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Comment by dataangel | Hacker News Reader

It's disappointing to see so many people arguing all crypto is a scam by saying it's been written about exhaustively and then linking to a gigantic list of articles written by people making the same mistakes over and over. People are having a very hard time distinguishing "this has properties that have attracted lots of scammers" from "every project is a scam."

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I'm a crypto skeptic, but I don't feel exceptionally informed of the other side of the argument(s). Can you recommend any posts/articles/summaries about the mistakes you're referring to?

I work with blockchain, but I stay the hell away for anything related to selling tokens or investing for future , sadly that excludes 95% of the blockchain world as it is today. But in that 5% there’s some really promising awesome projects.

We all understand the importance of databases and in general storing state. Do you know any other paradigm/system where a database is not controlled by a ‘root’ user with god powers?

That’s what blockchain is. If people are going nuts using it to create currencies and selling each other JPGS, that’s their business. Doesn’t deny the usefulness of the underlying paradigm.

Mind sharing what those use-cases are? Most of what I've heard of blockchains for non-cryptocurrency, non-token things are either cases where the blockchain is still permissioned (with some sort of root-like user with god powers), or could just as well be a DHT (like ipfs & bittorrent), or are things that sound interesting as a thought experiment but could never scale to their intended use-case, or something that is already solved by much simpler tech.

I'm open to the idea that blockchains are interesting as a tech but I have yet to see what they would be the best solution for besides illegal activity or speculation.

> But in that 5% there’s some really promising awesome projects.

This is exactly how I feel. Its very likely someone will someday create something uniquely awesome with the tech that really is transforming. I just don't think we've seen it yet

There's no mistake: the only uses of crypto so far are wild speculation and scams.

Anyone who gets involved crypto is going to fall into one of these two. I wish it turned out differently, but it's time we stop pretending crypto will change anytime soon and will bring anything good.

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