County Attorney, CPA, Adjunct Professor, Lieutenant Colonel US Army Reserves. Fightin’ Texas Aggie Class of 1995 (opinions are my own)
Texas, USA
Joined March 2016
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John Mark Cobern retweeted
Must-have fourth down, roll your struggling right-handed QB to his left. There's nothing that makes sense with this A&M offense. And the inability to convert on 2nd and 3rd and 1 is remarkable.
John Mark Cobern retweeted
Remember going to dealerships. Finding the car you like.
The salesman has you go to his cubicle.
You see all his photos of family, his trinkets on his desk.
He gives you a free pen.
There is the small talk.
Then you start the “sale”
He pretends to know all about the car.
You ask about the sticker price and ask for a deal.
He talks about all the great features.
Tells you the deals and all the rebates.
Tells you 3 other people are interested and put money down but will sell it to you if you buy it today.
He gives you a price which is really no deal.
You offer lower price.
Then comes the bargaining.
He says he has to go talk to his manager.
He walks away and leaves you looking at all the trinkets on his desk.
You click the free pen a bunch a times hoping they take your offer.
He comes back and says he has good news. Talks the car up more and offers to throw in 3 free oil changes. Then writes a price on a piece of paper. (Few hundred less)
This goes back and forth. You decided nope. So get up to leave. He says. Wait wait. Let me go talk to my manager one more time.
Finally comes back with an ehhh deal but you want the car so shake hands.
Then you fill out all the paper work and realize it has all these extra costs for floor mats and paint protection that used to be optional but they require it now…
Do you miss those days? I don’t. I was actually shocked it wasn’t too many years ago they still do the - I have to talk to my manager thing. 🤣
Buying a Tesla is so easy. I love it.
You pay what is listed, no games.
All online. 9 easy steps.
You have chat to talk back and forth with your SA (Sales Associate)
You could also call and talk to them.
I love it. Never going back to a stealership again.
John Mark Cobern retweeted
“This one stings,” said @bgarlinghouse, CEO of Ripple.
The CLARITY Act failed to advance in the Senate yesterday.
Crypto companies need Washington to write the rules for them. Bitcoin never did.
Crypto goes to Washington asking for permission.
Bitcoin doesn’t need it.
And every time the market understands that a little better, Bitcoin gets stronger.
In today's OUTSIDE MONEY
John Mark Cobern retweeted
It’s impossible to get in a self-driving Tesla and not be optimistic about the future. Trust me. Try it. It’s like living in the future.
John Mark Cobern retweeted
The Whale Pass
George explains to Jerry why Bitcoin is the people's money: decentralised, equal, no hierarchy, no elites.
🤖 Made with AI
John Mark Cobern retweeted
Sometimes I forget about the fact that a robot drives me around while I have half of my net worth in magic internet money
Life comes at you fast 💨
John Mark Cobern retweeted
Unfortunately we are seeing more of this. A new strategy seems to be to first gain access to your email account - once they are in your email, they can do tons of things like:
- Get access to your Google Authenticator 2fa backups
- Spoof emails from an exchange or HWW vendor and mark the spoofed emails as legit
- Create rules in your inbox so that you don't see warnings or replies
A @FoundationHQ customer was social engineered with these techniques. First they got into his Gmail and then he thought he was emailing with us – but he wasn't. I reached out to him on LinkedIn but it was too late.
I talked to this person too and it was the standard social engineering playbook.
After months of calls from “google” he finally decided to pick one up because it said it was from the Mountain View area.
The scammers then socially engineered him to reset his gmail password. They gained access to his gmail account, where they watched him email the real @trezor.
They then called pretending to be trezor and tried to give him a fake link to click. He was smart enough not to do that and went to the trezor website himself.
But they had already pulled pictures of his ID and passport from his gmail and created a panic inducing story about someone trying to pretend to be him and they said in the wake of coldcard they had a new recovery service and if he would just type his seed phrase into the chrome url they could make sure his bitcoin was safe. In a moment of panic his brain glitched out and he decided it was a good idea to do that.
The scammers then had access to his google and were able to see his browser history so they were able to read his seed in plain text and they stole his bitcoin.
He knows this was a big mistake and he feels dumb for falling for it, but this kid is not dumb. He knows a lot about bitcoin and has even heard about these types of scams before.
He simply had a very human moment of genuine fear and panic (which was artificially created by the scammers) and then fucked up and made a catastrophic error.
The lesson is that your own panic and fear is the scammers weapon, so if you’re feeling that it’s best to pump the breaks and slow everything way down. Get off the phone and breathe. Call a trusted friend. Come to them with what’s going on.
The other unpopular lesson is that self custody is hard and it’s not for everyone.
Stay safe out there friends.
John Mark Cobern retweeted
The average person is not going to be an early adopter of a new form of money. Perpetual preferred equity issued by bitcoin treasury companies will prove to be bad investments. Just buy less bitcoin if you can't tolerate volatility. Use a custodian or an ETF.
After nearly a decade in Bitcoin, I can conclude that the average person has no interest in rolling dice, buying multiple hardware wallets, and setting up a maximum-paranoia multisig vault just to avoid losing Bitcoin.
There is nothing wrong with doing that. It simply does not mean every person and institution will choose to do it.
Normal people and institutions want something with lower volatility than Bitcoin that pays a high yield. That is why $STRC and $SATA have raised more than $10 billion during a Bitcoin bear market.
This is an inflection point for Bitcoin because it reflects a realistic approach to providing the solution that normal people and institutions actually want.
This is what character and integrity looks like.
Re: Cold Card Hack
Hello fellow Bitcoiners,
It’s been nearly one week since my wallet was drained.
I lost my entire bitcoin stack, presumably the most in the entire attack - an amount I’m more than embarrassed and ashamed to even admit publicly. This was not only my life savings but my time, energy, hardcore conviction and identity after 13 years in this space.
I am posting pseudonymously as I’ve always preferred to stay out of the spotlight - and privacy (inspired by Satoshi) is something I value. I debated whether or not I should say anything at all, but after much deliberation I decided it may be beneficial for other victims who are struggling.
While this incident certainly forced upon me the darkest days of my life so far - I have now accepted it and will slowly put together my life again. I came from nothing and did everything right (except rolling the damn dice apparently 😅). I stayed away from trading, exchanges, shitcoins, ICOs, NFTs, false prophets, etc and quietly and consistently built up over the years through all the ups and downs - never spending frivolously on material goods but instead using bitcoin as my sense of freedom and security - with the hopes to pass it on to my future children.
Even though that peace, freedom and security is now gone - I am beyond grateful for the journey and life that bitcoin enabled me to have.
To all the other victims, as cliche as it is to say “it’s only money” - true wealth, as I’ve learned over and over again is in health, family, and friendships. I’d be lying if I told you I’m not afraid of the uncertainty ahead, but I know by taking one step at a time it will be possible to rebuild. Trust me if I can come to these realizations, you can too! The hardest challenges in life make us stronger and turn us into the best versions of ourselves - don’t give in to the hopelessness. By being in this community you are apart of something special that the majority of the world still hasn’t realized yet. It’s still early!
Thanks to all the wonderful people in the community I’ve been DMing over the past week - your kind words of support mean the world to me and helped me start to believe in myself again.
To the hacker: you still can do the right thing here and come clean - you have prompted a serious wake-up call that has brought the community together which will bring more resilience for the future. Doing the noble thing now will prevent a lifelong hunt.
To all the amazing bitcoiners who have jumped to action from the very beginning to support each other and mitigate further damage - it’s been a beautiful thing to watch.
To the @blocks team and especially @intangiblecoins, your efforts are inspiring and provide me with hope. Believe me when I say that IF I ever get my coins back you will all be taken care of very well, along with massive donations to the open source community.
For now I will withhold any judgement towards @nvk and the @Coinkite team - while I’m still processing this loss and dealing with the gravity of building my life up from the ruins - I have 0 anger or resentment. Bitcoin security is a tough job, mistakes are made, and lessons are learned by all. I made mistakes by trusting and not verifying as well as not having a more robust security solution so the responsibility must be shared, hindsight is 20/20 and even though it’s tough: I’m okay admitting that. Bitcoin humbles all.
Having said all that… I’M NOT FUCKING LEAVING!!! I will start building a new stack from the ground up like all the other plebs as my conviction in Bitcoin is even stronger today then when I got my first coins in 2013.
This was never about the money - it was always about the revolution, and that can’t be stopped. We will win.
Let’s keep our heads high.
The march continues.
It’s time to rebuild.
PS: Thanks for everything Satoshi ❤️
-M
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John Mark Cobern retweeted
The odds of me, serious money, a suit, rolling 100 dice is zero in my life time. No serious people are going to do this, most certainly not an institution, and to think i would then diversify across 4 different providers, 400 rolls of dice.....GTFO....This is not scaleable.
It is delusional to think people investing millions of dollars are going to roll dice 100 times or anything else so stupid.
Secondly; you are a moron at this point to connect or use software or hardware to protect hundreds of millions of dollars built by companies that have never been profitable, have no revenue growth, no path to profitablity, no excess profits to reinvest in security and R&D, and zero sustainable use case or relevance, and a total incapcity to take on millions of customers to scale and service them.
At this point Self Custody is a joke, it is not sustainable, and if the only real bitcoin is self custody bitcoin with a punk-small organization is dumb and announces bitcoin's failure as an experiment.
The concept of the fascist bitcoiners, who have never run or built sustainable businesses, who are anarchist, not creators, not builders of real businesses, who in their hearts want the entire system to collapse so they the anarchists with no experience to build industries, yets pretent to be experts promoting and advertising self custody I hold 1000 bitcoin on ledger or a casa is the dumbest think I have ever heard.
The odds of someone rolling 100 dice rolls the same as yours are 1 in 653318623500070906096690267158057820537143710472954871543071966369497141477376 teapawt.net/i/grok/share/150d2a491…