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Comment by mgavaudan | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people are saying that crypto is a scam because there are malicious actors in the industry. This claim is as far fetched as saying emails are a scam because Nigerian Princes want to wire you millions of dollars or that the Internet is a scam because some websites contain viruses.

Don't let these small bumps distract from the greater picture and all the amazing work the developers at Ethereum, Bitcoin etc are doing.

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I can close a deal via email, exchange love letters with my fiance and this will be probably easiest way to do. What can i do with bitcoin or ethereum? I am following cryptocurrencies since second year of bitcoin and still can't see real world applications that can't be solved in more predictive way. For example, once some virus stolen my bitcoins and how i can get them back?

You can transfer hundreds of millions of dollars in minutes, with very low costs. For example, [1]

[1] https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-largest-Bitcoin-transaction-...

No you cannot. You can transfer blockchain tokens ostensibly valued at millions, but you can't actually spend that money without cashing it out, which is extremely difficult with sums that large.

There is lots of things you can purchase directly with bitcoin.

Very few of them are both legal and tangible.

You can purchase anything on Newegg with bitcoin directly

Bitcoin isn't liquid like cash.

True. A lot of governments are working on fixing that... by making cash a lot less liquid.

Once you send a scammer hundreds of dollars, how do you get them back? You don't. You're pointing out a problem that exists with the current monetary system.

One use case of bitcoin, that is very similar to emails actually is being able to transfer value 24/7 rather than 9-5 on weekdays.

> Once you send a scammer hundreds of dollars, how do you get them back? You don't.

One of the main points of bitcoin is that it makes transactions irreversible. In the current financial system, many transactions can be reversed, which is a feature, not a bug.

Similarily email is irreversible. Sure some providers will stall your email so you have a period of time to cancel/edit the email...

Nothing prevents a crypto client from similarily stalling a payment until you are sure you want to pay...

> Nothing prevents a crypto client from similarily stalling a payment until you are sure you want to pay...

...and then all you need is fraud protection, monthly billing and airline miles and you've invented the credit card.

Only 1 side of a reversed transaction thinks it's a feature

You can buy things that are illegal in your jurisdiction.

Remember that the point if cryptocurrency is to enable finance in the absence of good government. It's useless if you like your government.

> Remember that the point if cryptocurrency

Nobody knows what the "point" of cryptocurrency is, and every enthusiast has a different opinion on that topic.

Yeah, that's exactly what the Church said about atheists.

"as an atheist what is the meaning of life? What is then the meaning of society? What is the meaning of ... ? "

It would be a lot simpler if we all simply served the commercial bankers, or perhaps the central bank or ... because then we wouldn't have to carry "the burden of having to ponder the meaning of our lives"

edit: slightly modified

That's a very strange analogy. Honestly I'm not really sure what you're trying to say but your sarcastic quip about serving central bakers tells me all I need to know.

I can buy things that are illegal in my jurisdiction with my Chase card, and the USPS delivers it.

Counterpoint: Nigerian scams are not an appreciable percentage of SMTP traffic by volume, if you look at what goes through a busy mail server. Even if you believe that cryptocurrency as a whole is not a scam, you have to acknowledge that a significant and appreciable percentage of the "coins" that you would see in a top-50 list of cryptocurrencies are highly suspicious or outright scams.

Which one of the top 50 are scams? I can't think of one. I think it would be more accurate to say that there is a lot of unsubstantiated marketing hype about cryptocurrencies that produces inflated valuations.

Email is useful for purposes other than scams and buying drugs. Crypto is, to a first-order approximation, not.

Email is mostly a scam, but you don't notice because you don't run your own mailserver and you have spam protection from a legitimate provider, and for now there is no direct way to transfer money via email.

Actually, I do run my own mailserver, with no spam filtering whatsoever. The volume of spam is high, but low enough to ignore.

> The volume of spam is high, but low enough to ignore.

Same with crypto. The projects people actually care about and follow aren't scams. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Nano, etc are not scams.

Sure there are some scams out there but they are mostly obvious. Just like email. But because some people have a personal crusade against crypto they like to play up the obvious scams as commonplace when they really aren't.

> A lot of people are saying that crypto is a scam because there are malicious actors in the industry.

Perish the thought. It doesn't even take any malicious actors to be a scam. It's a new kind of scam: a Nakamoto Scheme.

To your https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/

> victim factories, which in the next crash will produce hundreds of thousands of howling investors with little formal legal recourse due to four years of inaction on the regulators’ part.

How did we get here? As https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu... points out:

> It’s been nine years. Nobody has a practical use case for blockchains proper.

It's now closer to ten. Same article:

> Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing it doesn’t do is add a ridiculously wasteful proof-of-work mechanism for who’s allowed to add transactions to the <s>blockchain</s> repository

Now, this leads to your second statement:

> Don't let these small bumps distract from the greater picture and all the amazing work the developers at Ethereum, Bitcoin etc are doing.

Which is what?

This ties back to it being a scam: without a practical use case, it lacks any intrinsic value and the only reason people temporarily paid a lot for it were downright scams (Tether), hodl zealots, other hype. It won't take a few more years and it'll settle on its true value which is zero.

ps. The Washington Post already in 2015 summarized this madness:

> So the Bitcoin faithful have tried to not only convert people, but also convince them to martyr themselves, financially-speaking, for the crypto cause. It goes something like this. - Hey, do you want to hear about the future? It's a digital currency called Bitcoin that lets you spend or move your money online without paying any fees. - Sounds great. How does it do that? - Well, Bitcoin saves you money by making transactions irreversible. - So ... if I get scammed, I got scammed? There's nothing I can do about it? - Yes. - Okay, but is it at least easy to use? - The thing is, I don't actually use it. I just hoard it. I'm waiting for some greater fools to push up the price by using theirs. - Oh. - Yeah. So you should buy some Bitcoins and use yours. - I'll get back to you on that.

Of course, you could call all these "Bitcoin faithful" malicious actors if you so want...

Ps. I just stumbled on a new McKinsey report (published on January 4, 2019) https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-i... which has this:

> despite billions of dollars of investment, and nearly as many headlines, evidence for a practical scalable use for blockchain is thin on the ground.

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