Scams everywhere! Nobody cares, though.
I entered Bitcoin eyes-a-goggle, wet behind the ears, looking to meet cool people and build cool things with them. I'd yet to understand that one cannot trust someone one doesn't know, and that bitcointalk.org is the worst place to find trustworthy individuals with whom to conduct business.
I rapidly came to understand that the space comprised of people working on Bitcoin related projects was 90% flat-out scams, 8% 'legit operations' run by crazies/addicts/incompetents and 2% real businesses run by real badass humans.
That 2% would have nothing to do with me.
So I lurked, per hanbot's advice, and read. Read and lurked. Eventually, I started chiming in on the #bitcoin-assets IRC channel; picked up the variety speak; and began to obsess over the scammers who seek to part the rubes from their bitcoins. And oh my god are there a lot of idiots out there. Scams abound, certainly, but only because there are so many damn greedy idiots out there seeking alpha in all of the wrong places.
Channel topic in late-2012 through mid-2013 focused on all the scams going on in every which direction and rubber-necking the crazy runup to what turned out to cap out ~1200. The Bitcoin Trading Company was still a thing (GLBSE 3.14), and I was amazed that the scams could keep pouring forth and that the suckers would keep showing up to drop themselves into the chumpatron. Mr. Popescu calls this the "infinite hitpoints" problem - a practically infinite number of idiots can sustain a small crust of scammers essentially indefinitely.
Eventually BTCTC shut itself down, and the fraction of channel time devoted to discussing and mocking scams dwindled down to a trickle. This left us with Havelock and their pretenses of due-dilligence. Sometime after that (January 2nd 2014) I launched this miserable excuse for a blog and started an effort to catalogue the prior two years of scams on bitcointalk.org.
Quixotic damn mission. There are years of fraudulent insanity buried in that forum, and after two weeks of cataloging the madness had to take the project out back and shoot it in the head for fear I'd come down with whatever disease is infecting the brains of those who seek to throw their hard-won bitcoins at unknown entities across the internet. I politely bowed out and went on with my life, seeking to deliver value for clients and build things for myself.
Things I could spend my time on that would bring more direct benefit to myself than obsessing over cryptoscams:
- build really high-end products for the cool people in Bitcoin who either are now or will be in a decade ultra wealthy
- learn Ragel
- formalize the cryptocurrency network protocol
- move to Argentina
- close more deals
- have more sex
- recruit more partners for sex parties
- throw more sex parties
- work out more
- clean
- meditate
- go to a gay club
- start building the retreat
Besides, my goals for this blog thinger is to be a place of noodling on the topics of crypto, finance, tech and economics.