Let the scamming commence!
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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New Communities
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Linux administration, Rust & Flutter programming (Bots, Web services, GUI programs, etc.), and general IT work @ $5/hour
No frickin doubt.
America/Europe is not the whole world. Other countries do exist, each with different economical states.
Where I live, Iran, $5/h is a lot of money. The average job here pays $1/h, and that's if it's decent.
I hope not, and I'll do my best to keep scammers away. The good thing about doing it on the clear-net and on Lemmy, is scammers are a lot more likely to leave traces of themselves that can be traced back to them, so if they're smart, they'll leave the sacmming stuff in the TOR network.
Anyways, that aside, I created this community as the post said, because of the restrictions that centralized services like UpWork, Fiverr, PayPal, LinkedIn, etc. impose on their users.
As an example, I have a few online friends who are artists and take commissions. All of them, without exception, have experiences with getting banned or limited because of taking commissions that included heavier/darker themes (suicide, self-harm, drug use, gore [scenes from a war for example], severe depression, etc.). They not only have gotten their accounts banned, but the funnier thing is, their account has been banned with all of their credits/money inside of it, that they had rightfully earned from their customers. Thousands of dollars of rightfully earned money, lost in an instant, just like that...
That is beyond scary and awful to me... It shouldn't be acceptable at this point, and yet it is, because of the inhumane TOS that these services make you agree with before you get the chance to use them.
That is one of the very important reasons behind why I created this community. Freedom from the greasy hands of such corporations. If you know anything about GNU and FSF, to me, it's no different than being dependent on proprietary software with very, very limiting and inhumane TOS. Users should be in control, not multimillion dollar corporations.
The second reason, is the restrictions that these services have for the kind of users that they accept into their platform in the first place.
PayPal and LinkedIn for example, require identification before you can sign up for their services, and in the sign up process, they instantly refuse to let you proceed any further, if they find out that you're from certain countries that they don't provide their services to. For example, if you live in countries that are included in the list of countries that are sanctioned by the US by the US trade laws.
Needless to say, if you somehow manage to sign up for their services, you will always run the risk of them finding out and seizing all of your income that you depend on for your life, and that's IF they decide to stop there and don't follow you further.
Because of these geographical restrictions, so many creative artists, so many smart developers, and so many hard working people that can all benefit the world in a better way, are forced to do something else that they have no passion for, settling for a job that sucks the soul out of them and stifles their creativity, until nothing is left. It's tragic and inhumane to let this happen to so many bright people around the world who can offer their seevices to society and make it better. It's an accepted level of racism apparently by many people, to not let the people who happen to be born in these countries by fate, reach their dreams, and instead to stifle their creativity and turn down their solutions, simply because they are from a different part of the world than what is acceptable.
I know that the crypto currency world doesn't carry a good name, but as it is, it is the only way to solve these problems. As far as I know, it's the only way to trade services in a decentralized way, that doesn't give all of this power to these centralized, multi-million dollar corporations that only have money in mind, and not their users.
Well, good luck to you, your goal seems noble enough, though I've seen a few noble crypto projects turn into a scam. Anyway, I (and a lot of other people) try to not touch anything crypto related with a 10-meter pole (except for Americans, they use a 10-feet pole).
I dont get the blanket-hate. I saw your initial post about this and I‘m glad you went through with it.
You might want to have concise methods and tipps in your sidebar to mitigate scams because they will likely happen as they do with real money.
Judging from the reaction, you might also straight up look for mods who can delete span and trolling since hate = trolls will come and try to shut you down.
Thank you!
Yes, I hope I can come up with some mitigations for that. I'm a programmer so maybe until we have some more mods, I can create a bot (or use a preexisting bot?) to do some amount of moderation while I'm offline.
The hate is kind of understandable so I'm not mad! xD
If you're not privacy/freedom focused, then you might only see the use of crypto currencies in scam, especially if the news around you confirms that for you 24/7
I agree 100%. If you want any help from a fellow admin and coder, my matrix handle is in my profile. Feel free to hit me up.
If you search for lemmy bots you should definitely find some.
Also, I couldnt subscribe earlier, not sure why. I‘ll try again in a sec but you should keep an eye on it because this can hamper popularity substantially.
Hmm, weird that you couldn't subscribe. Is it on pending? Or did it just refuse to do anything?
It might be a temporary instance problem (Lemmy.wtf in our case).
It's not hate, I'm critical because I just don't understand how this can work.
It's curious: most people on Lemmy fancy themselves "anti-establishment revolutionaries", yet the mere proposal of a job market that breaks away from banks and the status quo causes them to downvote you like you are asking them to join some religious cult.
While crypto was a cool idea in theory, most of us have been paying attention since 2009 and can see what it's become. An untraceable black hole for investors to shove their money into, free from it being touched by us poors. Do you think it's "anti-establishment" that when I google bitcoin, the first thing that comes up is a stock market ticker? Or to fuel the climate crisis with unnecessary power consumption?
Not all crypto is Bitcoin, and not all blockchains are based on Proof of Work. Ethereum's Proof of Stake consumes less electricity than all the power used by PlayStation consoles at idle.
Cool and that was, what, seven years too late for the whole, creating thousands of tonnes of CO2 thing? For that one coin? I'm sorry but at this point I'm perfectly happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater on the whole "Web3" thing. I care very little for the irreversible harm it's caused to our planet at this point.
No, not "that one coin". The whole blockchain. Thousands of different cryptocurrencies and smart contracts are secured by it. The whole network is holding tens of billions of dollars worth of value, and it takes an estimated 8M USD worth of electricity in a whole year to secure it. There is no way that any existing financial banking system will ever be as efficient as this.
Arguing based on "how long it took to get there" is at best just bad argument based on sunk-cost fallacy and at worst moving the goalposts. If you care about "irreversible harm" from CO2, it would be a lot more productive if you wrote to your local city council to abolish parking minimum requirements than hating on a project that from the start was focused on creating a consensus system that did not require PoW.
This is just straight up disinformation. Crypto uses somewhere between 0.4%-0.9% of all electricity used yearly. 120 to 240 billion kilowatt-hours. That's more electricity than the entirety of my country of Australia. You've been duped if you believe the numbers you posted.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652623007308 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652623036995 https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/09/08/fact-sheet-climate-and-energy-implications-of-crypto-assets-in-the-united-states/
Edit: Adding this quote because I think it paints a clear picture:
...and is comparable to the annual electricity usage of all conventional data centers in the world.
You are talking about "crypto", which implies that you are talking about different blockchains, including Bitcoin and all other blockchains that rely on Proof-of-Work.
My figures are specific to the Ethereum blockchain, which is used to control transactions in Ether and many other cryptocurrencies (look for "ERC20 token standard", if you care to understand), including stablecoins that have its value anchored to different "real currencies" like USD, EUR, GBP... The Ethereum blockchain uses Proof-of-Stake and does not require "burning energy" to keep the network secure.
FWIW, I'm all for banning all blockchains based on Proof of Work, or at the very least adding a prohibitively expensive tax for every transaction done by a centralized exchange. This would be more than enough to kill Bitcoin or force them to clean up their act and switch their consensus system.
I dunno man, I just don't consider Libertarians or AnCaps to be revolutionary. Sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And no one with a minimum sense of morality cares about the labels or how they identify themselves. As long as their value system is not misrepresented, you can call them whatever they want.
Friend, you're the one that started this off by putting other people down for not having the same value system as you. I wasn't even going to comment in this thread...
Edit: Like I actually think OP seems to be forthright in creating a good community. They've suggested to use existing escrow services to ensure integrity. I like them. However you seem like the kind of person I was worried OP might be.
No, like you're part of some tech-bro cult. Which is worse, I will point out. Rejection of the current status quo doesn't mean we want a WORSE status quo.
And we already have plenty of people in the current establishment who want to pay their employees with something other than actual money. We call those people scumbags. At least being paid in exposure isn't bad for the environment.
I will readily agree that crypto absolutists are worse than the status quo. But I will also say that there are plenty of good people working in "web3" that are genuinely focused on building alternatives for disenfranchised groups.
The problem with web3 is in some ways similar to the problems of Fediverse and commons-based R&D: the majority of people claim they want to support the original (noble) goals, but when push comes to shove they do not back their words with actions, so the good projects get eclipsed by the psychopaths that get investment and resources because they made empty promises that appeal to people's greed. This is why we end up with A16Z scam DeFi, SBF, Threads & "source available" software projects.
The problem with the fediverse is that not enough people get how it works, so they don't use it, so there's not enough content, so there's less incentive to use it. The benefits of the fediverse are that you can't exploit and ruin something for everyone if there's an alternative readily available for them to use instead, and the fediverse is BUILT on those alternatives.
The problem with web3 is it does nothing practical enough to justify its existence. The only people who found a use case for it just used it like stock shares, being something worthless that might be valuable if enough time passes. Calling it an alternative to money is absurdly naive at best, manipulative at worst.
Imagine if you had a boss who told you they would only pay you in company stock, and tried to say that it's better than being paid money. That's what this is.
As long as there is a market with enough liquidity, being paid in stock shares is not a problem. At all.
Also: stablecoins. If you live in a developed country you may think it's stupid, but go ask someone in Argentina or Venezuela if they rather get paid in DAI or Pesos.
This. This right here. I live in Iran, and crypto currencies have been a life saver for many of us. Our local currency (IRR) is getting more worthless by the second. Many people have started immediately exchanging their earnings in IRR to something, anything else, including of course, cryptocurrencies.
I don't think most people who live in first-world countries like America can see the use in cryptocurrencies as clearly as people who live in third-wirld countries, where you get paid a dollar an hour on average at local jobs, and that's IF you have a decent job to begin with.
I have provided my services to people outside my country, and I prefer to do that, exactly because they are going to pay in dollar and not in IRR. And of course, they can't do that through something like PayPal or UpWork, etc. because those services aren't available to Iranians in the first place. Crypto currencies have saved and continue to save many, many people who live in these kinds of countries, because they provide a way for them to actually improve their lives by working, and not just hardly survive in whatever situation they are in and just stay alive for a bit longer. You can't really change your life working 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, for $1 an hour. It's just not feasible.
Again, I think it's something that most people who already have ready access to these kinds of services, and who use these services without ever doing anything that makes those centralized services start questioning whether they should ban their account or not, won't really get to appreciate. Want to use PayPal? Nope! You're an Iranian, so fuck you. You can starve to death for all these kinds of services care. You might be born as the most gifted person on earth inside Iran, and yet, if services like PayPal were THE ONLY way to work non-local jobs, you would lose so so much of your life just trying to survive, instead of doing something that helps people around the world.
Cryptocurrencies, have quite literally, been a life saver for many, many people in my country. And no, they mostly weren't scammers either. Some of them, sure, of course, but let's remember that scamming isn't something that only happens with cryptocurrencies. Scamming has been a thing way, waaay before cryptocurrencies were a thing.
It's kind of like proprietary vs Free software. You won't appreciate the Free, open source alternative until the proprietary one reeeally starts getting on your nerves, and changing in a way that directly affects you. This is the exact reason behind why people who advocate free software usage seem like insane people, because again, it's not something that you appreciate, until what you've been using starts to show you why you should have cared about these kinds of things a long time ago.
You get to appreciate the alternative when the current "go-to" solution starts to show its problems. And regular fiat money, for the most part, works pretty well for most people right now, so there's no reason to care about the alternatives at this point.
With crypto you can make international transfers within a few minutes and only pay a few cents. Using a bank account it takes multiple days, and costs a few euros at least. For me that's a major use case and something I do regularly.
What job proposal? This is a platform or a scam, any way you look at it is in no way different from what already exists, just with 0 protection for the workers, and using monopoly money that might make your work worth 20% less every month.
You are arguing against something I did not write and throwing around typical soundbites that are false and/or not applicable to all cryptocurrency. IOW, you are responding like a reactionary. Well done!
How do you handle escrow?
Thats the neat part, you don’t! You either scam people out of their effort, or people out of their crypto!
There are services for that available on the web, such as FairTrade on dread that d/Jobs4Crypto mods recommend. I had experience with this one. Looking for similar ones on the web, there's also FairDesk on clear-net, but I didn't have experience with them. The mods on r/Jobs4Bitcoins offer escrow services themselves, which I hope to offer if my users are willing to trust me with their money. I would have more to lose in the long-term by betraying their trust and taking their money for my own, than to just be honest and offer a good escrow service for my users, so that the activity in the community can continue as intended :)
If that's not convincing enough though, any 3rd party escrow service that both of the end-users agree on can be used. As long as the person or organization that offers the escrow service is trustable, it should be able to do the job.
yeah yeah yeah get outta heeeereeee
So you don't, is what you're saying.
Nice initiative. Small request: can you fix your community link so it's fediverse compatible and doesn't redirect to an external website?
It should be fixed now. I'm new to Lemmy so let me know if it still has that issue! :p
Welcome to Lemmy!
The best formatting for links is !cryptolancing@lemmy.wtf
Or /c/cryptolancing@lemmy.wtf