I tried to do something similar but couldn't get karma very quick (using a paraphrasing API on other people's comments and submitting news from RSS feeds). I think I had a chicken and egg problem with karma because most subreddits require a minimum amount to post. I ran it for about two weeks before I lost interest. None of my accounts were limited in any way and I was just using publicly available Hola proxies. It seems that very little scrutiny is applied to the reddit mobile API. No captcha is required for registration (unlike the website) and no email is required.
This is all theoretical, of course. I've had a think about running a botnet on reddit for a while because I detest what the place has become. I can literally see the obvious botting that takes place across the entire frontpage and it annoys the hell out of me. It's mass social engineering.
Time and time again I see people on reddit really intensely screaming 'go no contact with your parents, abandon your family for the slightest difference of opinion' and such a toxic viewpoint is not only heavily upvoted but applauded by others that jump in with 'I did the same, it's totally normal, everyone goes no contact with their parents these days...'
I really think the place is being weaponised to disrupt society in a fundamental way. I mean, genuinely trying to break down the bonds of society and turn people against each other by creating this alternate reality. You go outside and talk to the average person at work or in a bar about opinions that, from reddit, you'd suspect are mainstream and they look at you like you have two heads. It's so artificial. I just pray that too many people don't fall too deeply into the trap.
I use reddit spordically - [this](https://www.reddit.com/user/FirstToday1/) is my account. I got my job from something I posted on reddit so I still feel a little indebted to the site. Reading the default subreddits will probably cost you about 3-5 IQ points p.a. I don't know where the family hatred comes from either. It's really common on the advice subreddits. Reddit has always had the punk/atheist type stuff but now that more ordinary people use Reddit what they say can have an actual effect on society now. The increasing popularity of memes and videos over text probably isn't helping the site either. Such a shame.
> I tried to do something similar but couldn't get karma very quick. I think I had a chicken and egg problem with karma because most subreddits require a minimum amount to post.
Doing this on an account that you personally use is probably the easiest way, but that doesn't scale well for obvious reasons. Getting past time gates (must wait a month or more to post in certain areas) and karma gates takes time. This kind of makes me want to go back and try this again but there are moral/ethical issues that give me pause.
Yeah I think I would have been more successful had I just bought some aged accounts with 50-100 karma. If you're "morally flexible" and willing to work with some unsavory types there's probably a lot of money to be made but that's not really for me either lol.
You're not serious, right? You clearly haven't seen some of the latest unlicensed money transmitter prosecutions. The resourceful agents over at HSI have come up with an incredibly effective method of stopping crime in the Bitcoin network. It looks something like:
CS1: "I would like to exchange these dollars which I represent to be the proceeds of the sale of controlled substances in violation of the Controlled Substances Act for Bitcoin."
"Terrorism, regime destabilization, and policy change related objectives are by far more often assessed as failed, as compared to the other policy objectives. Overall, the average success rate [of sanctions] of around 34% across different policy objectives is very much in line with the effectiveness rate of 34% that is reported in the analysis of Hufbauer et al. (2007) and falls in the middle of the success rates ranging between 27% and 37% form Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions (TIES) database of Morgan et al. (2014)."
The paper also notes that "the success rate of sanctions has gone up until 1995 and fallen since then."
20-35% success rate of sanctions has been replicated a bunch of times. Sanctions are the foreign policy experts form of collective punishment. It seems they largely exist to satisfy the bureaucrat's need to "do something."
Not available to Americans (at least the ones unwilling to use BTC and a VPN), but Pinnacle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinnacle_Sports) is happy to take sharp bettors. If you're just arbing major US books then yeah you will get banned quickly.
It upsets me that we've ceded control of a nontrivial part of our lives to a bunch of opaque risk scoring algorithms. No one knows how they work and even if they did they couldn't tell you because that could "help the bad guys". My mom just called me the other day and told me she got locked out of her Google account after trying to reset her password. Who knows what tripwire she accidentally walked into (maybe has to do with the fact that it's a big household that probably has 10 Google accounts on the same IP address). You can find it in a bunch of other places too. Discord will give you vague error messages when you try to sign up with a VOIP number that magically go away when you use a regular number. "Card processing error" when you use a prepaid card. Of course ReCaptcha won't even let you fill out a form if you have an IP address that has ever been associated with known undesirables.
Ironically, yes. Casino sites can also do the same thing (although obviously if you deposit 1.215179 BTC from one address and then withdraw the exact same amount to a separate address it's probably still going to be possible to link the two addresses) This is why some blockchain analysis companies increase the risk score of coins from exchanges with effectively no KYC like Huobi or Kucoin.
The article doesn't come out and say it, but what they really want is for Binance to "de-risk." This could mean any or all of the following:
- Banning users from 2nd and 3rd world countries ("high risk jurisdictions")
- Banning VPN/Tor users
- Banning users with funds associated with gambling, darknet markets, or anything the FATF complains about
- Implementing opaque procedures to "deter criminals"
-> Holding funds hostage until adequate "source of funds" is provided
-> Note that even if source of funds is proven they will still cut off communication in about a third of cases for no reason whatsoever
-> Randomly requiring reverification (of course with selfies and maybe even over Zoom)
How much revenue will this actually raise? The previous threshold was $20k which makes me think this new policy will mostly just result in the IRS catching the neighborhood bike repairman who made $3k last year on Venmo and didn't report it rather than some shadowy ecommerce millionaire tax cheat.
According to the treasury, the total gap is about $600B/year.
> To further ensure that everyone pays their fair share, the Administration also calls for using information that financial institutions already possess—without imposing any burden on taxpayers whatsoever—so the IRS can deploy these additional resources to audit more sophisticated tax evaders. These changes to the third-party information reports are estimated to generate $460 billion over a decade.
So about $46B/year from reporting changes.
However, contra your intuition that this will mostly impact marginal contractors, the treasury claims that the misreporting is progressive and higher earners misreport more income.
This is more legislative theater. "We're catching the cheats" where the cheats are as you describe, middle or lower class households or individuals trying to get ahead with a side hustle. I hope to see this reversed in the near future.
The side hustle on etsy will likely have plenty of expenses that come off the income--but now you made the person do things like maintain inventory and the like. The compliance burden is a lot higher.
I'd like to see some modified rules for sufficiently small businesses--no inventory, no depreciation, you simply take expenses when they are incurred. This would especially apply to service type businesses where your expenses are consumables and tool replacement.
There already are rules that avoid most depreciation in this case. The Tangible Property Regulations allow a De Minimis Safe Harbor expense deduction for assets purchased, such as a computer or office furniture. The max amount is $2,500.
There's another reply in this post about a scenario of selling a couch on Craigslist, as an example. The burden that comes with a simple transaction is undue.
When the $10k (~$70k today) reporting threshold for cash deposits was set in the 70s, it was taken to the Supreme Court. Now we all celebrate "compliance." Interesting change.
I read stuff like this (not this book specifically) from the OCCRP or ICIJ occasionally and I'm beginning to have my doubts about all of it. It's always based on innuendo and insinuation. Like "the grandson of this Nigeria politician is one of the directors of some Delaware company that also has a director that was arrested for customs fraud in Morocco. He also didn't respond to our phone calls. Therefore he is a 'potentially corrupt shadowy official'". And the call to action at the end of course is always to increase financial surveillance despite the current already heavyhanded approach massively failing.
Yes, you know how it is when you start knowing something you start realizing journalist reporting of it, while not entirely false, is quite imprecise and simplifying ?
I work in an investment bank, on the trading floor, and when I hear reports on how we're supposed to be and act, I feel it is so different from how people actually are and think. For instance, they ignore incompetence and always assign to malice, they think being legit is less important to us than robbing money, they always describe us as amoral, parasitic, conspiratorial. It's an enticing narrative each time, but except when they have actual email exchanges (like the Millenium emails during the Maddoff SEC investigation - that painted the right picture, professional, missing information, imperfect but not anti-blue collar conspiracy lol), I can't really trust it anymore.
The FinCEN files by BuzzFeed were so trash, it was surreal to hear... We gave regulatory reports they leaked irresponsibly about suspicious activity by our fee-paying clients we are forbidden to tip off by refusing to talk to them, and we're now "hiding crime", maybe even "facilitating" it, tsk. They warned a lot of people that day, good job.
The EU is vast, it's hard to say "EU justice is more corrupt". Maybe Italy is more than NL for instance ? As for the U.S. they operate on principles I disagree with: very heavy prison sentences, focus on lies rather than criminal facts sometimes (like lying to the FBI is more dramatically bad than missing a tax payment), elected AGs if I understood, something we can't do in Europe (it'll turn into plebiscits and push towards political law enforcement brrrr).
I'd correct you buy saying: "when justice happens in the US, it tends to be very punitive and detailed", maybe ? I really don't think the U.S. provides fairer reparation than Germany or Sweden, it's just difference legal ideologies.
Corrupt politicians use innuendo and hatred to corrupt politicians to attack their opponents in the West.
As their opponents are often corrupt themselves, you can’t just look at the narrative. After all the narrative is: “corrupt politicians are doing these horrible things; stop them!”
This sort of reporting is very hard and very fact dependent.
It contains horror stories of the Khazakh leader using Western courts to persecute his opponents.
That’s possible because (a) the opponents aren’t saints, and (b) money is necessary to buy justice.
The dictators use money to hire western lawyers, western lawyers to win court cases, won court cases to establish facts, facts to destroy opponents legal status, fewer opponents to get more power, and power to get more money.
Power -> money -> lawyers/consultants (Tony Blair) -> truth -> power.
Here are some samples:
https://www.reddit.com/user/SereneKingdom36
https://www.reddit.com/user/EnviousEditor41
https://www.reddit.com/user/active_manufacturer6
https://www.reddit.com/user/RemarkableCracker71
If anyone at reddit is reading this, it'd probably be pretty trivial to identify the 50 other accounts I made like this :)