Mark Cuban's Dallas Mavericks say they'll give $100 in bitcoin to people who download the Voyager Digital app this week

Mark Cuban's Dallas Mavericks said on Wednesday that they would give away bitcoin to people who download the Voyager Digital app this week.

Until October 30, Saturday, at 11:59 p.m. CT, every person who downloads the app, enters a promo code (MAVS100), deposits $100, and makes a trade will get $100 worth of bitcoin, Bobby Karalla, the NBA team's digital content manager, tweeted.

The cryptocurrency platform on Wednesday announced a five-year partnership with the basketball team.

The deal includes the right to name the Mavs Gaming Hub, the official gaming and event venue for the Mavs' NBA 2K League team.

The platform teamed up with the Mavs because of their leadership in the NBA and Cuban's deep understanding of digital assets, Voyager CEO and cofounder Steve Ehrlich said in a statement.

Voyager Digital, founded in 2018, allows its over 2 million verified users to trade over 60 currencies. The platform joins the growing number of crypto firms looking to tap into the sports industry.

Step 1: you draw or have an algorithm create 100 images. You pay to have these coolminted into NTFS. They are, of course, not very valuable and you'd be unlikely to make money selling them. What a shame.

Step 2: you take out a loan and go to Bob. You say "Can you buy this NTFS for me? You don't need to pay for it, I'm gonna hand you 5100$ and you just turn it into ethernet points and buy it. It's worth 5000$ so I'll let you keep the extra 100$"
Bob, of course, agrees.

So Bob buys your NTFS and you get 5000$ back (minus some overhead) , which you turn back into cash, which is of course outside of the EthernetPoints ecosystem.

You now go to Alice, and make her the same offer, but on a different NTFS in your batch. You up it to 6000$ this time. She buys it, you get the money, and all that was lost was some overhead fees and some payment to Alice to do this.

Now you go to Carol and have her buy Bob's NTFS, the one you sold him earlier. You hand Carol 10100$ to buy it, she buys it got 10000, Bob keeps the 100$ and cashes out the 9900$ for you. You just spent 200$ to prove your NTFS is work 10000$

So after doing this for a while, you approach Mark and say "hey look, I'm making these NTFS things and I've only got one left. If you look at how much they've sold for, it's 5000-10000$, and prices are going up. You can resell them anytime to get your money back."

But for you, I'll give you a discount. You can have this mspaint squiggle for only 4000$. A bargain!

Mark isn't sure. This doesn't look like something that's valuable.

But you can point mark at the transaction history, perfectly preserved in the borkchan: you NTFSes have sold for 5000$ each, 10000$ each, resold for even more!

You've got a "market cap" of 5 million dollars!

Because what the borkchan doesn't know (and can't know) , is that you used the same money over and over again to purchase EthernetPoints, transfer it around, then cash it back out.

Maybe you only ever had 25,000$ and have only actually lost 5000$, but as far as the EthernetPoints ecosystem thinks, you've sold things for millions of dollars in total.

It's like that time the soviets flew three new bombers past an air show, and the Americans were like "ahh, they have three bombers"

But then 3 more planes flew past, then another three, then another three, and the Americans panicked. They have a ton of bombers!

No they just had three, and they were just flying out of sight, making a big circle, then flying past again.

But okay. Mark agrees to buy your NTFS, after all, the borkchan says it's worth tons of money, and they can always sell it!

So you make 4000$. You've spent 5000$ making all your NTFSes look worthwhile, so you're still in the hole, but the efforts to make this one look good apply to all the others too. And you made a hundred.

So you sell them all, making 400,000 income on 5000$ expenses, net gain: 395,000$

And now you have capital to do this again! You can make a 100 more and then find more marks.

And when those marks go to sell those NTFSes, they'll find out that those buyers don't really exist. They're just you and your partners in crime. Mark can't sell them, you sold them something worthless.

This is an old type of scam, usually called a "gold brick scam", where the mark is sold something they think is valuable, but turns out not to be. Often you have someone pretending to be an expert, who helps convince the mark that it's valuable

Like, you offer to sell a watch to a mark. You say it's worth 200$.

An "expert" goes: "hang on, that's a super rare valuable watch licked by the queen! I'll give you 5000$ for it!"

And you say "wow! But hey, I'm an honest guy, I already offered it to the mark for 200$"

So the mark buys it for 200$, thinking it's worth 5000$. It's not, of course, it's worth 10$, and the supposedly independent expert is in on the scam with you, and they also suddenly disappear when the mark tries to resell the watch to them.

Here, because the bockchaim is a permanent recording of all transactions, it (and the websites reporting on all these sales) serves as the independent expert.

You can "prove" this NTFS is worth 5000$ because look, it's sold for that much and more, the borkchan never lies!

And here is how the IRS is going to hopefully stop this:

They're going to require reporting of these transactions. They're going to de-anonymize the big cash transactions, and what's worse, they're going to consider these things investments and tax you on them.

And now, you have a bunch of worthless NTFS that you were going to scam people with, and the IRS is going to say "because that's something you could convert into cash, it's a taxable investment. And clearly it's worth 10,000$ as you say, because we can see the transactions too"

And you're going to pay taxes on it like it's actually worth the inflated amount you were claiming it was worth.

And this is going to destroy the profit potential in this scam, at least in the US. And while you could try to structure it so that all your transactions happen outside the US, I wouldn't try it. The IRS can see all of them, they're public on the borkchan.

To avoid the IRS you'd have to make sure all your transactions are well under the reporting threshold, and that's going to make it hard to make money on this scam.

Then overhead of the EthernetPoints brokcomp itself and the need to pay your partners in crime is going to severely cut into your profits at the low end where the IRS isn't watching as closely.

And you might think "but foone, couldn't you do this scam with other things? Like, no borkchimp needed, you could just do it with art and property and watches and such?"

Yeah! You can! And we have hundreds of years of laws and regulations and investigators to try and stop you and punish you for doing it!

This is why large transactions get reported to the IRS and banks keep logs!

Because if you're going to do it, you're going to do it for a lot of money (given the risk involved) and all this reporting means it'll leave evidence and you'll be far more likely to get caught

Crytypocurrentseas just provided a new way to run old scams, one that wasn't yet under the eyes of regulatory authorities to keep you from running these scams and laundering money

And guess what happens when a new field opens up, without the regulation and oversight of the old one?

Scammers dust off the book of old tricks, the ones they could have done in the old field until regulations and authorities were introduced specifically to stop them.

And they scam people left right and center until regulation and oversight and inevitably introduced to stop all the scamming.

And they sadly put away the book, waiting for another day. When a new field opens up, bright and full of potential, ready to deploy the same tricks on.

The old scams never die, they just get a new coat of paint.

Anyway I have here a digital NTFS piglet in a poke here, if any one is interested in buying it.




And as good as it is that the NTFS scam is hopefully about to mostly die, I don't think the new IRS rules will come into effect until 2023, so expect the NTFS shills to get fever pitched in the coming months.

The writing's on the wall. MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. They have been judged and found wanting. Their scam is about to end.

So they're going redouble their efforts to push it while they still can, while there's still time.

It probably going to result in a game of hot potato as we get closer to 2023. No one wants to be holding NTFSes when the music stops and the IRS shows up asking about your investments and how much they're worth.

So it's going to doubly suck for people falling for this scam then. Not only are they out the money they paid to buy something worthless, but now they're gonna have to pay taxes on it like it's actually valuable.

All the more reason to spread the word now: NTFSes are a scam and they're a scam which is doomed. Don't touch them. You'll lose your money twice, at least.

It's a pig in a poke scam except instead of a cat, you're getting asbestos.

And you will not be entitled to compensation when you get mesothelioma.

BTW, I am intentionally misspelling the name of the non tungable fokens. There are bots and people who keyword search, and I also want to pay them all due respect, specifically, none.

BTW this scam is so old that the example on Wikipedia is in Early Modern English:




That's why it's a "poke", which is a 13th century Middle English word for a bag. It comes from the same root as "pocket"

There's a lot of layers of paint on this scam by now.

And most of the paint was full of lead.