Crypto leads to surge in online scams

Honestly, I wouldn't bother putting my money into a 401k - I would stash it away, let a little rot away with inflation and use it to start a business that provides real people with a real product and pray. That seems like a more sure-fire way to get across the line.

Ostensibly, that can be thought of as a more extreme version of your "pick an index and stick in it" approach. The reality of it is that we don't know which one of these choices is the right one - it may be so that cryptocurrency will make you trillions! Or that the Roth IRA will have 70% of the people who stick their money in it as actual millionaires despite them only making $70k a year for 30 years.

If you add the context of "More money is better", "Value is gained after gaining money" and "Money has value", it seems to perfectly fit into logic. Prove me wrong if I am, I would appreciate it - I am not a Haskell programmer, so I think I could learn from it.

The metaverse NFT thing has not resulted in much in the way of good 3D worlds. Decentraland and Sominium Space actually got worlds going, but they're not very impressive virtual worlds and few people go there. Many of the later entrants don't even try to implement a product. They just hand-wave that as something scheduled far down the roadmap. They go on and on in their "white papers" about the details of the token system, while saying nothing about how they plan to implement the supposed product. Then there are the people who just sell plots on a 2D map and don't even pretend to have ambitions of making it into a usable virtual world. There are a few NFT promoters who aspire to build a 3D world, or at least talk about it, but they are not seen to be working at the scale required to bring it off.

Now, what props up this house of cards is the success of Bitcoin, Etherium, and Tether. We now have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in memes. So people think that investing in new memes is a real business. The history of financial scams suggests that it is not. It's worth noting that none of this stuff has faced a recession yet. In a recession, there's net outflow from investments. What could possibly go wrong?

But if all you want is your money to be backed by something that intrinsically retains value, there are many standard choices. Like _foreign currency_. Or something more involved, like stocks and bonds and commodities contracts.

Or you could just plain use precious metals.

Cryptocurrency doesn't uniquely solve the problem of inflation, but it does introduce a lot of others. (Including the risk that a country's entire Treasury gets drained because an office worker plugs a USB stick they found in the parking lot into the wrong computer)

Told the police, they said, they can't do a thing, because the scammer stole the bank account and probably lives in Estonia or somewhere.

So, while I use banks on a daily basis, simply because I have to, I don't believe they are much safer.

Doesn't change the rest, though.

> This is especially true among younger people who are digitally savvy but less financially literate.

> People ages 18-to-39 were more than twice as likely to report losing money to social media scams as older adults last year.

Seems like maybe we should be protecting the "young know-it-alls" from themselves?

Their phishing incidents dropped to zero.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/07/google-security-keys-neu...

To make sure that everyone, who will eventually read this, understand what this line actually means, is:

There's always an idiot falling through the cracks.

Yes. It's inevitable. It happens. Doesn't change the fact that if people were more rational and less driven by their feelings, less people would be falling for scams and thus less scams would exist.

Anyone who doesn't understand that scams solely exist because they work, is excused. Anyone who disagrees with the idea that people need to act in a rational, self responsible manner is a part of the problem.

The cause of scams is people, who aren't thinking things through, falling for them. If schools nowadays didn't raise people into mostly being thoughtless robots, the world would be a better place as a whole, scams included.

Of course there's always going to be one guy. Doesn't change the rest at all. You're making good the enemy of perfect and your solution in no way or form actually improves us, as humans, and instead removes even more responsibility away from us.

Why exactly do you think the valuation of cryptocurrencies are so high? Certainly it's not an indicator that the business case for it is nil. Maybe not revolutionary, but it is disingenuous or delusional to suggest that there's no business use for this thing while staring point blank at a world getting eaten by it in real time.

What about this tool makes it criminal by nature?

It's censorship-resistant, private (if you want it to be), and very inefficient energy-wise. It's the logical extension of encryption. Encryption is also useful for criminal purposes and internet crime wouldn't really exist without it. Privacy != criminal. Also, do you know how much energy it would save if nothing was encrypted?

Every government in the history of the world has eventually collapsed causing devastation for its people. Money printers go wild. Corruption everywhere. People cannot afford basic necessities. If we can figure out a money that cannot be messed with, maybe that's not such a bad thing.