I’m angry as fuck. Mostly at myself.
This morning, I woke up at 5 am and had this notification about Cardno/Charles on this massive giveaway. I won’t detail what it was as I don’t want to give people ideas. But you know.
The channel was called Cardano Foundation, had half a million subscribers, over 80 thousand people live watching. I verified the address on Cardano explorer, and several transactions were going on. Thousands of Adas.
It made sense to me, maybe because I’m stupid, greed, or both in a very twisted way.
- We have the whole scenario where people are “learning” PoW is terrible for the environment.
- Cardano is about to release a lot of new things.
- This would create a lot of hype that would allow more growth into the platform, and the giveaway would be just silly money compared with the possible returns in this “market campaign”.
It turns out, surprise, it was a scam. I lost a lot of money, over 4K ADA.
I don’t wish this feeling to anyone. Never underestimate scammers and their capability to get in your mind.
I’m at peace about losing my money, less so about letting this happen to me. I want to ask you guys if there is anything we could do to prevent or diminish this type of thing in the future.
Before the scam:
- Don’t be naive as I was. Go after past scam cases on the blockchain, coin, token, you own. Don’t focus only on the good things (making moneky!) but on the moments people lost money. You might learn something from it.
During the scam:
- We can go into the platform where it’s happening and report. Go into the groups we are part of and report, being very careful to not generate more flow into the site/video/etc.
Now… what can we do in addition to that? Some thoughts:
- Say me or you found the scam happening. Anyway, we could initiate a blacklist voting on the pools so that that address stops receiving validations?
- Can we use the knowledge of scams from the past, and identify a pattern in the blockchain that could be used to alert the user on Yoroy? The address is pasted and a message saying “Make sure x y z, this address is behaving strangely”
- After the scam has been done and it’s know to be a scam. Could there be a mechanism to roll back all the transactions in and out of that address based on oracle data and reset that state?
I’m a libertarian and I don’t want other people involved in my decisions on who I send my money. Also, I don’t like the idea of rolling back transactions as that could create an institutional aversion of some kind (why would I sell something for ADA if it could be rolled back at any time?). But maybe there’s a way to do that without risking that scenario.
Thoughts?
