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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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

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).

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.