Starting 2026 with a horror story: a guy was completely wiped out by a cruelly named "Pig Butchering Scam"—so called because the scammers (for whom a special place in Hell is reserved) take their time grooming and persuading him to do the unthinkable: sign your stack away.
As seen on Bitcoin News (which has gotten pretty good, by the way):
"This week, a deeply sad story circulated on X about a Bitcoiner who fell victim to a pig butchering scam. His Bitcoin advisor enabled him to send his entire bitcoin balance, held in a multisig setup with BTC Adviser and Unchained, to a scammer, a woman he believed he loved, in the hope that she would help him double his money."
(Notice the use of fake family photos)
Firstly, I KNOW—idiot. I had the same thought. It's normal and natural first reaction. All scams are idiotic in their own way, so let's process that and move on. If I can quote one of my own SN posts:
Suspicious or not, it is completely true that the "mind has no firewall." Bad actors want to catch you acting without thinking—and how the fuck can any security protect you from pressing send yourself?
Everyone thinks they would "never" do that, but people will do anything if the narrative in their mind makes it the logical conclusion. The point of social engineering is precisely to weave that narrative so that you fuck up irreversibly.
Our minds are not cryptographically secure. I do think spear phishing and outright manipulation schemes will increase because the internet gives everyone free access to your mind. It's a good exercise to ask yourself, seriously, "What would it take to persuade me to do something I would never do?"
p.s. (I don't spread Quantum FUD, but I do sometimes unapologetically spread 'We Are Not As Smart as We Think' FUD)
I try to be compassionate to most human foibles and failures, but jfc. So many layers of idiocy on this.
In addition to "pig butchering" one might google "cooling the mark out".
We need to start to think in terms of webs of trust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
Too easy for scammers now. We got to make them work harder for their ill gotten loot.
WoT is great to prevent continuous scamming. But it encourages large scale rug pulling.
interesting.
can you give examples, explain why this is. or otherwise flesh it out?
personally I'm deep diving woT .
BTC Advisors and Unchained should have seen that coming IMO.
Bitcoin means self responsibility. Delegating that responsibility to 3rd parties is the same as going back to traditional banking.
I will repeat this thousands of times:
Sovereignty also means being responsible for your own actions and learn about new things on your own. But no matter how many guides and documentation we will write, people are still TOO STUPID for Bitcoin. A more simple UI app will never fix human stupidity.
If you believe security is largely about locking doors encrypting data and putting processes in place you miss the most volatile part of the equation. The mind is endlessly flexible which is both its genius and its fatal vulnerability. A skilled manipulator does not waste energy trying to break your system from the outside they instead step inside and rewrite the rules by which you see the world. Once your internal narrative changes your actions will change and no firewall can stop the command you give to yourself.
It is tempting to frame this sort of loss in simple terms as stupidity or gullibility. But that framing blinds us to the uncomfortable truth that there is nothing structurally different between the victim’s susceptibility and our own. Given the right emotional pressure the right sequence of events and the right imagined outcome any of us can be persuaded to do what we would otherwise swear is unthinkable. The internet amplifies this risk because it lets strangers construct highly targeted psychological pressure at scale and over long periods of time.