David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run
Public

stay away from Crowdbucks, it's a fairly obvious scam from a vibe coding bro, attempting to affinity-fraud the fediverse

social.treehouse.systems/@pndc
s.basspistol.org/notes/agipgkl

EDIT: and from a few months ago social.chinwag.org/@mike/11506

the guy is Charles Iliya Krempeaux, his past history is an assortment of dodgy Canadian fintechs and being a "startup entrepreneur", this is his attempt to monetise the fediverse. when it goes south, he's rich enough to leave you dangling. as those foolish enough to sign up have discovered, it already doesn't actually work.

on the plus side, it isn't literally crypto. on the minus side, it just smells like it.

@pndc (@pndc@treehouse.systems)

My attention has been drawn to CrowdBucks (https://crowdbucks.fund/). It's being portrayed as an open-source distributed blah blah Fediverse payments system please use us uwu. But the code is undocumented, and the website is detail-free and just pushes you to create an account on *their website* using your Mastodon account for auth. I've declined to do this so don't know what happens next. From what I can tell, it's just a way to make them a middleman in Stripe payments. So, what value does it add over just using Stripe directly? Do they take a cut? The classic crypto exchange "you failed our KYC checks" 100% cut? If I can indeed host it locally, again, why would I choose to use it instead of Stripe directly? It feels a bit crypto-adjacent, but AFAICT it is not related to the shitcoin of the same name. The code does at least appear to be written by a human rather than AI. AI bothers to add comments :) (I didn't clone the repos and explore it fully as it's hosted on the end of a bit of wet string. I just randomly sampled some source files in the forge web interface, so I might have missed something important.) But it all feels a bit off. When a developer comes up with something that they think is world-changing, you usually can't shut them up about it and they will explain it in so much detail that your ears will seal up in self-defence. But for this project? Tumbleweed. I wonder if @davidgerard@circumstances.run might be interested in having a nose around.

social.treehouse.systems · Treehouse Mastodon

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