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Comment by robot_no_419 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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