With crypto, it was largely MLM scammers who started pumping it (futily, for the most part) until Ross Ulrich and the Silk Road leveraged it for black market sales.
Then Bitcoin, specifically, took off as a means of subverting bank regulations on financial transactions. This encouraged more big-ticket speculators to enter the market, leading to the JP Morgan sponsorship of Etherium (NFTs were a big part of this scam).
There’s a whole historical pedigree to each major crypto offering. Solana, for instance, is tied up in Howard Lutnick’s play at crypto through Cantor Fitzgerald.
I guess AI isn’t so dissimilar, with major ‘sects’ having major billionaire/corporate backers, sometimes aiming for specific niches.
Anthropic was rather infamously funded by FTX. Deepseek came from a quant trading (and to my memory, crypto mining) firm, and there’s loose evidence the Chinese govt is ‘helping’ all its firms with data (or that they’re sharing it with each other under the table, somehow). Many say Zuckerberg open-sourced llama to ‘poison the well’ over OpenAI going closed.
Silk Road and other black market vendors existed well before the scams started. You could mail order drugs online when bitcoin was under $1, the first bubble pushed the price to $30 before crashing to sub-$1 again. THEN the scams and market manipulation took off.
Later people forked the project to create new chains in order to run rug pulls and other modern crypto scams.
It was the same with crypto TBH. It was a neat niche research interest until pyramid schemers with euphemisms for titles got involved.
With crypto, it was largely MLM scammers who started pumping it (futily, for the most part) until Ross Ulrich and the Silk Road leveraged it for black market sales.
Then Bitcoin, specifically, took off as a means of subverting bank regulations on financial transactions. This encouraged more big-ticket speculators to enter the market, leading to the JP Morgan sponsorship of Etherium (NFTs were a big part of this scam).
There’s a whole historical pedigree to each major crypto offering. Solana, for instance, is tied up in Howard Lutnick’s play at crypto through Cantor Fitzgerald.
Interesting.
I guess AI isn’t so dissimilar, with major ‘sects’ having major billionaire/corporate backers, sometimes aiming for specific niches.
Anthropic was rather infamously funded by FTX. Deepseek came from a quant trading (and to my memory, crypto mining) firm, and there’s loose evidence the Chinese govt is ‘helping’ all its firms with data (or that they’re sharing it with each other under the table, somehow). Many say Zuckerberg open-sourced llama to ‘poison the well’ over OpenAI going closed.
Silk Road and other black market vendors existed well before the scams started. You could mail order drugs online when bitcoin was under $1, the first bubble pushed the price to $30 before crashing to sub-$1 again. THEN the scams and market manipulation took off.
Later people forked the project to create new chains in order to run rug pulls and other modern crypto scams.
Silk Road was launched in 2011, the same year of the first big Mt. Gox crypto heist (now largely recognized as an inside job).
Crypto scams are as old as Bitcoin itself.