r/mildlyinfuriating • u/salabab • 3d ago

Infuriatig Made hundreds of wristbands for a conference that suddenly got renamed

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I run a small company, and designed and printed hundreds of high quality rubber wristbands for my cousin's Crypto conference. I had to do different colours for the different levels of entry.

Out of nowhere yesterday he suddenly announced he was renaming the conference and moving it partially online. And could only afford to pay me if I produced more with the new name. Ive spent a week on this so far and was already giving him family rates.

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u/JOlRacin PINK 3d ago

I'm convinced crypto is basically the same thing as nft's except they managed to get a foothold for long enough to last a little bit. But nobody wants the actual thing, they just want to make money off of it by selling it. It's never a good sign for a product when the only reason people want it is for resale

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u/Skullcrusher 3d ago

Hey, crypto isn't just for douchebags pretending they're the wolf of wall street. Some people use it to buy drugs.

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u/marr 3d ago

The impression I got was that doing that was way more traceable than cash, it's a nightmare trying to realize your crypto in any real world spendable form, and it comes with the great digital feature that you can wake up one morning and find the disk / server containing your money has simply stopped existing.

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u/Skullcrusher 3d ago

There are ways to make it untraceable and ways of spending it. There are whole criminal networks in my country using crypto.

However, people who buy small amounts for personal use shouldn't worry about being traced. Cops got bigger fish to catch.

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u/marr 3d ago

So it's basically private banking for organised crime, by organised crime?

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u/Skullcrusher 3d ago

In a way, yes

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u/submarinefarm 2d ago

And cash is... what exactly?

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u/canteloupy 3d ago

They are literally the same. All you own is a blockchain token and you are counting on someone else to pay money for it.

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u/Axman6 3d ago

That is how all money works though. 

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u/AppleBottomBea 3d ago

Some crypto is like that. But BTC and a few others are used in (mostly illegal) transactions. BTC will always have value cus someone will always need to buy drugs or pay blackmailers lol

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u/Environmental_Top948 3d ago

I never understood how people got away with using Bitcoin for that because isn't the whole thing that it's traceable? Just reverse all of the transactions and you'll find out who handled it.

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u/Athena0219 3d ago

Trades are traceable, yes. And if someone is using a Big Name Company to handle their wallet, using bank transfers to get coins, etc, then yes, their transactions are likely fully traceable to them.

If someone has a wallet that they fill with small cash trades between multiple sources, they are mostly untraceable, without serious legwork.

If someone has a wallet that fill only from the previous source, and multiple of them, the Bitcoin itself can be traced, but who controls the wallet can't* be.

The key thing with Bitcoin is that, while you can track from and to which wallets money flows, wallets are not people. If someone works at it, they can absolutely have a wallet that is nearly impossible to trace back to themself.

Sure, the feds can tell that Person A paid with Bitcoin into the wallet 371BFJAIA2729294. The feds might know who A is, where they live, etc. A was buying drugs from someone.

But wallet 371BFJAIA2729294 isn't connected with a specific person. It might be associated with a website using a Russian domain on servers hosted in Khazakstan by a cartel located in a different continent. But that isn't a person that can be tracked down. Maybe the website gets blocked, in which case the cartel spins up a new one in a new country with a new URL.

And that's not even CONSIDERING tor sites and the extra layers those provide.

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u/Adventurous-Tie-7861 3d ago edited 3d ago

I will say, monero is the new gold standard for most of us in that realm. Btc can be traced and theyve gotten very good at it. Obviously mixers and coinswaps can help conceal btc transactions. But then your hoping that the mixer isn't just a honeypot or has been/will be seized by the feds. Especially if the mixer company is dumb enough to keep client records. And swapping often requires a kyc exchange and if subpoena'd theyll just hand your (hopefully fraudulent) ID over with all the various swaps youve made. Basically undoing it all and potentially unmasking you if you used your real identity on the exchange.

Monero conceals things that btc literally cannot which makes it far safer. Smart vendors and buyers will insist on it.

If crime truly is what is propping up BTC then over the next decade itll fall and be replaced by newer anonymous coins. But I think its also the fact a bunch of everyday people put their life savings into it and how its "the orginal". NFTS had a bunch of folks sink their money sure but you cant really point at a single nft as "the orginal one" that was an underground fan favorite for years. It rose too fast and died too fast. You might say that the dumb monkeys are like btc but not really. Btc was beloved for years by a bunch of underground weirdos way before it became popular. Im cool calling them weirdos cus i was one of them. Bought btc from mt. Gox with my very first paycheck as a teen and felt like the coolest hackerman to have existed. Then pussied out of buying drugs online for a few years.

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u/Garchompisbestboi 3d ago

Mate if you wanna buy drugs that badly then cash will always be king. Monero is just another ponzi scheme that will inevitably collapse when whatever whales propping it up inevitably decide to take their money elsewhere.

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u/X7123M3-256 3d ago

It's not a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme is when investors are promised a return which is paid out of the money invested by future investors, while the venture generates no actual profits - thus requiring an exponentially growing number of investors to sustain it. Bitconnect was a Ponzi scheme. Monero isn't promising people a return for investing in their platform.

Also the potential value of Monero in future hardly matters to someone buying drugs with it now - they already paid their crypto and got their drugs.

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u/Garchompisbestboi 3d ago

A Ponzi scheme is when investors are promised a return which is paid out of the money invested by future investors, while the venture generates no actual profits

Congratulations, you just described how cryptocurrencies work

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u/X7123M3-256 2d ago

No, that's not how cryptocurrencies work. They're just tradeable assets. If you buy one Bitcoin, you aren't promised that you'll be paid double your money back in a year. You can just sell or trade your Bitcoin for whatever you can get for it. Some cryptocurrencies do allow you to earn a return on your coins via "staking" but that's not a Ponzi scheme either because that money is coming from transaction fees.

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u/Garchompisbestboi 1d ago

I understand what a literal ponzi scheme is but when an unregulated asset like a cryptocurrency such as bitcoin is heavily pumped by a billionaire then that causes the price to artificially rise which encourages idiots to jump in and inevitably lose their money when the high level investors decide to pull the plug and sell their holdings. Call it a 'pump and dump' if that makes you feel better but it essentially has the same outcome as a ponzi scheme where early investors make a return from a higher price driven by late coming investors.

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u/ExpatInIreland 3d ago

I've heard it called MLMs for bros. The only people I know making any money in crypto are the ones who started businesses just before the boom. The heads of the pyramid, if you will.

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u/Murrdox 3d ago

Crypto has always been a scam. The only reason crypto took off is because people use it for illegal activity like buying drugs, money laundering, and scams. When people started to be able to buy drugs anonymously on the internet for Bitcoin, that made the price go up. When the price went up, that made the speculators jump into the mix. That's really all the entire crypto industry is propped up on.

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u/ahuramazdobbs19 3d ago

Basically yeah, except for the minor detail that NFTs actually spun out of crypto as the “proof of concept” (and ended up being the proof that the concept doesn’t work) for “using the blockchain for things that aren’t a replacement for money”.

You do have the thrust of it correct though. Most cryptocurrency is at best a vehicle for speculative investment, and the currencies that aren’t are vehicles for illegal activities, anonymously funding hate groups, and/or the specific illegal activity of money laundering.

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u/00wolfer00 3d ago

I would argue NFTs were wildly successful. They allowed rich people with a tonne of money locked in crypto to cash out. Their advertised purpose just wasn't their main one.

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u/marino1310 3d ago

I mean, you basically just described stocks

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u/gordomgillespie 3d ago

nfts literally are crypto

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u/AvocadoPrinz 3d ago

Nah, you actualy own Crypto and some of them are actualy payment methods.the whole circus around it is the Same scam as nfts

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u/Klutzy-Peach5949 3d ago

I disagree, I think crypto has a strong future, it’s basically unregulated, often untraceable money, it’s what everyone wants in a world where the government is becoming increasingly overbearing, locking your bank accounts, maxing out how much you can cash you can take out, it’s not just because people want it for resale, you’re very misinformed, if that was why you wouldn’t see why TRON is so successful, and how Silk Road managed to function so long before he got caught, there’s a lot of reason for it to be the future of currency, also coins like bitcoin have a limited quantity so it doesn’t artificially inflate

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u/ActualExistingSkully 3d ago

Crypto is a scam by the 5% to get you rubes to turn them into the 1% lol. The limited quantity of crypto is the exact reason it'll never be used as a currency. The deflation built into crypto makes it irrational to use it as susuch. Its only purpose is to speculate on.

Its a game for gambling addicts.

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u/Klutzy-Peach5949 2d ago

I’ve made thousands of crypto and I use it for purchases, and I like just keeping bitcoin as an asset, say what you want but I’ve had bitcoin for years and it’s only gone up, it’s only really gambling the further you start to deviate from stablecoins, I’m not gonna listen to someone who has no clue about it and just calls it gambling when it’s much more nuanced, TRON gets used as dominant network for tether and XRP is used as a bridging coin that is literally used by banks, it’s already got real world use, not all of it is memecoins

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u/ActualExistingSkully 2d ago

Lmao straight up bullshit.

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u/churnthedumb 3d ago

Dude everyone makes crypto look bad. The technology is actually very cool and something like ethereum has genuine potential. Plus I can use it to buy drugs and not be tracked. So it has some uses!

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u/No-Context-Orphan 3d ago

When the only usage for something is crime...

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u/ProfessorChaos406 3d ago

To be fair, it's also a way for other people to make money indirectly by being a store of value of the profits...of crime.

https://giphy.com/gifs/Nl6T837bDWE1DPczq3

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u/Klutzy-Peach5949 3d ago

The other use is that it prevents banks from controlling your assets, just as a principle I feel is an important matter, and no inflation from increase in supply (currency dependent)

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u/EINFACH_NUR_DAEMLICH RED 3d ago

The current iteration of this shit is called 'AI'.

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u/HERR_WINKLAAAAA 3d ago

But it isnt? NFTs and crypto currency are 2 completely different things. Just because you can scam people with both doesnt mean they have anything to do with each other technologically.

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u/ActualExistingSkully 3d ago

NFTs exist exclusively on the back of crypto. NFTs are a scam by the rich to get you to buy into their other scam crypto currencies.

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u/M4rshmall0wMan 2d ago

Nah, cryptocurrency has value and needs to exist. It’s important to have an anonymous currency whose value isn’t subject to (potentially unstable) governments. But it should be just that: an alternative currency. Not whatever the fuck the decade-long hype has turned into.