Re: TEMP: Investigation into scotaloo

Quote from: Kouye on October 16, 2013, 10:29:18 PM

Quote from: Atruk on October 16, 2013, 08:47:50 AM

This isn't directed to you or team scotaloo, but more to people in general.

Honestly I have no idea if this is true or false. In the Bitcoin space a lot of people's dox are held by a lot of other people. Bringing yourself into the Bitcoin space means exposing yourself into a lot of counterparty risks of the sort you wouldn't have conceived of until it is too late.

Forums as a rule tend to fill themselves with lolcows. Generally it is boring business unless it does something like enrich the LabCoin scammers who were identified as a probable scam months before "momentum trades" and full frontal idiots latched onto them. As problematic as scotaloo was in particular and phishers, skiddies, and scammers are in general the larger problem isn't in bitcoin, but in idiots who think they can unprotected and without reading and understanding risk.

I don't want to sound too sympathetic to scotaloo or team scotaloo, but in most scams, especially the big ones like Pirateat40 and LabCoin, the scam happens less because there is a bad buy scammer than because people don't take the time to read how these scams have happened before. I'll probably have even less sympathy for the people who get burned when mcxnow goes bust than the people who fell for scotaloo or furrycoat.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=303795.msg3256239#msg3256239 is the wrong attitude for bitcoin if you want to keep it. Scammers are like tornadoes, earthquakes, flood or fire. They exist, just like any natural thing. The wrong course of action is to assume nature will politely avoid you. The right course of action is to harden yourself for nature's indifference to your snowflakeness.

Many thanks for this testimony, Atruk. I'd still would like to hear more, but I'm starting to wonder about scotaloo team agenda, looks a bit more complex than just "gimme dat monies".

They've always struck me as more troll than anything else. Maybe they just want to scam bigger money though. It is hard to say.

I mean Something Awful is full of idiots playing smarter than they are while 4chan is full of relatively smarter people playing dumber. That though is a generalization. The internet is only ever truly simple when simple people are looking at it.

Not knowing or caring enough about scotaloo to look deep their actions that I know of seem to follow patterns more endemic to some classical forms of trolling than scamming as such. Where before someone would normally be limited to harvesting tears and butthurt, bitcoin seems to have allowed them to harvest tears, butthurt, and money.

Still, you can't assume that these things won't happen. Generally social engineering is a much cheaper way to defeat cryptography than rubber hoses, five dollar wrenches and such things.