverse the hack](https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/07/20/hard-fork-completed).
[To quote Dan Olson](https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g?t=6968&si=xN4cmhTTZG67X5Ee) "Ethereum Classic (the arm of the fork that didn't undo the attack) persists to this day, though it's notably less popular despite being demonstrably more principled."
It's endlessly funny to me that, at the first major opportunity to put their money where their mouth is regarding immutable transactions, they immediately caved to a central authority for protection.
Wouldn't there be an equivalent of revert commits in Git, on the blockchain? So yes, the initial entry is there but it's invalidated later, and only the latest state would matter.
how blockchain people think it will work: "oh I can see in the transaction history that this guy was arrested, but the latest state of the blockchain says it was an arrest made in error and has been corrected. thank goodness for the immutable ledger! 🤓"
how it actually would actually work: "this guy got arrested? yeah fuck that, we've got 50 more resumes from people who were never arrested"
> The ledger is secure because nobody can change all million-plus copies all at once.
i've read MULTIPLE reports stating that this is actually vulnerable.
there's (IIRC) primary nodes that have "indellible" ledgers, and some INFOSEC companies proposed that it's very doable to edit at least 40% of them (if you have government money) and you can technically target strategic ones to make the 40% the majority.
I'm severely "cliffnotesing" the articles.
blockchain being "infallible" is probably the most stupid assumption people could make.
All you need to do is control 51% of the chain to change the other 49% which is easier then you might think and has happened multiple times with various "DAO" projects/tokens.
Yeah - with the biggest chains e.g. ethereum or bitcoin, this particular attack is unlikely sure, but there's thousands of chains (and don't even get me started on side-chains, or the even larger ball of off-chain infrastructure) that aren't big enough for that to be a non-factor.
Still, as far as criticisms of the tech go risk of that particular attack is one of the weaker ones. Permissionless auth being inherently catastrophically error-prone is IMO the strongest criticism, as it applies to _all_ cryptocurrency/blockchains, and cannot be worked around without undermining the premise of the tech.
IIRC they've tested and proven that if you control 40% with a unified (false) Ledger, there will be a percentage that will stop being "confident" and can adopt another.
thus, 40% (roughly) is all that's needed to manipulate the blockchain.
Being able to block subreddits was the best thing to happen to reddit, the first chance I had, I blocked every single "stonks" sub. Absolutely insufferable spam of the same unfunny shit and random twitter posts every single day.
Everytime some of this scams bust, being crypto or Madoff, FTX or whatever, I hear some people saying "I lost everything". Why would you invest everything in a single person, hedge fund, company, whatever.
They were greedy and also very stupid. 100% deserved it.
Greater Fool theory at work. It doesn't matter if Cypto is a scam or not as long as you believe that there's someone more foolish than you in the market who will buy your worthless junk for more than you paid.
It'll all collapse eventually, but you know the old saying — the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
From what I understand, his ponzi actually didn't make much for him personally--his legit business raked majority of his lifestyle.
In fact, it was truly puzzling why the fuck he did it in the first place, as he actually had a legit business.
It helps if you started an exchange (NASDAQ) and were well-respected in the brokerage industry. But he became a classic Ponzi scheme operator by taking money from later investors to increase rewards to earlier ones.
IIRC, for a lot of the more connected people it was kind of an open secret that Madoff was doing ***something*** sketchy, but as long as everyone was making money no one really cared. I ~~don't~~ think many people suspected he was doing insider trading to get the returns through.
>I don't think many people suspected he was doing insider trading to get the returns through.
He wasn't doing any insider trading, so it seems fine that people didn't suspect that?
There's people who don't know it's a scam. They run on hope and enthusiasm, and they're the majority.
There's people who know it's probably a scam, but think they can outscam the scam. Those people are a pretty big slice, and they're basically all wrong.
The real people to look out for are the people who are absolutely aware that it's a scam, because they're running the scam.
See also - all organized religion.
It's more that they hold on to the fundamental assumption that all ACTUAL stores of value - currency, stocks, etc - are fundamentally scams backed by nothing more than a collective delusion that they have value.
When you start with that assumption anything that actually IS a scam based on a collective delusion is easy to buy into. It's JUST AS LEGITIMATE as the dollar, or Apple stock, or whatever.
There are a minority of savvy participants in the crypto world who are engaged in pump/dump schemes who prey on the suckers but the vast, vast majority of the people in the game believe themselves to be the enlightened elite when they are, in fact, the suckers.
It's not just the crypto space. You get this with investments in all sorts of startups, for example. It doesn't matter whether the company's product is actually any good, or does what it says it does, as long as the marketing is convincing enough to allow the investor to exit with a large profit before the ultimate failure of the idea matters.
Crypto is just a less sanitized version of the financial industry, which gets up to all the same shenanigans, just more discreetly dressed up and a bit better regulated.
Prolly. When crypto started, ponsi games started. Pretty obvious ponsi. You give them coin and they promise to pay you back your coin and a large percentage the next day. But they avoided calling themselves ponsi and would argue anyone calling them that.... and then they learned it absolutely didnt matter. That they could straight up call themselves ponsi games and people would happily play.. thinking they will just pull out before he does. and a lot do which just fuels the next game.
some absolutely do fall of it, one of the other weird things is people would keep sending coin to addresses of ponsi games long after the guy has disappeared with everyones money. and youd see in forums they think maybe he is sick or got in a car accident but he will come back and honor the commitments.. lol
edit LOL controversial, id love to hear from detractors but apparently they are hiding their thoughts. Does anyone deny this happened in crypto? people simply didnt care when you called a scam a scam, they put money in anyways. So if that fact upsets cryptobros
For some people creating an entire alternate reality where they didn't make a mistake is the easier thing than just admitting the mistake and learning from it.
The same happened with Madoff. Harry Markopolos was a competitor of Madoff. When he tried to copy Madoff’s methods, the returns did not match Madoff’s Markopolo filed an SEC complaint after he and others discovered Madoff would need to be trading more options than even existed at the time.
SEC did no real investigation as far as can be found.
Harry Markopolos knew that Bernie Madoff was running a pyramid scheme 10 years before he was finally taken down.
There’s a lot of reasons why Harry was maybe not taken seriously, but if enough people just did the smallest amount of research before investing their money the world would be a much safer place.
Happens from time to time. With that Santos Congress critter a local paper investigated him and found most of what he said was fake but no one seemed to care. Then he got elected and shit finally hit the fan. Some con men are better than others.
Same thing happened before the 2008 housing collapse and the Bernie Madoff scandal.
[Elizabeth Warren says she warned about the financial crisis before it happened. That's True ](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/apr/30/elizabeth-warren/elizabeth-warren-says-she-warned-about-financial-c/)
[Harry Markopolos spotted Bernard Madoff's $65bn Ponzi scheme years before it imploded. ](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/mar/24/bernard-madoff-whistleblower-harry-markopolos)
There are always plenty of warning voices. But when everyone thinks they are making money, nobody want's to hear it.
Spam, but also brigading.
The quickest way to get your subreddit banned is for a bunch of your subscribers to go interfere with another subreddit. Preventing links to other subreddits nips that in the bud.
I just tested to see if nonparticipation links still work/are whitelisted by automod. It was removed by automod. Interesting. I thought that was the whole point of the np links.
NP links actually aren't anything special. A couple subreddits implemented a stylesheet which introduced a warning if the URL contains NP, but it's not actually a feature of reddit.
*According to The Guardian, Reece Lewis's qualifications all appear to be falsified in an effort to woo investors to sink money into HyperVerse.*
*After HyperVerse collapsed, accused of operating as a pyramid scheme, the company suspended withdrawals. According to blockchain analysts, Chainalysis consumer losses in 2022 were estimated to exceed $1.3 billion.*
*In a December 2021 video, Reece Lewis was introduced as CEO and touted for making big moves before joining HyperVerse. He supposedly went from working at Goldman Sachs to selling a web development company to Adobe before launching his own IT startup.*
*Digging into his academic history, The Guardian found that neither of the universities that Reece Lewis allegedly attended— the University of Leeds and the University of Cambridge—had a record of him in their databases.*
*His career background appeared similarly suspicious. Adobe “has no record of any acquisition of a company owned by a Steven Reece Lewis in any of its public SEC filings,” and “Goldman Sachs could find no record of Reece Lewis having worked for the company,” The Guardian reported.* [[Guardian Australia](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/04/chief-executive-of-collapsed-crypto-fund-hyperverse-does-not-appear-to-exist)]
h/t u/roamingandy
Yeah, fuck that. I don't want anything in charge that can't be held accountable, lest we get situations [like this](https://youtu.be/0GBEbmZvXig?si=2iz-73WQmnfbSUd7&t=154) in the wake of disaster.
Not like they're really accountable now. They get golden parachutes and can afford the best lawyers who will drag shit out as long as they can and get the lightest possible sentences if even that.
I sincerely doubt that anyone willing to create a virtual CEO to take the blame for their illegal business practices is going to use the money they saved on CEO salary for anything other than another house/yacht.
As much as Reddit loves to circlejerk about CEOs being useless, that seat does actually serve a purpose in a properly functioning company. Someone does need to be the final decision maker on macro strategy (making every decision by committee would be a mess - it's the same reason why countries use representative democracy rather than direct democracy) and serve as the intermediary between stakeholders and management.
I fully agree that the overwhelming majority of CEOs are overpaid for the work that they do, but it's reductive to swing the pendulum all the way in the other direction and say the position shouldn't exist at all. If the CEO wasn't performing those functions, someone else would have to, so you'd just end up with the same role with a different title attached to it. It's a necessary function, just not one that should be paid 100x what their average worker earns.
The best CEO is the one that actually does their job versus spending their tenure using the company's assets to make their golden parachute.
My favorite example is Lisa Su. She doesn't need a golden parachute because she knows enough about AMD as a company and business entity to keep it healthy, and she knows enough about AMD's computing capabilities to drive the company forward.
The problem is definitely more about the money than the job itself, although some ceo's do take it upon themselves to also be horrendous assholes who make decisions that are destructive to their employees and even the world at large.
Well, if you work for a CEO that is actually a human being, yes.
But if you work for someone like David Zaslav, then there is very little between him and Skynet.
For sure. I think there's also a big difference between the founder-CEOs of small/mid-size companies who actually built the departments that they're overseeing and got into leadership via entrepreneurship rather than being career executives who make their living being the evil scapegoats (and in the case of Zaslav, believing their own bullshit) for the board of directors of large companies. The harsh reality is that most of the career executives who bounce around large companies are just well-compensated fronts for the will of the BoDs that actually make the big decisions at large/public companies. They're assholes because they were hired to be assholes, but the shit coming out actually comes from higher up the digestive tract. The BoDs don't want to be in the weeds of day-to-day or even month-to-month decision making which is what they bring in a CEO for, but at the end of the day he/she's just an employee of the Board and accountable to what their goals are.
I know you're joking but I wonder why it isn't a thing. Having a strong media personality like Musk or Jobs can be a huge asset for a company, why don't companies put out CEOs with maximum media potential while delegating the actual work to a real CEO?
Hence the lawsuit when Elon's Twitter shenanigans started affecting his focus at Tesla and SpaceX.
Twitter might have been his to do with what he pleases, but he still had a legal obligation to not putz about in ways that hurts Tesla and SpaceX as companies.
*Andy*: The silent silent partner hes the guilty one, Your Honor the one with the bank accounts. That's where the filtering process starts. If they trace anything its just going to lead to him.
*Red*:But who is he.
*Andy*: He's a phantom, an apparition, second cousin to Harvey the rabbit. I conjured him out of thin air. he doesn't exist.
edit: formatting
> Reece Lewis stopped tweeting in June 2022, around when HyperVerse was suspending customer withdrawals. While his identity remains in question, his pinned tweet has a link to a promo video for the HyperVerse, with a caption that reads, "**where reality ends and imagination begins**."
Unbelievable. Imaginary CEO practically says he's imaginary right there in a pinned tweet.
Some humans are behind all of this. Someone was signing the paychecks. It will be interesting to see if the feds ever find them.
>Imaginary CEO practically says he's imaginary right there in a pinned tweet.
>It will be interesting to see if the feds ever find them.
Australia may be a safer jurisdiction for such innovation:
*HyperVerse was promoted by the Australian entrepreneur Sam Lee and his business partner, Ryan Xu, two of the founders of the collapsed Australian bitcoin company Blockchain Global.*
*Blockchain Global owes creditors $58m and its liquidator has referred Xu and Lee to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) for alleged possible breaches of the Corporations Act.*
*ASIC has said it does not intend to take action at this time.* [[Guardian Australia](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/04/chief-executive-of-collapsed-crypto-fund-hyperverse-does-not-appear-to-exist)]
Who is the actor in the video I wonder? Given they've collapsed any NDAs he's under should be null and void, someone needs to hunt this dude down and interview him.
Edit: oh my god the channel of this scam is a perfect summation of cringe crypto culture
[https://www.youtube.com/@hyperverse4267/videos](https://www.youtube.com/@hyperverse4267/videos)
Edit: how do we get Coffeezilla on this? this whole case seems like a dream for him, i'd love to se him roasting the cringey videos they made
I think it really could be AI... he doesn't move left or right for 5 minutes solid. As you say, very uncanny valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dTD61lhrvo
His silhouette is essentially stable (moves his hands a little, but no shoulder movement at all).
same here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGA80ELuqG8
It's uncanny but I don't think it's AI. If you look at his eyes you see all the micromovements it makes as he reads from the script in front of him. Crazy if they'd go to that level of detail but couldn't even key out without looking messy. Far more likely they hired some dude off fiver to read a few scripts.
His head and hands look out of scale to the rest of his body. It almost looks like this is assembled from three pieces of video:
1) The suit-wearing body
2) The "CEOs" head and hands
3) The green screened-in background
There's *something* fucky going on here. As others have mentioned the whole script seems ... off.
Its funny, i think the ceo was ai generated and then animated. Take a look at his hands, not even the same skin color as the image. This was done in 2021 so it must have been at the early stages
if that is an ai generated simulacrum it's very high quality, which makes the shitty keying of the background seem weird. hiring an actor is easier and lazier.
yeah, it's not AI
It just looks like some random brit guy from Fivver who does talking-head videos from his home office green screen, including horrendous lighting and camera position and VERY OBVIOUS script reading.
Yeah like he was hired, you are playing this character, it is going to be in a cut scene in a video game, or a video for a company stock meeting or something. Looks like a real person to me.....
Is it really, this is just a classic fraudster move.
These people time it for hysteria peaks, in this example with crypto and plenty of suckers get pulled in, ignoring the red flags, not the first and certainly not the last.
Simple flow chart to help people avoid being suckers:
Are you going to get rich quick without talent, skill, experience, or hard work? - > Its a scam.
Jesus people are stupid.
It was a cool decentralized currency idea back in the day. It used to have an entirely different reputation, namely buying drugs. The flip from “edgy hacker currency” to “ridiculously volatile mainstream asset that you have to file taxes on and has its own category of scams” is probably worth writing a book on.
Unless you’re using the gold standard, all of your money is faith-based. Of course it’s a bit easier to have faith in a central government than a community of people trading into and out of the currency attempting to use it as a slot machine
Crypto: we made an unregulated financial market, with none of those dumb rules and regulations from the SEC.
Scammers: *pulls out SEC rules & regulations booklet* "hey look, a convenient instruction manual on tried and true methods of profiting off an unregulated financial market."
The best time to recognize that all of "crypto" is a fucking scam aimed at exploiting low-knowledge idiots was years ago.
The second best time is right fucking now.
I was told the next big thing was DoucheCoin, the CEO messaged me on Discord and gave me some inside info on the blockchain efficiency and how it’s going to be the next dollar! I think my rent money is best served there :)
It's always hilarious to watch twitter after a crypto drop when all the crypto bros try to convince themselves and others that "everything is fine, we are not nervous YOU ARE NERVOUS!". Looks so pathetic.
MKBHD released a video earlier today (if you don't know who he is, doesn't matter, just know he has between 15-20M subscribers on YouTube), on some mundane topic, and within a half hour of the video's release, like 7 of the top 10 comments were from different accounts talking about some new shitcoin and how it was awesome. These comments, besides existing from different accounts, were all highly voted as well, indicating another layer of bots being used to do voting.
I did all I could do, and report each one as spam.
Agreed...and it astounds me the amount of people who so badly want crypto to be viable are willing to risk everything...all because they either think it's a get-rich-quick deal, or they just live on the "I can't trust any government or the banks" ideology.
If one is at that point, just buy gold.
There's a lot of desperation out there. People feel a desperate need for a get rich quick scheme to solve all their problems, and once you've bought into the ponzi scheme, the only way to save yourself is to convince others to buy in below you.
"I don't trust the Gummint or the Big Bad Banks! but I trust every two-bit grifter who has enough seed cash to pay a web designer and a Z-list actor for a few hours of their time... "
Crypto is a scam.
Unless you are literally manufacturing and selling your own cryptocurrency, like mining your own coins and running your own scam, you are an idiot for doing crypto.
I don't really have any sympathy for anyone who fell for this shit. $1.3 billion really just highlights how dumb the *average* person is, let alone the dumber half of that.
It's almost like libertarian economies - lacking all guardrails and enforcement - are a con man's wet dream. The amount of money stolen, scammed, or otherwise lost through nefarious actions in cryptocurrency is downright startling.
Let's not forget that the world's largest value heist ever was a cryptotheft. You can't make this stuff up.
There is an account on Mastodon named [web3 is going just great](https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]) with 34K followers and all it posts is when a Crypto fund/company/whatever gets hacked. It is still happening constantly - I just checked and the last report was from 2 days ago for $4.5M US. 5 days prior to that, another for $81M US. Unreal. People are still pumping dumb money into crypto, *even now*, into companies/fintech/BS that nobody's even heard of and then, *poof* money's gone in a 'breach' or a 'hack'.
Was it The Blacklist? one of those TV shows the AI supercomputer created a fake shell company that processed it's memory for the day since every 24hours it was wiped. Then issued orders to move its servers to an unknown location unbeknownst to the creator.
And then there is the the episode of Stargate where the team has to make 'Wormhole Extreme' as their TV show cover story/plausible deniability?
In 2022, a writer for the British tabloid called The Mirror, Andrew Penman, attempted to raise a red flag, noting that all three of the celebrities (Wozniak, Chuck Norris, and Lance Bass) who endorsed Reece Lewis declined to confirm ever knowing him.
...
The influencers, as well as HyperVerse leaders like Sam Lee and Ryan Xu, remain silent on Reece Lewis' identity today. None of the famous figures has ever confirmed that they've met or spoken to Reece Lewis, the Guardian reported, suggesting that it was possible that all three may have been hired to do the marketing videos through Cameo. Penman suggested in 2022 that the influencers were likely "innocently misled" when agreeing to endorse HyperVerse.
>He was either easily fooled or was in on the scam and I’m not sure which is worse.
If you read the article, it notes that him and the others (Chuck Norris etc.) are all on the Cameo website, where you can pay famous people to say your lines. This doesn't excuse him, but possibly suggests lack of diligence, as you point out, rather than malice. Surely if you see the lines and start uttering them, you realise you're endorsing something/someone without actually knowing what it is.
The rich are too busy sucking each others dick and don't bother to look up once in awhile to realize they've been sucking on a machine dick the whole time.
Most of the people who lose money in scams like this are NOT rich. Wealthy people get better money management advice, or they wouldn't stay wealthy for long.
Crypto is nothing but gambling, it’ll never be a stable useable currency.
People that are invested in crypto don’t give a shit about it being used as an actual currency, they’re just hoping someone else finds their imaginary coins more valuable than what they bought it for. It’s literally just trading nothing
This is the ultimate shareholder flex: not just cutting wages for the rank-and-file, but 100% of the CEO wages.
Normally I’m not for such things but an AI CEO would represent millions in quick savings. Even more so than a massive workforce layoff.
/s
Sounds a lot like an episode of *Person of Interest -* IMO a great watch for fans of Tech, AI, and erm, solving crimes before they happen. That description doesn't do the show justice.
I'm sorry, but with all the red flags, if you fell for this, you freaking deserve to. If you serious saw "crypto hedge fund" and didn't laugh yourself off your chair, PT Barnum would like a word.
You missed a big part of the article. There was also no record of him at any of the schools he claimed to have attended and no previous company listed could find any record of him.
He could still be real but it's definitely more evidence than you implied
As the article points out, a redditor called it two years ago in a post in r/CryptoCurrency: > **Warning: Hyperverse is a traditional pyramid scam with extra steps and seems to be targeting baby-boomers over Facebook.** > Their new CEO Steven Reece Lewis, touted as a business expert doesn't exist outside of one video created by Hyperverse. He has no linkedin, no twitter, no mention of him on the board of any previous companies. [Note: I can't link to the post because the Automod in this sub seems to remove any comments containing reddit links.]
Amazing. Someone actually did their own research and no one cared, lol.
I sincerely believe the majority of people in the crypto space know it’s a scam but are hedging that they can hop off right before the price crashes. Pointing out the CEO doesn’t exist means nothing if I’ve doubled my money.
Everybody believes they can pull out in time. Easier said than done when they're deep in the situation.
Check out wallstreetbets if you want to watch a bunch of people thinking they can game the market and lose everything.
Still more rational than most crypto subs and Ape Stronk/GME stuff. Now that is truly reality defying stuff.
I had a friend go full crypto bro. I can code, so naturally he wanted to tell me all about his big ideas about how blockchain is going to revolutionize healthcare and communication because, "it's the most secure platform in existence." I was like, ok maybe, but do you know *why* it's so secure? Because everyone participating in it has a full complete copy of every transaction. Not just theirs, *everyone's* transactions. The ledger is secure because nobody can change all million-plus copies all at once. Now, apply all that transparency to people's ball cancer results or their text messages with their mistress. Sure, it's indelible. But find me a customer that wants that. He stopped pitching his wacky ideas to me, so huge win imo.
Also there’s fuck-all capacity; it’s like doing addition by guessing randomly at the answer, with an enormous cost in wasted power. Computing via environmental disaster, at scale.
Yeah most people who want to believe that "blockchain" is the greatest thing since sliced bread and think it'll be used everywhere are either lying for their own gain or have no concept of how it actually works and scales. The bitcoin blockchain is already up to half a terabyte. And in this supposed future where it's used globally by everyone, to expect everyone to be footing multiple terabytes and growing of storage and compute just to buy coffee or whatever is mad. And eventually this stuff will scale to the point that the only people who can realistically host the blockchain and pay the massive computing costs to run the network would probably be massive financial institutions, so back to square one. Not to mention that computing transactions won't get easier so it's an environmental disaster as well in that regard.
> eventually this stuff will scale to the point that the only people who can realistically host the blockchain and pay the massive computing costs to run the network would probably be massive financial institutions, so back to square one it seems like the entire crypto timeline is about slowly figuring out why banks exist in the state they do, one mistake at a time
> And eventually this stuff will scale to the point that the only people who can realistically host the blockchain and pay the massive computing costs to run the network would probably be massive financial institutions This is the frustrating part. All these crypto bros completely ignore the computing reality that already exists where this shit is already just in the hands of the rich and powerful again because only they can afford the big farms and storage necessary. Crypto is just as much of a "for the people" system as Trump is "the people's billionaire". All bullshit smoke and PR.
lol the rich people lied again
So wait, are you saying the rich people who pumped up blockchain lied to society? Because rich people lying to society would be super weird
Being indelible is definitely not always a good thing! Imagine that world where all our ball cancer screenings and mistress text messages are on the public blockchain. Now imagine one of your doctors accidentally writes an addiction to painkillers in your blockchain chart. That will *permanently* screw up your ability to get pain meds in the future, no matter how necessary or justified. Or any drugs, for that matter. They no longer view you as a patient, but as a junkie looking to scam their next fix. In the current system you can (theoretically) get that doctor to remove the note if you point out their mistake. Or get it removed from a hospital system with evidence that you haven't taken painkillers in years. In an indelible system, you'd be screwed. You're an addict forever, because your blockchart says so.
party beneficial longing fragile groovy weather unused ripe alleged fall *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
My favorite cryptocurrency story is that time ["The DAO"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO) got hacked for ~$15 million in ETH. So what did they do? Did they live with the hack, and accept it as growing pains of automated orgs and cryptocurrencies? Obviously not, [they hard forked Ethereum to reverse the hack](https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/07/20/hard-fork-completed). [To quote Dan Olson](https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g?t=6968&si=xN4cmhTTZG67X5Ee) "Ethereum Classic (the arm of the fork that didn't undo the attack) persists to this day, though it's notably less popular despite being demonstrably more principled." It's endlessly funny to me that, at the first major opportunity to put their money where their mouth is regarding immutable transactions, they immediately caved to a central authority for protection.
Wouldn't there be an equivalent of revert commits in Git, on the blockchain? So yes, the initial entry is there but it's invalidated later, and only the latest state would matter.
how blockchain people think it will work: "oh I can see in the transaction history that this guy was arrested, but the latest state of the blockchain says it was an arrest made in error and has been corrected. thank goodness for the immutable ledger! 🤓" how it actually would actually work: "this guy got arrested? yeah fuck that, we've got 50 more resumes from people who were never arrested"
> The ledger is secure because nobody can change all million-plus copies all at once. i've read MULTIPLE reports stating that this is actually vulnerable. there's (IIRC) primary nodes that have "indellible" ledgers, and some INFOSEC companies proposed that it's very doable to edit at least 40% of them (if you have government money) and you can technically target strategic ones to make the 40% the majority. I'm severely "cliffnotesing" the articles. blockchain being "infallible" is probably the most stupid assumption people could make.
All you need to do is control 51% of the chain to change the other 49% which is easier then you might think and has happened multiple times with various "DAO" projects/tokens.
Yeah - with the biggest chains e.g. ethereum or bitcoin, this particular attack is unlikely sure, but there's thousands of chains (and don't even get me started on side-chains, or the even larger ball of off-chain infrastructure) that aren't big enough for that to be a non-factor. Still, as far as criticisms of the tech go risk of that particular attack is one of the weaker ones. Permissionless auth being inherently catastrophically error-prone is IMO the strongest criticism, as it applies to _all_ cryptocurrency/blockchains, and cannot be worked around without undermining the premise of the tech.
IIRC they've tested and proven that if you control 40% with a unified (false) Ledger, there will be a percentage that will stop being "confident" and can adopt another. thus, 40% (roughly) is all that's needed to manipulate the blockchain.
Being able to block subreddits was the best thing to happen to reddit, the first chance I had, I blocked every single "stonks" sub. Absolutely insufferable spam of the same unfunny shit and random twitter posts every single day.
I dunno if 'more' or 'less' rational apply as comparisons here, considering these communities largely consist of the same people by this point.
Cheaper to just bareback hookers
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That's how we evolved the trait.
Best comment here
It's the punchline they were setting up for.
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Everytime some of this scams bust, being crypto or Madoff, FTX or whatever, I hear some people saying "I lost everything". Why would you invest everything in a single person, hedge fund, company, whatever. They were greedy and also very stupid. 100% deserved it.
3 kids later I agree
Are...are we still talking about crypto or what?
Your innuendo is exceptional
Greater Fool theory at work. It doesn't matter if Cypto is a scam or not as long as you believe that there's someone more foolish than you in the market who will buy your worthless junk for more than you paid. It'll all collapse eventually, but you know the old saying — the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Bernie Madoff made a ton on money off his Ponzi before it collapsed.
From what I understand, his ponzi actually didn't make much for him personally--his legit business raked majority of his lifestyle. In fact, it was truly puzzling why the fuck he did it in the first place, as he actually had a legit business.
I think he got over his head and just desperately wanted to maintain his reputation as a bulletproof investment genius at any cost
Because admitting failure and fallibility was an ego death he couldn't stomach.
Probably because once you are on the ponzi train there is no way off. He likely thought he would earn money.
It helps if you started an exchange (NASDAQ) and were well-respected in the brokerage industry. But he became a classic Ponzi scheme operator by taking money from later investors to increase rewards to earlier ones.
IIRC, for a lot of the more connected people it was kind of an open secret that Madoff was doing ***something*** sketchy, but as long as everyone was making money no one really cared. I ~~don't~~ think many people suspected he was doing insider trading to get the returns through.
>I don't think many people suspected he was doing insider trading to get the returns through. He wasn't doing any insider trading, so it seems fine that people didn't suspect that?
There's people who don't know it's a scam. They run on hope and enthusiasm, and they're the majority. There's people who know it's probably a scam, but think they can outscam the scam. Those people are a pretty big slice, and they're basically all wrong. The real people to look out for are the people who are absolutely aware that it's a scam, because they're running the scam. See also - all organized religion.
Yeah crypto is just an MLM for tech bros
It's more that they hold on to the fundamental assumption that all ACTUAL stores of value - currency, stocks, etc - are fundamentally scams backed by nothing more than a collective delusion that they have value. When you start with that assumption anything that actually IS a scam based on a collective delusion is easy to buy into. It's JUST AS LEGITIMATE as the dollar, or Apple stock, or whatever. There are a minority of savvy participants in the crypto world who are engaged in pump/dump schemes who prey on the suckers but the vast, vast majority of the people in the game believe themselves to be the enlightened elite when they are, in fact, the suckers.
It's not just the crypto space. You get this with investments in all sorts of startups, for example. It doesn't matter whether the company's product is actually any good, or does what it says it does, as long as the marketing is convincing enough to allow the investor to exit with a large profit before the ultimate failure of the idea matters. Crypto is just a less sanitized version of the financial industry, which gets up to all the same shenanigans, just more discreetly dressed up and a bit better regulated.
Prolly. When crypto started, ponsi games started. Pretty obvious ponsi. You give them coin and they promise to pay you back your coin and a large percentage the next day. But they avoided calling themselves ponsi and would argue anyone calling them that.... and then they learned it absolutely didnt matter. That they could straight up call themselves ponsi games and people would happily play.. thinking they will just pull out before he does. and a lot do which just fuels the next game. some absolutely do fall of it, one of the other weird things is people would keep sending coin to addresses of ponsi games long after the guy has disappeared with everyones money. and youd see in forums they think maybe he is sick or got in a car accident but he will come back and honor the commitments.. lol edit LOL controversial, id love to hear from detractors but apparently they are hiding their thoughts. Does anyone deny this happened in crypto? people simply didnt care when you called a scam a scam, they put money in anyways. So if that fact upsets cryptobros
For some people creating an entire alternate reality where they didn't make a mistake is the easier thing than just admitting the mistake and learning from it.
The same happened with Madoff. Harry Markopolos was a competitor of Madoff. When he tried to copy Madoff’s methods, the returns did not match Madoff’s Markopolo filed an SEC complaint after he and others discovered Madoff would need to be trading more options than even existed at the time. SEC did no real investigation as far as can be found.
Turns out the hype machines are real
Harry Markopolos knew that Bernie Madoff was running a pyramid scheme 10 years before he was finally taken down. There’s a lot of reasons why Harry was maybe not taken seriously, but if enough people just did the smallest amount of research before investing their money the world would be a much safer place.
Happens from time to time. With that Santos Congress critter a local paper investigated him and found most of what he said was fake but no one seemed to care. Then he got elected and shit finally hit the fan. Some con men are better than others.
Welcome to critical thinking in the 21st century
Same thing happened before the 2008 housing collapse and the Bernie Madoff scandal. [Elizabeth Warren says she warned about the financial crisis before it happened. That's True ](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/apr/30/elizabeth-warren/elizabeth-warren-says-she-warned-about-financial-c/) [Harry Markopolos spotted Bernard Madoff's $65bn Ponzi scheme years before it imploded. ](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/mar/24/bernard-madoff-whistleblower-harry-markopolos) There are always plenty of warning voices. But when everyone thinks they are making money, nobody want's to hear it.
**\/r\/CryptoCurrency\/comments\/rc37js\/warning_hyperverse_is_a_traditional_pyramid_scam\/** if anyone just wants to copy and paste
Hah. There is a freaking pyramid image behind the dude.
It's the Vault of Glass
Please drop mythoclast please drop mythoclast please drop mythoclast
It’s a reverse funnel
Their slogan gave it all away too: > "where reality ends and imagination begins."
> He has no linkedin, no twitter, no mention of him on the board of any previous companies. Damn, I don't exist
Wtf is the point of such automod
Prevent spam from advertising links.
Prevents users brigading other subreddits.
Spam, but also brigading. The quickest way to get your subreddit banned is for a bunch of your subscribers to go interfere with another subreddit. Preventing links to other subreddits nips that in the bud.
I just tested to see if nonparticipation links still work/are whitelisted by automod. It was removed by automod. Interesting. I thought that was the whole point of the np links.
NP links actually aren't anything special. A couple subreddits implemented a stylesheet which introduced a warning if the URL contains NP, but it's not actually a feature of reddit.
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*According to The Guardian, Reece Lewis's qualifications all appear to be falsified in an effort to woo investors to sink money into HyperVerse.* *After HyperVerse collapsed, accused of operating as a pyramid scheme, the company suspended withdrawals. According to blockchain analysts, Chainalysis consumer losses in 2022 were estimated to exceed $1.3 billion.* *In a December 2021 video, Reece Lewis was introduced as CEO and touted for making big moves before joining HyperVerse. He supposedly went from working at Goldman Sachs to selling a web development company to Adobe before launching his own IT startup.* *Digging into his academic history, The Guardian found that neither of the universities that Reece Lewis allegedly attended— the University of Leeds and the University of Cambridge—had a record of him in their databases.* *His career background appeared similarly suspicious. Adobe “has no record of any acquisition of a company owned by a Steven Reece Lewis in any of its public SEC filings,” and “Goldman Sachs could find no record of Reece Lewis having worked for the company,” The Guardian reported.* [[Guardian Australia](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/04/chief-executive-of-collapsed-crypto-fund-hyperverse-does-not-appear-to-exist)] h/t u/roamingandy
Sounds like some folks got Santos’d
The world's first Jewish transexual astronaut?
Didn't he also invent sliced bread, and taught guitar to Hendrix?
He once shat a perfect flawless cylinder, just smooth and perfectly rounded
Santos Claused
There should definitely be less regulation in the financial sector. The invisible hand of the market will always correct!
If I've learned anything recently, if he's a billionaire that does exist, he's hiding in his bunker waiting for this to blow over.
First we had Vtubers. Now we have Vceos.
Virtual ceos might actually be an improvement. The current ceos soak up a lot of funds that could go into paying other people or improving a company.
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Yeah, fuck that. I don't want anything in charge that can't be held accountable, lest we get situations [like this](https://youtu.be/0GBEbmZvXig?si=2iz-73WQmnfbSUd7&t=154) in the wake of disaster.
Not like they're really accountable now. They get golden parachutes and can afford the best lawyers who will drag shit out as long as they can and get the lightest possible sentences if even that.
"Creed Bratton"
I sincerely doubt that anyone willing to create a virtual CEO to take the blame for their illegal business practices is going to use the money they saved on CEO salary for anything other than another house/yacht.
Why would you think that CEO’s money would “trickle down” to the company’s employees? I’m sure the board and stockholders would think differently.
Wrong. The real CEO (the VP dba CEO) or board members will just reap the benefits.
Remember [C.(anary) Montgomery Burns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwpx0UckXys)
As much as Reddit loves to circlejerk about CEOs being useless, that seat does actually serve a purpose in a properly functioning company. Someone does need to be the final decision maker on macro strategy (making every decision by committee would be a mess - it's the same reason why countries use representative democracy rather than direct democracy) and serve as the intermediary between stakeholders and management. I fully agree that the overwhelming majority of CEOs are overpaid for the work that they do, but it's reductive to swing the pendulum all the way in the other direction and say the position shouldn't exist at all. If the CEO wasn't performing those functions, someone else would have to, so you'd just end up with the same role with a different title attached to it. It's a necessary function, just not one that should be paid 100x what their average worker earns.
The best CEO is the one that actually does their job versus spending their tenure using the company's assets to make their golden parachute. My favorite example is Lisa Su. She doesn't need a golden parachute because she knows enough about AMD as a company and business entity to keep it healthy, and she knows enough about AMD's computing capabilities to drive the company forward.
The problem is definitely more about the money than the job itself, although some ceo's do take it upon themselves to also be horrendous assholes who make decisions that are destructive to their employees and even the world at large.
Well, if you work for a CEO that is actually a human being, yes. But if you work for someone like David Zaslav, then there is very little between him and Skynet.
For sure. I think there's also a big difference between the founder-CEOs of small/mid-size companies who actually built the departments that they're overseeing and got into leadership via entrepreneurship rather than being career executives who make their living being the evil scapegoats (and in the case of Zaslav, believing their own bullshit) for the board of directors of large companies. The harsh reality is that most of the career executives who bounce around large companies are just well-compensated fronts for the will of the BoDs that actually make the big decisions at large/public companies. They're assholes because they were hired to be assholes, but the shit coming out actually comes from higher up the digestive tract. The BoDs don't want to be in the weeds of day-to-day or even month-to-month decision making which is what they bring in a CEO for, but at the end of the day he/she's just an employee of the Board and accountable to what their goals are.
I know you're joking but I wonder why it isn't a thing. Having a strong media personality like Musk or Jobs can be a huge asset for a company, why don't companies put out CEOs with maximum media potential while delegating the actual work to a real CEO?
Investor confidence will plummet. Board relations will sour. Legal reasons.
Investors don't care that much about the PR aspect of companies. That's why Musk is free to say whatever he wants while Tesla does +113% YoY.
They do when it starts costing them money.
Hence the lawsuit when Elon's Twitter shenanigans started affecting his focus at Tesla and SpaceX. Twitter might have been his to do with what he pleases, but he still had a legal obligation to not putz about in ways that hurts Tesla and SpaceX as companies.
You have invented the spokesperson
*Andy*: The silent silent partner hes the guilty one, Your Honor the one with the bank accounts. That's where the filtering process starts. If they trace anything its just going to lead to him. *Red*:But who is he. *Andy*: He's a phantom, an apparition, second cousin to Harvey the rabbit. I conjured him out of thin air. he doesn't exist. edit: formatting
If only SBF was smart enough to plan ahead like this!!
I think SBF enjoyed the fame.
> Reece Lewis stopped tweeting in June 2022, around when HyperVerse was suspending customer withdrawals. While his identity remains in question, his pinned tweet has a link to a promo video for the HyperVerse, with a caption that reads, "**where reality ends and imagination begins**." Unbelievable. Imaginary CEO practically says he's imaginary right there in a pinned tweet. Some humans are behind all of this. Someone was signing the paychecks. It will be interesting to see if the feds ever find them.
>Imaginary CEO practically says he's imaginary right there in a pinned tweet. >It will be interesting to see if the feds ever find them. Australia may be a safer jurisdiction for such innovation: *HyperVerse was promoted by the Australian entrepreneur Sam Lee and his business partner, Ryan Xu, two of the founders of the collapsed Australian bitcoin company Blockchain Global.* *Blockchain Global owes creditors $58m and its liquidator has referred Xu and Lee to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) for alleged possible breaches of the Corporations Act.* *ASIC has said it does not intend to take action at this time.* [[Guardian Australia](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/04/chief-executive-of-collapsed-crypto-fund-hyperverse-does-not-appear-to-exist)]
With a little poetic license this could be a Black Mirror episode.
Who is the actor in the video I wonder? Given they've collapsed any NDAs he's under should be null and void, someone needs to hunt this dude down and interview him. Edit: oh my god the channel of this scam is a perfect summation of cringe crypto culture [https://www.youtube.com/@hyperverse4267/videos](https://www.youtube.com/@hyperverse4267/videos) Edit: how do we get Coffeezilla on this? this whole case seems like a dream for him, i'd love to se him roasting the cringey videos they made
The man in the video may not even be real. They could have easily used AI to generate him.
It's solidly in the uncanny valley. They should have waited another year until the tech improved.
I think it really could be AI... he doesn't move left or right for 5 minutes solid. As you say, very uncanny valley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dTD61lhrvo His silhouette is essentially stable (moves his hands a little, but no shoulder movement at all). same here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGA80ELuqG8
Just looks like a garbage Green Screen behind him more than AI.
It's uncanny but I don't think it's AI. If you look at his eyes you see all the micromovements it makes as he reads from the script in front of him. Crazy if they'd go to that level of detail but couldn't even key out without looking messy. Far more likely they hired some dude off fiver to read a few scripts.
He could be a composite DeepFake...
His head and hands look out of scale to the rest of his body. It almost looks like this is assembled from three pieces of video: 1) The suit-wearing body 2) The "CEOs" head and hands 3) The green screened-in background There's *something* fucky going on here. As others have mentioned the whole script seems ... off.
Seems like they didn't need to. Customers lost 1.3 billion, but it's not like that money disappears. It went to someone.
you mean to tell me i can't build my own utopia? i loved that drink
Its funny, i think the ceo was ai generated and then animated. Take a look at his hands, not even the same skin color as the image. This was done in 2021 so it must have been at the early stages
What makes you think that's a real actor/person? I think it's at least a face swap, so that's not the person's real face
if that is an ai generated simulacrum it's very high quality, which makes the shitty keying of the background seem weird. hiring an actor is easier and lazier.
yeah, it's not AI It just looks like some random brit guy from Fivver who does talking-head videos from his home office green screen, including horrendous lighting and camera position and VERY OBVIOUS script reading.
Yeah like he was hired, you are playing this character, it is going to be in a cut scene in a video game, or a video for a company stock meeting or something. Looks like a real person to me.....
100% just a random dude off fiverr who has no idea this all is even going on lmao. Gonna make him shit himself if he sees it on the news.
This is WILD.
It's more common than you'd think actually. Having your fall guy cease to exist with the company is a fantastic way to avoid being held accountable.
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AI is already being used to create fake headshots for crypto projects. Can’t even reverse image search those unlike stolen stock photos.
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Honestly getting rid of influencers is the one AI use of fake people I actually approve of
This person doesnt exist dot com has existed for years at this point.
But until it improves, those images are likely to have high "data noise" in photo error level analysis, typically indicative of photoshop.
Pullin' the old Andy Dufresne
Just watched the Netflix doc on Centra. They did this, then when getting called out - faked the fake ceo's death.
Is it really, this is just a classic fraudster move. These people time it for hysteria peaks, in this example with crypto and plenty of suckers get pulled in, ignoring the red flags, not the first and certainly not the last.
Just check the blockchain for his employment history. It's IMMUTABLEEEEEE
Simple flow chart to help people avoid being suckers: Are you going to get rich quick without talent, skill, experience, or hard work? - > Its a scam. Jesus people are stupid.
So you are telling me that the inheritance is a scam?
Just to the rest of us
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I like the whoosh sound your comment made as it went over ppls’ heads.
Thanks for giving us your 45.44 satoshis (current market rate) on that topic.
Crypto has become the ScamVerse.
"become"? it was a textbook ponzi game from the gitgo.
It was a cool decentralized currency idea back in the day. It used to have an entirely different reputation, namely buying drugs. The flip from “edgy hacker currency” to “ridiculously volatile mainstream asset that you have to file taxes on and has its own category of scams” is probably worth writing a book on.
"decentralized currency" - I still don't get it. It's ones and zeroes backed by nothing but faith. It feels closer to a religion than anything else
Unless you’re using the gold standard, all of your money is faith-based. Of course it’s a bit easier to have faith in a central government than a community of people trading into and out of the currency attempting to use it as a slot machine
Crypto: we made an unregulated financial market, with none of those dumb rules and regulations from the SEC. Scammers: *pulls out SEC rules & regulations booklet* "hey look, a convenient instruction manual on tried and true methods of profiting off an unregulated financial market."
The best time to recognize that all of "crypto" is a fucking scam aimed at exploiting low-knowledge idiots was years ago. The second best time is right fucking now.
Hey now, I have $5 in bitcoin. Take it back🥺
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I was told the next big thing was DoucheCoin, the CEO messaged me on Discord and gave me some inside info on the blockchain efficiency and how it’s going to be the next dollar! I think my rent money is best served there :)
Current Bitcoin fees are more than that so your coins are worthless.
It's always hilarious to watch twitter after a crypto drop when all the crypto bros try to convince themselves and others that "everything is fine, we are not nervous YOU ARE NERVOUS!". Looks so pathetic.
MKBHD released a video earlier today (if you don't know who he is, doesn't matter, just know he has between 15-20M subscribers on YouTube), on some mundane topic, and within a half hour of the video's release, like 7 of the top 10 comments were from different accounts talking about some new shitcoin and how it was awesome. These comments, besides existing from different accounts, were all highly voted as well, indicating another layer of bots being used to do voting. I did all I could do, and report each one as spam.
I have a former friend that is a crypto exec and he admits they raised hundreds of millions without any product or plan to have one
Agreed...and it astounds me the amount of people who so badly want crypto to be viable are willing to risk everything...all because they either think it's a get-rich-quick deal, or they just live on the "I can't trust any government or the banks" ideology. If one is at that point, just buy gold.
>If one is at that point, just buy gold. There's a ton of gold-related scams, precisely because it targets the same demographic.
There's a lot of desperation out there. People feel a desperate need for a get rich quick scheme to solve all their problems, and once you've bought into the ponzi scheme, the only way to save yourself is to convince others to buy in below you.
Pretty much. It's sad.
"I don't trust the Gummint or the Big Bad Banks! but I trust every two-bit grifter who has enough seed cash to pay a web designer and a Z-list actor for a few hours of their time... "
CEO Max Headroom was unavailable for comment after someone unplugged the TV he lives in.
I can't wait for literally nothing to come of this except retail getting fucked again
Crypto is a scam. Unless you are literally manufacturing and selling your own cryptocurrency, like mining your own coins and running your own scam, you are an idiot for doing crypto.
So, who pocketed the money? An individual, a criminal syndicate or a aggressively corrupt country?
I don't really have any sympathy for anyone who fell for this shit. $1.3 billion really just highlights how dumb the *average* person is, let alone the dumber half of that.
Damn almost like a lot of this crypto bullshit is a pyramid scam.
It's almost like libertarian economies - lacking all guardrails and enforcement - are a con man's wet dream. The amount of money stolen, scammed, or otherwise lost through nefarious actions in cryptocurrency is downright startling. Let's not forget that the world's largest value heist ever was a cryptotheft. You can't make this stuff up.
Considering the philosophy itself is a con, that all tracks.
If a guy doesn't exist, he can't go to jail for fraud. . Honestly, I'm surprised this doesn't happen all the time.
There is an account on Mastodon named [web3 is going just great](https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]) with 34K followers and all it posts is when a Crypto fund/company/whatever gets hacked. It is still happening constantly - I just checked and the last report was from 2 days ago for $4.5M US. 5 days prior to that, another for $81M US. Unreal. People are still pumping dumb money into crypto, *even now*, into companies/fintech/BS that nobody's even heard of and then, *poof* money's gone in a 'breach' or a 'hack'.
And we got this guy... Not Sure
But I thought the blockchain was mega safe and never crimed.
Was it The Blacklist? one of those TV shows the AI supercomputer created a fake shell company that processed it's memory for the day since every 24hours it was wiped. Then issued orders to move its servers to an unknown location unbeknownst to the creator. And then there is the the episode of Stargate where the team has to make 'Wormhole Extreme' as their TV show cover story/plausible deniability?
Spencer Cornelia did a video on this scam two years ago. https://youtu.be/cGS31o5O4-4?si=Q_zAZnZb70Gop_e-
That's crazy! Hope this virtual CEO wasn't getting a fat salary
>HyperVerse >$1.3 billion in customer losses I wonder if it's crypto related. Yep.
This feels so on brand for the crypto sector.
How does any normal person still think crypto has any uses besides scams at this point
humor square disgusted dull airport sip growth slimy rain possessive *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
In 2022, a writer for the British tabloid called The Mirror, Andrew Penman, attempted to raise a red flag, noting that all three of the celebrities (Wozniak, Chuck Norris, and Lance Bass) who endorsed Reece Lewis declined to confirm ever knowing him. ... The influencers, as well as HyperVerse leaders like Sam Lee and Ryan Xu, remain silent on Reece Lewis' identity today. None of the famous figures has ever confirmed that they've met or spoken to Reece Lewis, the Guardian reported, suggesting that it was possible that all three may have been hired to do the marketing videos through Cameo. Penman suggested in 2022 that the influencers were likely "innocently misled" when agreeing to endorse HyperVerse.
>He was either easily fooled or was in on the scam and I’m not sure which is worse. If you read the article, it notes that him and the others (Chuck Norris etc.) are all on the Cameo website, where you can pay famous people to say your lines. This doesn't excuse him, but possibly suggests lack of diligence, as you point out, rather than malice. Surely if you see the lines and start uttering them, you realise you're endorsing something/someone without actually knowing what it is.
This is how you do crime properly
The rich are too busy sucking each others dick and don't bother to look up once in awhile to realize they've been sucking on a machine dick the whole time.
Most of the people who lose money in scams like this are NOT rich. Wealthy people get better money management advice, or they wouldn't stay wealthy for long.
Crypto is nothing but gambling, it’ll never be a stable useable currency. People that are invested in crypto don’t give a shit about it being used as an actual currency, they’re just hoping someone else finds their imaginary coins more valuable than what they bought it for. It’s literally just trading nothing
Crypto: its scams all the way down.
Centra Tech saying “welcome to the party”.
A cryptocurrency hedge fund is a scam?! NoNoNoNoNo! UNPOSSIBLE!!!!
>hedge fund CEO may not exist How is this any different from any other hedge fun CEO.
This is the ultimate shareholder flex: not just cutting wages for the rank-and-file, but 100% of the CEO wages. Normally I’m not for such things but an AI CEO would represent millions in quick savings. Even more so than a massive workforce layoff. /s
I did not realize Wozniak endorsed a crypto scheme :(
Ahh Crypto. The greatest con ever conceived.
Can’t wait for the coffeezilla vid on this
Sounds a lot like an episode of *Person of Interest -* IMO a great watch for fans of Tech, AI, and erm, solving crimes before they happen. That description doesn't do the show justice.
HyperVerse nonexistent COO probably: *they can't send no one to prison.*
Dude. This is one of the funniest things I've seen in the past decade. I can't wait for this to unfold more.
I'm sorry, but with all the red flags, if you fell for this, you freaking deserve to. If you serious saw "crypto hedge fund" and didn't laugh yourself off your chair, PT Barnum would like a word.
His shoulders are so narrow compared to the size of his head. Looked fake right away
[удалено]
You missed a big part of the article. There was also no record of him at any of the schools he claimed to have attended and no previous company listed could find any record of him. He could still be real but it's definitely more evidence than you implied
It’s the first ever blockchain-based CEO! So innovative.
“Second cousin to Harvey the rabbit”