Belgian Crypto Ads Must Warn of Risks Under New Rules - Slashdot

Posted by BeauHD

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  Just mispelling a long hexidecimal address by one character can make you lose all your money. Even connecting a wallet lets people steal it. Crypto advertising needs to be treated like tobacco and put in brown boxes covered in warnings.

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    Yep. Because that totally stops smokers from buying it.

    • 1 hidden comment

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        "We can already see that smoking is safer than drinking soda."

        No, we can't. We really, really can't. Smoking doesn't double or triple your chance of lung cancer--it increases it 15 to 30 times.

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      "Yep. Because that totally stops smokers from buying it."

      Well, yes, it does. It doesn't stop *all* of the smokers from buying it, obviously. It may not even stop most of the smokers from buying it. But it's a provable fact that the number of people buying cigarettes goes down when it's in unattractive packaging. That's why cigarette companies want to put them in attractive packaging and spend quite a lot of money making that packaging attractive (when they're allowed to).

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    It's not that hard to cut and paste. Most modern tools make it really easy not to screw up send addresses unless your system is compromised.

    Base chain level transactions aren't really meant for the average Joe anyway. Not in the long run.

    As far as "connecting a wallet" goes... connecting it to what exactly?

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      FWIW, there is no possibility of error free copying methods, one methods that reduce errors. E.g. copy-paste is subject to frame registration errors. (And to other errors, that's just the one that happened to me earlier today, copying a web link.)

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    I'm surprised that the last 2 hex digits aren't a checksum like credit cards using Luhn algorithm [wikipedia.org]?

    Oh wait, that would take planning, understanding computer science, human psychology, and work from the crypto bros./s

    Alex, I'll take "Noobs Designing Crypto" for $100.

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      They DO have a checksum in the address. I'm quite surprised this is news to any of you. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bas... [bitcoin.it]

• I think today the biggest risk today is running into scammers who write âoecryptoâ in big letters, without any crypto actually involved: They just grab people's money and run.
  
  These people are not going to be stopped.

• It seems to me these people are fighting the wrong fight. The crypto crisis is history, it's a banking crisis we're having now. Bank ads should really carry a warning about the real risks they take with their investments, about the bail-in laws that have been passed since the last financial crisis (hint: if your bank fails, *your* money may be used to bail out the bank, and you might get some shares in the bank in return), about how government deposit insurance schemes are really just a smokescreen intended

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    This is a government agency trying to turn public attention from the current bank crisis toward crypto problems.

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      As a citizen of Belgium, crypto here is absolutely not on anybodies radar (maybe a very very very small percentage of people), and I work in the tech sector.

      I went with my cousin to an open day in a school which does IT bachelor's degrees, and there were four choices for specialisation: security expert, software engineering, AI and blockchain. There was zero interest in the two last degrees, nobody stood there asking question.

• Crypto is just a weird Ponzi scheme! Thankfully I've known that for a long time, so I invested in a regular bank, Credit Suisse. My money is safe!