The Bullshit Monitor, Trust Us, Bro

We've all seen the crazy stuff happening in the Bitcoin and crypto space misleading ads, outrageous claims, corporate nonsense, broken promises, and some pretty funny statements. I thought it’d be cool for us to gather these ridiculous posts and comment on them for a laugh. It could be something fresh or even old stuff that ended up being untrue. I’ll keep an eye on this thread to make sure it doesn’t get overrun by spam, but I really want everyone to pitch in. If you drop a post, throw in your thoughts on what's off about it or why it's misleading. I'm calling this little project The Bullshit Monitor, Trust Us, Bro. To kick things off, let’s talk about Ledger. Just two days ago, they decided to remind everyone that they’ll never ask users for their secret recovery phrases. Of course they won’t. Why would they? They just happen to have this feature in their firmware that can extract your keys and send them off to multiple third parties for "safe-keeping."

While this has been discussed in its thread already but since this is a dedicated thread for such controversial posts, I think it’s best to have it here too. This is unstoppable wallet actually marketing themselves while trying to de market the hardware wallets, in a wider space like this (crypto) they could have done the marketing without talking bad about other brands, they themselves aren’t doing so well in what they offer too, They still can’t support bitcoin fees less than 1 sats/vbyte and no one has used that against them. There swap provider exolix is been called out for a vulnerability of leaking customers data too. So they belong to this thread and to the tag ”Trust us, Bro”

Ledger again. From Ledger Recover years ago, now they are doing something more dangerous for users and stupid for their business growth because there will be more people feeling fearful about Ledger and its present products and future ones. Ledger Recovery - Send your (encrypted) recovery phrase to 3rd parties entities. Ledger Recover: What The Hell is Happening? With aantonop and lopp.

I remember Exolix negatively ever since that incident when they sent stolen funds to one user who used their swap service. They showed back then that they don't care and this is just another proof of that. The ability for third parties to access sensitive swaps data that is supposed to remain hidden is apparently a "feature" for them and something normal.

Not sure if this is in the same vein but I recall the gushing over PayPal when they suddenly announced that you could 'buy, sell, hold' Bitcoin. You know, to democratise Bitcoin access and allowing everyone to buy directly from the app. Except, there was never any coin to begin with. All they did was offer a contract for speculation.  You could name any other app for selling this bullshit. This was supposed to be "massive" for Bitcoin adoption.

If this feature becomes a vulnerability, it is not just a personal attack, but a collective attack. If you fail to curate your wallet, your trust will be useless even if you conservatively choose old coins that tend to be stable risk.

Of course. That's the idea. I think it's better to focus on recent cases and not recycle old incidents. All exchanges have probably been guilty of promising that their users are safe and nothing bad will happen to them at least once and so many of them have been hacked or had their data leaked. I wouldn't focus on that either. Same thing with roadmaps and unrealistic expectations. I think that's how it started with PayPal but later they made it possible to withdraw bitcoin to external third-party wallets outside of their service. It's available in selected markets only, of course, just as the possibility of buying/selling bitcoin is.

Hey honestly im glad they did it so that we know not to use them! Its crazy that they ever thought that was ever a viable option. Like you run a crypto wallet company and you think we want people with their hands on our seed phrases yeah okay lol 😆 they are such a joke of a crypto company

I doubt we will ever get official numbers, but I am still curious to see how many subscribers they got for Ledger Recover since the service became available. I guess we will never know. The danger isn't only that the feature could get hacked and keys might leak. Their third-party key holders will support and cooperate with government agencies and law enforcement, meaning they will assist in the confiscation of user funds.

Well, technically they never asked anyone so they didn't lie. Does the entire bitkey thing work for this thread? https://bitkey.world/ I mean for a hardware wallet that entire thing is a lot of just trust us. -Dave

Who needs seed phrases when you can use a hardware device with no display. Just trust us, bro! At least their newest device can be called a 'hardware wallet' because they decided to add a display to it. Their first model didn't have one, and you had to put absolute trust into whatever information was displayed by the software. That old model definitely works for this thread.

If your hardware wallet company is doing anything stupid, drop them, I will always abandon any company that doesn't prioritise open source and decentralisation. The likes of Ledger and Trust wallet among few others are bad ways to start storing your coins, many beginners won't know this unless they do their own diligent research first. Trust me bro isn't enough, I've learned the hard way picking  crypto wallets anyhow, it's the most important part that everyone needs to be careful with, it's what will determine your long or short stay in crypto space.

Perhaps not totally on topic, but I’ve noticed something a little similar about the Bitcoin influencers online. They will post clips from speeches that are a year old and try to pass it off as new and bullish… I see this a great deal when markets turn. So my advice during the next bull run is when you see influencers online posting things from months before, it is time to run.

You just remind me of Chipper Cash. Chipper cash is a payment platform within Africa but it's funny they claim to offer crypto service by allowing you to buy, hold and sell crypto. Imagine you want to withdraw your coin and then realise that the platform is under maintenance  I suggest all payment platforms PayPal, Chipper and their likes to stay off crypto because they obviously not up to task.

This is an exceptional post that actually hits on some of the stunts marketing teams use to capitalize on users trust and making them forget about what corporate gaslighting is always about in the first place. Here's an example I could dig up about the institutional floor/volatility is dead narrative that took users unaware late last year and was on mainstream Media upon publication: Firstly, from Farside Investors (Bitcoin ETF Daily Flows), they were so sure that the multi-day outflow streaks from BlackRock’s IBIT, Fidelity’s FBTC, and Grayscale’s GBTC was in perfect order and so precise it was that it measured accurately with the sharpest point of the price drop that happened at the time. Another one was JPMorgan's Bitcoin Volatility Research Notes led by Managing Director Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, which was explicit about the structural impact of institutional products and Bitcoin's volatility decay starting from the peak of the bull run, also contributes to the other evidences of wall street corporate spin that got those trusting users unawares. Funny enough it was that the price of Bitcoin dropped from $82k to $67k in a blink of an eye thus leading to a downward price pressure as spot ETF was so much recording massive net outflows at the time. https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2018/03/01/bitcoin-money-or-financial-investment?hl=en-US https://hkifoa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/2024-q3-crypto-industry-report-coingecko.pdf?hl=en-US

I have noticed that as well. There are several accounts on X that are guilty of this. One popular topic they seem to recycle often is the Clarity Act. I often see X posts that begin with: "Trump just said..." "Senate just confirmed...", "Brian Armstrong this and that", but then you realize it's topics that were discussed a long time ago. One thing that often gives them away is segments where bitcoin's value is displayed in the background and you realize that their "BREAKING NEWS" stories happened at a time when bitcoin was at $90k.

Yup! That was how PayPal initially sold their big thing, and how everyone thought how massive this was going to be for whatever million users it had. Hooray we added another imaginary thing for you to speculate on. Big deal. I know a previous response to my post did say PayPal eventually allowed coin withdrawal in some cases, doesn't change the original bullshit. I'd say Chivo (though overall, the entire El Salvador Bitcoin legal tender chapter) was another bullshit claim I haven't seen a stern test of yet (no, influencers visiting and showing off a payment from their wallet at particular points doesn't count as rigour).

Plus, the initial interest in bitcoin by the citizens of El Salvador had a lot to do with the little BTC airdrop the government gave to every adult user who downloaded their official software wallet. Many saw it as free money, which it is, and gladly took it, but I wonder what the genuine number of bitcoin users who live in the country is and how often they use bitcoin for everyday payments? The government also claims to by buying 1 BTC/day. Did they ever provide blockchain evidence for these purchases?

I'm sure very close to zero. I don't have proof either but each time over the past few years I tried to look for actual user experiences online, the same thing more or less: no one really wanted to take your tourist satoshis, unless you used Chivo (which actually settles your payment for them in fiat). You can't force Bitcoin down their throats, even with free money thrown at them. And fair enough. That's not how you get buy in. The government claims of buying daily actually has been accounted for years now and can be tracked here: https://bitcoin.gob.sv/ That's not the issue to me. Anyone with enough money could strike a deal to move 1 BTC daily into a wallet they controlled, and give that address to ES to show them. What's not proven (or even documented), to my past attempts to uncover, however, is who precisely has control of the keys to that fund. And who has oversight over how the people's money was used for this buy? And what's the plan for it? Those, are more important for me, and the lack of those are what says quite loudly: bullshit. It's not just even a lack of this. IMF, for one, has asked for some information surrounding this. At least, surrounding Chivo. No prizes for guessing if the government ever gave any of that info up. El presidente is, quite effectively, telling his people: trust me bro.

Is someone is still trusting ledger after everything than they have serious problem in their head with low IQ. But I would also apply similar logic to most altcoins, including coins like zcash pretending to be a privacy coin. Outside of crypto I could say the same thing for all politicians, but people still trust them and vote in their stupid elections.