Hacked!
By now you have probably heard what happened on Twitter. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Apple, and other large accounts got hacked by scammers who then sent out scam tweets in order to defraud unsuspecting folks of their crypto.
Truth be told, you kind of have to be greedy to fall for something like this usually. However, a tweet from a verified Apple account is quite something different. People that wouldn't normally fall for a classic money-doubling scam may just be tricked by someone as prominent as Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates claiming to want to give them free money.
I saw a few posts about how Bitcoin is "unsafe". No, Bitcoin is safe. Twitter is unsafe. You cannot "hack" Bitcoin away from someone's secure cold wallet, unless you socially engineer them to either give you their seed phrases, or actually send you the coins. You can hack an exchange and gain access to wallet keys. That's not Bitcoin's failure, it's the failure of the human beings handling it.
Apart from the human failure, the biggest failure here has been Twitter and the undeserved trust of the blue check mark. That check mark is supposed to mean something. It's supposed to command trust in the bearer, or at least in the fact that that is in fact their verified account.
What is needed isn't more trust, but rather more trustlessness. We need cryptographically secured, trustless environments and transparent blockchains.
Who are these hackers?
So far in 2020 I've noticed a sustained, unrelenting effort by various entities to relieve people of their crypto. It's everywhere, especially on social media. It's on Twitter, it's on YouTube. They are even purchasing Google ads that have been showing up on my various social media feeds, including on YouTube pre-video ad rolls.
It seems to me like a well co-ordinated, state sponsored effort, or at least some kind of organised crime syndicate. I even got a personal message on Instagram from a person impersonating a Hive content creator asking if I wanted to participate in a "Bitcoin investment opportunity". The MO seems the same - impersonate a trusted person, then try to scam their followers.
I'm not on FaceBook, but I'm sure it's littered with these scammers as well. I have warned my relatives over the past few weeks and brought their attention to what's going on. It's probably a good idea to do the same. They may be savvy, but you never know :)
How will this affect crypto?
I fear that because of the size of the accounts and prominence of the personalities hacked, there might be an unfair retribution on the crypto community. I'm willing to bet that cryptocurrency related business and content creators are going to bare some of the brunt of this.
YouTube, Twitter and other social media platforms will probably clamp down even harder on the crypto stuff now. That doesn't address the root issue, which is that YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are ALL insecure platforms!
Now more than ever, we content creators should push and patronise decentralised social media platforms like Hive even more than ever before.
To quote MKBHD "Don't send Bitcoin to strangers".
Peace & Love,
Adé