If you go on a crypto exchange, you see trading pairs, e.g. BTC/USD, BTC/EUR and so on. You also see order books and trading volume.

I kindly assume you never heard of any of this and asked this question in earnest.

PS: last time I shaved I saw someone who would fit your description.

This is not some Nostradamus like prediction, it's a mere statement of things already happening. Every larger financial institution of the US has issued Bitcoin ETFs or similar products, you can buy stocks of companies engaging in crypto mining or which just hold cryptos. What you describe as harbinger of a pending catastrophe has already happened and it's clearly not a catastrophe.

I've been reading crypto currency related comments for many years now on Slashdot, and they all pretty much sound like your comments here. "It's a ponzi scheme", "It's backed by thin air", "It will bankrupt our economy", the doomsday predictions keep coming in and nothing of the kind happened. Bitcoin went through massive boom and bust cycles throughout its history, and the world and the economy and Bitcoin just kept humming along.

Anyone listening to this ongoing "expert" drivel, how bad and baseless Bitcoin is, lost out on opportunities to make massive amounts of money in the last 10 years. Do you really expect people will continue listening to you about this? Will Jim Cramer and you reimburse those whom you led astray with your ongoing narrative?

It's a price point at which BTC can be (and constantly is, the markets are very liquid and have considerable volume) bought and sold. You can scream "but it's not backed by anything!!!" all day long, until I exchange some satoshis for USD and wave them in your face.

If you look at the BTC exchange rates, BTC/USD goes up as USD/EUR goes down. In fact BTC/EUR hasn't moved up a lot since last November. What you see here is not BTC rising, but USD falling, and I see no reason, that this trend would stop any time soon. By selling your USD for BTC you would likely at least maintain your purchasing power.

Allow us to educate you

Every 10-15 years there appears to be a wave of specific attack vectors, which first get exploited by professionals on a small scale, and then eventually ravage larger sectors of the IT industry, typically caused by anarchistic teenagers. We remember the wave of buffer overflow exploits leading to massive pwnage 20-30 years ago. We lived through Anonymous and LulzSec tearing apart gazillions of sites with SQLMap.

Current target seems to be not so much shoddy software, but unmotivated and underpaid help desks dishing out credentials and SIM cards to whoever is persistent enough or willing to pay bribes many times their monthly salaries - still very little compared to the damages these attacks ultimately cause. As usual we'll hear the refrain "experts from Mandiant are on premise and have already prepared an Excel sheet for the C suite", we'll squeeze some screws here and there, and business will continue as usual, with the same abysmal results.

Yes, and of these theoretically possible 65,536 ports only 34,500 ports were attacked, which means this was not just random data, but carefully crafted and targeted data thrown at the victim.

We don't know that, but we do know, that it will inevitably lead of monetary losses amounting to quadrillions for the Music and Film Industry of America (MaFIA).

"Normal citizens" typically don't face a court order allowing the gov't to root their phones. If you don't trust European courts, then your Whatsapp messages are the least you have to worry about.

No, they have a plan to exploit the insecurity of known to be insecure phones - which is pretty much all of them. This is neither new, nor special, and dictatorships have been doing this (without need for independent court order) for many years now.

Mr. Snowden said no such thing, to the contrary, he confirmed (back then), that the "math works". None of these pundits here seem to know, how the Austrians are going to listen in to Whatsapp&friends: they'll remote root the phones (with court permission) and then just monitor what happens on that phone. Nobody will have to reinvent the internet for that.

What stores would typically do is bar you for a few years, but not for life time, at least apply to petty theft. Violent behavior or whatever would probably bring a life time ban. And no, stores do not have to serve you if you don't play by the rules.

Either way, what seems to have happened there is a complete breakdown of process. A woman was wrongly accused of theft by incompetent staff and publicly embarrassed through no fault of herself.

I know about Facebook's issues well (don't have a Meta account for a reason), but at least Facebook sits in a jurisdiction, where our collective authorities could do something about their behavior (if they actually cared). This is, however, not the case e.g. with Burma or several countries in Central Africa, which seem to have been more or less off limits for us. What I proposed here is to change that, to make it more expensive for these countries to allow these scam centers than to kick them out.

Yes, this will require some political pressure and will lead to some nasty head lines, but it would be something, which - for once - actually helps protect our poor. Not sure whether our politicians will be open to that.

"Pig butchering" and related scams are not small business but massive enterprise, employing hundreds of thousands of people with just one aim: bleed "rich but stupid westerners" dry to the point where they become dependent on social services. These businesses do not only promote crypto currency scams, they also pursue romance scams and any other method to extract money. Just look at the numbers reported here and elsewhere.

This is not about protecting rich people, I really don't think that these scams are very successful with the top 10% income/wealth bracket. This is very much about Joe/Jane Shmoe average internet user currently getting thrown to the wolves.

While we "the west" could clamp down on our own social media platforms facilitating such schemes (I'm looking at you, Facebook), we may also want to think about a stern conversation with certain countries tolerating these enterprises on their soil ("Who would complain about money heading to our country?"). Contrary to what some regions of this world may think, we are not defenseless sacks of money waiting to be slashed by some enterprising folks from Africa or Central/South/Southeast Asia.