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> appeal to those that have a vague idea of what their money is most-physically represented by?

It attracts people who want to make money easily. A crazy amount of people who have no idea about the tech aspect of crypto are "investing" and active in crypto social groups. Just go on the major subreddits and read a few threads, it won't take long to see that a very large portion of them are kids/teenagers who invested a few hundreds or less in the hope of a 1000x pump, these are the people who get scammed.

Everyone says they're here for "the project", "the future of currencies", &c. most of them are here to make a quick buck

We're well pass bitcoin being a mathematical curiosity. There's plenty invested because line on graph goes up & smart sounding person sounded smart talking about it

Indeed. I'm way too young but I would have loved to be one of the people who, back in the day, thought "there's no way that $1mil of fiat value would exist in the blockchain because SHA256 must be fuckable in some way, if that kind of money was in it".

Sadly, too many smart people are too greedy for their own good.

Stop chasing the easy money. In fact, stop thinking about money all the time.

Stash a little money from your paychecks into a 401k and a Roth IRA and invest in passive, broad market ETFs. Hold no matter how the market is feeling this week. Don't trade on margin, don't stock pick, don't daytrade, and stay away from options.

The buy and forget way to wealth is a much surer path than the risky one.

Are these "intelligent" investments? Or just complex adaptive systems which are theoretically digestible by you but you don't even bother?

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.

Factually most businesses don’t make it past the 5 years point for different reasons which are not always even solvable by the the starting team. An example would be the market moving at a time where you don’t have enough available capital to adapt. The alternative is doing something relatively predictable and safe like a corner store or a bakery. There is good money to be made there but probably not much more than by doing a well paid engineering job for most.

Don’t get me wrong. Starting a business is a bet in yourself which is always good. I think people who are interested in the life style should definitely do it, just not by using all their retirement savings.

Numerically, most of the scams are rug pulls. "Get in on the ground floor of our hot new web3 token issue that will be the next BAYC or whatever". There are enough such things out there that do make money (a lot of it) that people are willing to bet on them anyway.

Then the owners take the $2M they got in early financing or seed money or reservations or whatever it's called and disappear with it.

"Give me 1btc and I'll send you 3btc back" is not logically refutable in the strictest sense of "logic".

It's obvious, socially/culturally, that this is a scam; why would anyone give people money after they get money?

But logically, no. This is not a "logically refutable scam". Unless you misunderstand what logic is.

I don't know if I understand what "logic" is, but I clearly used the context of sociology and the game of life. Furthermore, if you want to fight on the ground that this isn't logic - who's to say that a higher number is better? That consent is required for BTC to be sent? That the number of BTC sent is not based on an outside variable?

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.

I don't think the strictest sense of "logic" has much use outside of pure math. Using commonplace definition of "logical=rational", it's logically refutable. Any rational person should be able to reason out that it's a scam.

Certainly that's incorrect, actual logic is used throughout virtually all sciences to deduce conclusions using methods of proof. The reason we're able to deduce many core truths of reality is by relying on both observation and logic to guide us to truth.

But, to engage with your implied argument in good faith: Do irrational people deserve to have all their money taken from them?

Actual, deductive logic can't be used in any scientific field because we don't have scientific objective truths. Science is based on inductive reasoning and constant hypothesis checking. Plenty of scientific facts we once thought were "true" ended up being false such as Newton's laws of gravity. The only place where true deductive logic really has a use is philosophy and pure mathematics, which are completely abstracted from reality. The laws of physics as we understand can always be overturned at some point; the laws of mathematics cannot.

My argument was that any rational person should be able to conclude it's a scam. That's really the extent of my willingness to engage further.

You do not need objective truths to use deductive logic. That statement shows that you fundamentally misunderstand deductive logic.

You simply need premises (i.e. assumptions) to make use of deductive logic in a standard logical system. Those premises, when used with logic that has no fallacies, implies conclusions. Any real world conclusions are always based on premises, where those premises are based on experimental evidence. It's always the case that there could be problems with the experiments, and there always are limitations of those experiments. That doesn't mean you can't use logic to derive conclusions.

You know what? You're 100% right and I agree with you. I am wrong here. But still by your definition of logic, anyone can logically conclude it's a scam. Just make the assumption that people don't give out money for free, which is a valid assumption to make given most people's experience with the world.

Well, certainly that would be a logical argument, but it isn't a sound argument and I can give a few examples: a long time ago, people gave out bitcoin for free to anyone that wanted it. I personally received 0.05 BTC back around 2010 simply by providing my wallet to a generous person who ran a website.

It's very common to give away new cryptocurrencies to seed them and build popularity with them, even in a non-scammy way. RaiBlocks (eventually renamed Nano), for example, started this way. Eventually that currency (mostly) ended in a giant heist because the biggest exchange for that currency had its entirety of value "stolen" (embezzled by the exchange's operator). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano_(cryptocurrency)#BitGrail...

Naive users who know very little about cryptocurrencies but who want to get into that market (think your parents, if they're technically literate enough to use the internet) will genuinely be persuaded by giveaways.

It's becoming a common scam practice to give people free cryptocurrency tokens (or at extreme discount), and make it so people can only sell those tokens by buying other tokens. This happens over and over, and actually got some reporting on it with the Squid Game tokens (not associated with the actual Korean media drama): https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59129466

So sure, you could technically make a "logical" argument about anything you want with the right premises, but if those premises are not based in reality, then the conclusions don't hold in reality. Those are called apriori arguments. Because the statement that "no one would ever give away cryptocurrency for free" is a strictly false one.

Stuff like "Give me 1btc and I'll send you 3btc back!!!" works better with bitcoin (even if only marginally) because the occasional mark who might actually fall for it has heard so many confusing stories about something called bitcoin making some people rich for reasons that certainly did not make any sense at all to them.

Now they hear another of those stories that don't make any sense at all. But this time with a peculiar tweak, they might perhaps be the protagonist themselves! Two wrongs don't make one right, so far so good. But what about two utterly confusing?

Some people made a bunch of money on dogecoin and it got enough attention to spark a wave of scamcoins