I think you have to stretch the definition of “fradulent transaction” to the breaking point to be able to make that claim with a straight face. At best, we have a definitive record of every fradulent transaction ever committed with Bitcoin, which is progress of a sort.
To hit the whole article more generally, the author claims that men with guns can't guarantee fiat currency remains valid. True. But if men with guns say your crypto is now illegal, the utility of crypto for the common individual is now (value - expected cost of committing a felony on a public ledger). You might still find a use for it, but the majority of layperson use cases to mitigate hyperinflation just went down the toilet.
So your argument is not that it's misleading/infactual, infactual, but that the colon person would misinterpret this.
Does this not happen with technical subjects all the time? Such as in law, some of the lingo used doesn't follow the community accepted definition.
I suppose you mean phishing attacks or some form of hack on an exchange or end user.
I'd bet that the police were unable to recover anything that the gang members robbed. Crypto introduces a weird situation in which you either: A - keep all of your private keys at home which is effectively just like keeping all of your cash at home, but in easily distributable packages or B - trust some third party entity to hold and protected your assets from what looks like fraudulent transactions. I would imagine a world in which everyone has crypto as their currency would have a lot more physical crime, home break ins, and robberies.
I come from a family of policemen and consider that cryptocurrency adoption will lead us to a scenario where your assets can't be taken away from you because they can't be linked to your physical identity in the first place. The idea that others will protect your personal property on your behalf actually puts you and your assets at danger in more sinuous and violent ways, either by theft or injunction or even by clerical mistake.
If crypto is the main currency then it will be tied to your physical identity, because you will "use" it- and whatever medium you're using to convey that payment, be it a QR code on a physical card or a phone app, has significantly increased risk if lost or stolen or forcibly abused.
Much of the benefits of crypto for non major financial transactions can be solved with cash and a shady hoody. But laypeople still use banks, because what they really want is risk reduction, and for 99% of the population, banks provide that.
Just the other day some guy on HN was adamant that bitcoin was "only" useful to buy drugs without having to meet shady people. I thought he was short sighted but you can't even see the benefit in _that_ specific disintermediation...
In all honesty, when I read things like what you just wrote, it doesn't make me want to spend my time showing you a different point of view because I don't believe you are able to learn from the experiences of others.
The Bitcoin network worked as expected, but by most normal definitions of fraud, I've defrauded you.
It's lucky that, at the time, pretty much anyone knowledgeable enough about blockchain would have been in the Bitcoin community!
Of course, 0 bad entries is probably a necessary condition for a ledger that is supposed to be cryptographically secure.
However, and here’s the kicker, it’s no more fake than the original. So as long as somebody will accept it as part of another chain, then it has value.
So you are left with the task of proving that Bitcoin is fraud in and of itself, rather than on the basis of circular argument.
Tricking other people out of their BTC, meanwhile, isn't really fraud, it's just theft.