Interpol Issues Red Notice For Terra Founder Do Kwon (techcrunch.com) 29
Interpol has issued a red notice for Do Kwon, requesting law enforcement agencies worldwide to search and arrest the Terraform Labs founder whose blockchain startup collapsed earlier this year. From a report: The collapse of Terra cryptocurrency (Luna) and the so-called stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) wiped out investors' $40 billion, prompting an uproar that caused the prosecutors to launch investigations into Kwon and his colleagues. He faces charges in South Korea, the prosecutors said Monday.
Not scammer is not on the run (Score:2)
And has only done fake scams with pretend currencies. Well, that red notice is quite real, unfortunately for him.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if we'll get any crypto-bros defending him and the whole concept of stable coins again.
They've been surprisingly absent recently. Or maybe not so surprisingly.
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It's super easy to defend the concept of stablecoins. It's extremely easy to defend a group that takes whatever it is tied to custodially and is in full reserve. For instance, when Tether (USDT) came out, people believed it was that. It turned out later it was not, but there had been such a huge pump in between that whatever risks they were probably taking turned out ok, and as such, Tether is very much solvent despite the incessant predictions to the contrary. Similarly, Coinbase's USDC was another thi
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USDC is just getting fudded by criminals because they locked funds on tornado cash, nothing much changed with the auditing reports.
Re:Not scammer is not on the run (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been one of Slashdots crypto-bros lately, getting modded into oblivion every time I hint at something positive about crypro currencies or blockchains. Yet I would have been the first to warn you about investing into the Terra/Luna ecosystem.
What many people, even (shockingly) some bigshot venture-capitalists with huge credentials don't realize is that a lot of these blockchains are being developed by kids like you would build some social network. "Move fast and break things": No strong foundations, no strong security, no validation, and also barely decentralized. User acquisition and token price are the indicators that drive everything, while the actual robustness and technical proficiency of the platform are shaky at best. Yet for some reason that absolutely dumbfounds me, there is no shortage of VC's, crypto influencers, some people who have been in the space for a long time, that promote and push these ecosystems like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Naturally people believe these "experts", invest millions, billions into these fragile constructs, and eventually due to the technical debt or lack of research and validation, some of these things come crashing down eventually, taking the billions with them.
It was absolutely eye-opening to me to realize how many of these people who you think should know their stuff are actually clueless fuckers. I guess maybe you need to be a software engineer and actually invest some good research effort in order to be able to tell a good project from a bad one, but shouldn't these people have advisors with technical proficiency in their teams? I don't know. I truly don't know where all the stupid is coming from.
Also, it's no secret that Do Kwon is an arrogant, loudmouthed idiot. Maybe the character of a person is also a bit indicative of their ethics and practices?
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Yeah. Considering that most of the loud 'experts' and 'famous people' that try to get you to buy all this stuff are as clueless as a blind duck, I'm somewhat surprised it isn't *worse*.
My goodness (Score:4, Insightful)
He must have scammed rich people, interpol says red notices are "typically [for] murder, rape, child abuse or armed robbery". [interpol.int]
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Did Bin Laden even get a red notice?
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I'm now imagining a new take on the old Red Buttons bit...
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What a difference a word makes ... you say "are" outside the quotation marks, they say "can be" in the actual text.
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Which you know because I linked to it.
But really, since they didn't say anything else it "can be", it's an implication they wanted to create. I didn't create their webpage.
Fake money (Score:4, Interesting)
Wiped out $40 billion. How much total cash was lost though? If you bought the Mona Lisa inn a garage sale for $10 .. and then you put it on auction, you might get $1 billion for it right? You'd be able to cal yourself a billionaire right? Heck if the Elizabeth Warren finds out, she may even want to force you to sell it and pay a few hundred million in tax. Anyway, now imagine comes out that Leonardo Da Vinci was a pedo guy or something and he actually copied the Mona Lisa from a different painting that was now discovered. Suddenly, people don't want the Mona Lisa anymore. How much money did you really lose? $10 is what I say. You never had a billion in cash. You had something that a lot of people wanted, and they suddenly didn't want it anymore. Sure you had your hopes up, but no sense crying about it like you lost a billion.
Re: Fake money (Score:2)
Agree, the $40B number sounds odd. Are we to believe he had $40B in actual cash to backup his Terra crypto currency? And that somehow it all just "disappeared" [youtu.be]
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No cash is ever lost on either bitcoin or stocks. Every buyer pays a seller. Your garage sale holder has your $10 so no money was lost, unless the $10 bill got burned or shredded which would be the tragedy in that case.
Stable coins? Why? (Score:1)
When the Luna collapse first hit is the first time I heard of it. I don't follow every random faux-coin out there but the story was interesting.
What I didn't get was what's the point of a so-called stable coin they've done some shenanigans to pin to the dollar? Which obviously was a failure, anyway, but that's not my point.
Let's say the shenanigans really did work and Luna really did maintain it's 1:1 dollar pin? Why would anyone want Luna? Just use dollars.
Still scratching my head on this one. I assum
Re: Stable coins? Why? (Score:3)
The idea of using a crypto currency as a stand-in for actual cash is the ability to avoid tracking payments through the banking system.
Drug buys, sponsoring terrorism, and paying bribes with untraceable currency has obvious appeal.
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Lol, dude, no stablecoins are private. You don't buy drugs with tether or USDC, you buy them with Monero. Go to dread and try to pay with some fucking ethereum token, tell me how that goes.
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>Let's say the shenanigans really did work and Luna really did maintain it's 1:1 dollar pin? Why would anyone want Luna? Just use dollars.
The way a lot of these work is, there's a stablecoin (in this case UST) worth a dollar, and a reserve currency (in this case LUNA) that is a speculative asset. You would buy LUNA if you believed more people in the future would use UST and sell LUNA if you thought fewer people in the future would use it- via some shenanigans (there's other coins that didn't implode tha
Re: Stable coins? Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
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>The idea was to create a stable coin that works everywhere without the possibility of being frozen or sanctioned by a US government order.
Tornadocash was sanctioned because its ethereum wallets were sanctioned. Why would you be able to pull out, say, a DAI token but not a USDC token?
There is a hypothesis that an algorithmic stablecoin might be more resistant to censorship- for instance, if the USG leaned on coinbase, perhaps they could render certain USDC tokens irredeemable and no longer fungible. Th
A Question (Score:2)
How many of the "coins" issued in the past 10 years have a perceived value today?
Bitcoin, obviously. A few others claim to have value against bitcoin.
But just about every other "coin" out there has been, or probably will soon be, claimed to have been a scam.
Given the percentages, you would think someone would figure out that coin X is just as bad as coin M, and not get caught up in the hype.
Alas, we haven't been through the whole sector of gullible people yet. 'Tis a shame.
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Nature keeps building a better idiot, and what's more, it keeps building more of them.
Capitalism keeps handing money to people who don't know anything about it, and didn't get rich on anything like merits — only whose womb they came out of, or usually much more relevantly, who helped put them in there. So it should not surprise anyone that people with a lot of money keep getting bilked out of big pieces of it. Look at what happens to most lottery winners.
A typical witchhunt (Score:2)
The same kind of law that arrests the previous president because a boat sinks or the economy tanks on their watch.
A different kind of legal tradition I guess.