Yes, I know that it still exist, and yes, decentralized currency which utilizes distributed, cryptographic validation is not actually a strictly bad idea, but…

Is the speculative investment scam, which crypto substantially represented, finally dead? Can we go back to buying gold bars and Pokemon cards?

I feel like it is, but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen. Maybe crypto scammers moved on to selling LLM “prompts?” Maybe the rug just got pulled enough times that everyone lost trust.

    • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
      3·
      2 years ago

      Yeah. It might put me on a watchlist or something but, I’ve went on the Dark Web. I’ve never purchased anything or went too deep into it, but the only things I found are:

      some privacy services,

      some crypto “cleaning” (whatever the phrase is) services,

      some Tor mirrors of regular websites,

      a Luke-Smith-esque (only taken even further to the extreme) privacy related blog,

      a porn website (all of it legal, and it was all just indexed from clearnet porn sites, not even pirated, funnily enough)

      And there seemed to be a lot of drug websites. When I say a lot, I mean a LOT. Like, all of the websites listed above (can we even call them websites if they’re not on the worldwide web?) times 2 would be a lower number than the websites related to drugs that were listed on the various versions of the Hidden Wiki. And all of that by just using a page that acts as an indexer of the more popular pages. I didn’t even use a dark web search engine. So, yeah. Who knows what else might be hiding there? Some guys on YouTube go on the dark web, like this guy, John Hammond, and find some fun stuff there, like ransomware gangs. That is to say there is more serious stuff on there, but I haven’t looked for it.

      • trent@kbin.social
        3·
        2 years ago

        You probably saw some (mostly fraudulent) ads. Dread is where most of Tor’s public content can be found; but, yeah, crypto (specifically Bitcoin and Monero) are the standards there.