Coffeezilla, a YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams | Hacker News Reader

Coffeezilla, a YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams

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248 pointsmitchbob193 comments

Blockchain has two proven use cases:

1.) Speculative investment assets.

2.) Moving value outside of a financial system.

Unregulated stable coins have proven to be as stable as the titanic was unsinkable.

Number 1 is really a problem because of Number 2. Number 2 is a fancy way to describe a primary use case being money laundering. Of course though there are some instances where that’s helpful like backing a foreign government you agree with. Unfortunately, it also means countries like North Korea can use it to evade sanctions.

Blockchain is largely a solution in search of a problem with speculators throwing money into stuff they don’t understand.

I’m a reformed blockchain enthusiast.

your talking points are from like 2012 man. off the top of my head: remittances, online retail, trustless decentralized computational systems

Can you link a couple of sources that show companies that successfully leverage this use cases?

https://brave.com/transparency/

i run a small retail business that only accepts crypto and it's been doing fine

Is it a small laundromat, or do you just not want to accept money from all customers?

Could you tell us why you chose to do that?

partly to seize a market niche and avoid fees, partly as a proof of concept for others (i wrote up the technical details), and partly because the product is crypto-adjacent, which most CC processors won't touch. i highly recommend the software i use, you can fairly easily turn it into an automated vending machine for digital goods that relies on no middlemen: https://btcpayserver.org/

my business is not even close to legally questionable but i prefer not to dox myself on this account. i found a friendly CC processor that i'm waiting on approval from, so it will be hybrid eventually.

What do you sell/provide?

Trustless or distributed trust (up until the point of a 51% attack)?

fair enough, but in the same way that conventional systems are only 'secure and encrypted up until the point of being beaten with a wrench'

Conventional systems don't tell you all the time how they save the trust issue.

And conventional systems are old and grown and have a ton of security features and is still getting finetuned.

if i want to send money to a family member in bangalore, i don't have to trust anybody by using crypto. this isn't some nebulous promise, it is intrinsic to the design of the system -- i perform a transaction in my bed room, and the money is transferred to a new ownership address, which nobody else has control over. this trivial use case is profound and there is no parallel for it in the conventional financial system. that isn't to say it has perfect security, but it eliminates the need for middlemen while preserving the benefits of digital systems. it's optimized for autonomy and freedom over safety -- giving someone the power the revoke transactions can also be used against you. "grown and have a ton of security features and is still getting finetuned" is also true of crypto

> ...which nobody else has control over.

Control may be distributed, though it certainly is there. And crypto requires no party have too much control over the hash rate or else the advantage over traditional finance is lost.

> ...but it eliminates the need for middlemen...

Not technically. Even crypto-to-crypto trades still involve miners at least. And if it's L2 then you're trusting that middleman. Then for the family to get useful fiat from crypto they need an exchange.

> And crypto requires no party have too much control over the hash rate or else the advantage over traditional finance is lost.

what is your threat model here? what practical attack do you think is going to happen?

>Not technically. Even crypto-to-crypto trades still involve miners at least.

miners are not middlemen, they have zero control or ability to interfere with the transfer of funds. wiring money involves handing control of the funds to a middleman like a bank, who you have to trust to do what you ask. there are incentive structures but it is ultimately a human system. this is not the case with eg bitcoin -- any individual miner or validator who didn't want to process your transaction would simply be replaced by one of the thousands of others. if you're savvy you can simply run your own node.

They control the whole network if they want.

You make it out as the miners would not own the Blockchain which is just wrong.

And it's not that you can run a node, you actually should run a node.

After all decentralization doesn't work if only big players own it.

But now you need to be tech savvy as you said it yourself.

And every Blockchain has this problem and the fact that there are many Blockchains makes this eve worse.

Remittances and online retail is already done quite well with centralized systems. "Trustless decentralization" is only relevant when you are doing things illegal. Which, as it turns out, is the main usecase of cryptocurrency.

“Nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide” goes back even further than 2012.

That has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm saying. What I am saying is that cryptocurrencies are so horrible in every way except anonymity that the ONLY reason you would use it is for illegal activities, speculation, or paranoia.

It isn’t even that good at anonymity for the most frequent use case compared to alternatives. By far the most transactions that may benefit anonymity are local and involve relatively low values. Cash is a perfect fit for that and gives you even more (and a lot easier) anonymity then cryptocoins.

Cryptocoins only prove them selfs superior if the transaction is located to far away to conveniently travel, or involves such large sums that gathering or carrying as cash becomes inconvenient (or impossible). I would think that over 99.99% of people never engage in such transactions where they additionally require—or even prefer—anonymity.

i personally use it as a passive, diversified savings instrument, but i don't mess with altcoins or trading. most crypto is actually exceptionally bad for anonymity, worse than cash, and the proportion of criminal activity it facilitates is 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than the conventional economy: https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2021/01/19/the-fal...

it is in fact so bad for anonymity that i suspect you have not read much about it!

i don't disagree that it features a lot of hype bubbles and ridiculous speculation, but that's hardly specific to cryptocurrency. how's your local housing market been looking lately?

s/cryptocurrencies/encrypted communcation

And does the mainstream crypto outside Monero help you to hide things? You are still dealing with some actors and surely they keep records if you don't solely do face to face activities. In which case why even bother and not just go with Euros or dollars...

I thought this too, but then looked into and saw that fiat currency use for illicit things is an order of magnitude more then crypto (as a percentage of total use).

this is the exact same argument as politicians saying that encryption is only useful for child pornographers

zero knowledge proofs have other uses, for example proving to your family members no-one has bought the same gift for the same person, without revealing the nature of the gift.

Maybe people wouldn't repeat the 2012 talking points 10 years later if crypto had improved in any way since then. But no, all that has happened is the growth of a massive speculative bubble on top, while the fundamental issues remain the same.

A trustless descentralized system that manages to process a handful of operations a second by spending as much energy as a country?

remittances - money laundering.

online retail - drug & illegal sales - essentially money laundering

trustless decentralized computational systems - There is still trust, it's just in the code. Which also tells you how "decentralized" they are.

i urge you to think about things a little bit before talking

> Number 2 is a fancy way to describe a primary use case being money laundering.

That's not entirely true. I think a more principal use case for Number 2 is purchasing things (dark web drugs, gambling, etc) outside of the usual centralized financial system rails which would stop them at the edges.

Bitcoin seems like a poor choice for money laundering because of how traceable it is; you'd need to use privacy coins for that, and even then, it's questionable (51% attack is doable in the same way that many Tor nodes are compromised).

> Unregulated stable coins have proven to be as stable as the titanic was unsinkable.

When in the last five years have you had difficulty cashing out USDT, USDC, or DAI at dollar value?

Because past performance is _always_ indicative of future performance, am I right?

> When in the last five years have you had difficulty cashing out USDT, USDC, or DAI at dollar value?

You could have said the exact same thing about Terra/UST right until sometimes last week. It works until it doesn't.

Typically, past performance is indicative of future behavior. This is why statistical modeling in social sciences works somewhat okay. But there are extrapolation regions or shorter memory missing prior events that cause behavior to deviate from status quo expectation.

Yes, you could say that sometimes past performance can indicate future behavior, but it doesn't hold for crypto the same reason it doesn't hold for perpetual motion machines.

Algorithmic and partially backed stablecoins (like Luna's TerraUSD) are perpetual motion machines.

Fully backed stablecoins (all other popular stablecoins with the arguable exception of Tether) are not perpetual motion machines.

What do you mean “fully backed”? The last time I checked on USDT (which was a while ago) I thought they admitted it was a fractional reserve, primarily denominated in undisclosed commercial paper. Additionally, they had not yet received an unqualified audit report from any of the big four. Has something changed in the last year or so?

As I said, Tether (USDT) is an arguable exception. You seem to be arguing that exception. I don't disagree with you.

Tether is the largest stablecoin in existence. If you are intent on arguing that the biggest example of your mentioned category is an exception, how do you propose the average person goes about find out what's an exception and what's following the norm?

Picking any regulated, US-based stablecoin is a great start.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31381864

Tether is large because it got a head start on network effect before the proper regulatory frameworks were put into place, in the USA at least. There's a massive amount of momentum there even though their product is inferior.

I’m genuinely curious, can you point me to credible information showing that some other stablecoin is actually fully backed?

USDC backing, audited by a large US accounting firm: https://www.centre.io/usdc-transparency

GUSD backing, also audited by a large US accounting firm, subject to New York State Department of Financial Services regulations: https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/gusd-stablecoin-gemini-do...

USDP backing, also audited by a large US accounting firm and subject to New York State Department of Financial Services regulations: https://paxos.com/usdp/

DAI backing, viewable transparently on-chain. Currently backed 168% by collateral: https://daistats.com/#/overview

LUSD backing, viewable transparently on-chain. Currently backed 189% by collateral: https://dune.com/dani/Liquity

UST (Terra/Luna) and USDT (Tether) have/had nothing like this.

Cool, thanks a lot! But why is it then that these currencies are not as attractive or hyped as Tether and UST? Could it be that the fact they are properly backed makes them less interesting for those who want a more adventurous kind of investment?

Tether is popular because it was the first stablecoin by several years (e.g. Tether launched in 2014, USDC launched in 2018). Much like Bitcoin, Tether isn't a particularly good product nowadays if you look at its fundamental properties - most of its usefulness comes from its extrinsic properties such as liquidity and demand. However, much like Bitcoin, due to its very early launch, Tether became an early schelling point that has gathered significant liquidity/usage due to network effect (liquidity begets liquidity).

TerraUSD (UST) was hyped up and became popular mainly because the network paid 20% APY interest on UST deposits, which is a way higher rate on a "stablecoin" than you can get anywhere else (rates in much safer protocols are about 5-8% right now). Obviously a 20% interest rate is unsustainable when it's supported by money printed from thin air. But people were either unaware of this (unsophisticated investors), chose to overlook it (calculated risk-takers, RIP), or positioned themselves to be able to find a chair right before the music stopped (institutional investors like Celsius).

Just wanted to thank you again for all the valuable information. It’s certainly food for thought during a couple of coffee breaks!

"The reaper didn't come today, so he won't tomorrow"

For technology, that assumption is more likely than not, in a general sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Value of an asset doesn't really count as technology though. The technology of UST/Luna still "works" even though the value crashed.

UST was intended to be a dollar-pegged stablecoin. The failure of its dollar peg was certainly a failure of technology, because a "dollar-pegged" coin that is not actually pegged to the dollar is not a "working" system.

The thing is, you're right many times until you're wrong. Unfortunately when you're wrong, it can be catastrophic.

... is a pretty good approximation.

The problem is that you don't care if a stablecoin collapses tomorrow; you care if it collapses in the next 50 years and "the stablecoin hasn't collapsed in 50 years so it won't collapse in the next 50 years" obviously doesn't apply.

Have you heard the tale of the inductivist turkey and thanksgiving?

  This turkey found that, on his first morning at the turkey farm, he was fed at 9 a.m. However, being a good inductivist, he did not jump to conclusions. He waited until he had collected a large number of observations of the fact that he was fed at 9 a.m., and he made these observations under a wide variety of circumstances, on Wednesdays and Thursdays, on warm days and cold days, on rainy days and dry days. Each day, he added another observation statement to his list. Finally, his inductivist conscience was satisfied and he carried out an inductive inference to conclude, “I am always fed at 9 a.m.”. Alas, this conclusion was shown to be false in no uncertain manner when, on Christmas eve, instead of being fed, he had his throat cut. An inductive inference with true premises has led to a false conclusion. (via Alan Chalmers, What is this thing called Science, 2nd edition, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1982)

Have you heard of faster ways of conveying the insight that “turkeys seem safe until the day they get slaughtered” and less toxic ways of formatting quotes?

And was it a fully general argument against induction, or do you disagree with the conclusion you were promoting?

1. UST hasn't existed for 5 years, the others have.

2. "Algostable" coins are experimental, and this one was propped up by ponzinomics on Anchor. It is not comparable to collateralized stablecoins, and claiming otherwise is intellectually dishonest.

1. The beanie baby craze lasted a bit shy of 5 years. 5 years is nothing.

2. Collateralized stablecoins are stable insofar as they actually have enough liquid collateral to redeem. None of these coins have even remotely been tested yet.

You don't think USDT holders have been scrambling to exit USDT over the last few days? Actually the sensible ones started cashing out around 1-2 months ago. You say that they have "not been remotely tested?" How are you quantifying that claim?

USDT can only be redeemed by non-US-person "authorized participants" as determined solely by Paolo Ardoino per their terms and conditions. Just who do you think these APs are? Best guess, they're exchanges, whose existence depends on USDT continuing to hold it's peg.

Yes, I do think the holders have been scrambling to exist - one guy lost $4M trying to swap for USDT - but I think it's not Tether cashing it out, but instead exchanges eating the losses.

That can only get you so far. The failure mode is a step function.

no, terra is an algorithmic coin, the ones that are 100% backed by IRL assets are flawless

Depends on the assets doesn't it.

What if those assets decline in Value by 50% where assets held is 50% or less than equivalent usd value?

Same could be said for US dollar as a world currency, couldn't it? Do you think its model is sustainable?

British pound has enjoyed a long history and was used as a currency for international trade until early 20st century. Then dollar took over.

One could argue it's because USA emerged from WW2 as a super-power.

But it would be foolish to say that only a major war or a fall of the empire will change what currency people use.

I'm not arguing for Terra as it was really a bad design. But it is odd that so many people just reject the idea of cryptocurrencies.

It's a big sandbox, big experiment with thousands of people working on the new primitives. Even if 80% projects are scam or failures, 20% might be revolutionary. The US dollar as it is today went through several iterations

It was kind of a stablecoin in the early days, pegged to the value of Spanish dollar which was more popular. There were also Continentals that failed and many colonial currencies that were outlawed IIRC.

Currencies rise and fall, and US dollar may as well get replaced by the Chinese yen as the world reserve currency by 2050. But that does not in any way merit cryptocurrencies, whose uselessness is independent of the failures of the US monetary policy.

Your argument reminds me of the Politician's fallacy, which goes like: "we should invest in an alternative asset in case the US dollar fails, cryptocurrency is something, thus we should invest in cryptocurrencies." Go read this thread to understand the numerous criticisms of cryptocurrencies and then think why any of the existing cryptocurrencies should be worth beyond $0 (or slightly more, I admit they are novel and thus could be a collectible).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

What you're describing is totally different in scale though. When the British pound got displaced as the currency for international trade it didn't suddenly lose 99.9999% of its value in a weekend. And whilst the Dollar isn't guaranteed to be the most popular currency for international trade, it's still going to be the currency a bunch of guys with guns insist Americans pay taxes in. There are real reasons people must hold real currencies. There are no reasons that anyone needs to hold crypto.

I'm not saying crypto has no value, but I'm saying it's not comparable to a modern currency. You might be right that it's similar to some historical examples of weak upstart currencies most of which failed, but even those were backed by a lot more than just... what? In this case we're literally comparing to currencies that are often backed by nothing.

> it's still going to be the currency a bunch of guys with guns insist Americans pay taxes in

Well, yeah, most currencies are defacto backed by military force. That fact creates bad incentives.

Crypto doesn't have this luxury, it can be only be backed by the trust in code. If the currency is trusted - because it's open-source, open for all to use, is well designed - it's value is going to go up. See Bitcoin and Ethereum as best examples of this.

This make a decision whether to use a particular coin similar to choosing Python vs JVM and their ecosystems.

To be fair, I don't think stablecoins work well in that context. The information on how they are backed is not completely public, the companies issuing stablecoins are not that well audited...They are blobs of closed-source "stuff" that look like 1$

Sure, and UST is another example of this, it built a multi-billion dollar market cap by obfuscating the fact you were buying a perpetual motion machine. The incentive created by "trust the code" is "lie about the code". Which is why you'll hear several thousand reasons why BTC is valuable but none are as compelling as "Those bunch of guys over there will shoot you if you try and undermine it", and most of them aren't even as compelling as "Number goes up".

The theory is that the market can efficiently decide whether the code actually does work. But the practice is that you can make billions tricking people about what the code does. And often it's people who have never even glanced at the code telling you what it does. I would wager good money that there was no one invested in UST that understood the code.

> British pound has enjoyed a long history and was used as a currency for international trade until early 20st century. Then dollar took over.

The British Pound is still worth about the same proportionately to the dollar as it always was, and no-one would look at you funny for paying for stuff in pounds.

Have you ever redeemed Tether?

As opposed to selling it to another chump on am exchange?

Have you ever taken your Tether holdings and redeemed them at Tether.io for US Dollars?

With a corporate account, not personal, but yes. They make it relatively simple. I don't imagine it's any different for an individual, aside from the verification process.

My impression is that at certain exchanges that accept USDT (eg. bitfinex), you can withdraw your USDT for "real" USD wired to your bank account. Isn't this effectively redeeming it, even if you're not directly transacting with Tether Operations Limited?

No. That’s you selling your usdt for usd to a non tether entity.

> When in the last five years have you had difficulty cashing out USDT, USDC, or DAI at dollar value?

Wow, naming USDT was a bold choice since Paolo's answer as to why they can't tell you what backs it was almost verbatim what Skilling said when asked why Enron couldn't provide a balance sheet. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp5kv7aENxw

I thought I was listening to a podcast but it seems I accidentally stumbled into a butcher.

If you can’t learn from examples, I guess you’re gonna have to learn by experience.

USDT and USDC are certainly not "unregulard stable coins". DAI is collateralized and well-designed. In fact its value were often above $1 in the SAI days until the USDT-USDC-DAI pool was created and it became possible to mint $1 DAI with $1.01 USDC.

> When in the last five years have you had difficulty [snip]

When until 2008 did anyone have problems with their holdings in Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers stocks?

Things are OK right up until they aren't any more. Afterwards this can seem (painfully) obvious. Beforehand, less so.

Stablecoins without collateral backing them have repeatedly failed (and they failed when they were tried before crypto too), but dai/rai/usdc are working fine.

At this point I’d like to sees US regulation around $ stablecoins so we can use something else and reduce the power of the US dollar in the world. Go ahead America, regulate yourselves.

> they failed when they were tried before crypto too

do you have references to non-crypto based coins? also recent ones?

This type of argument always uses the same conjectures:

- crypto can be used for money laundering therefore it is mostly used for money laundering

- one big stablecoin has failed therefore all stablecoins are unsustainable (the first one usdt is still around btw, and so is dai)

- etc

The main value proposition of crypto is cryptographic security. You cannot confiscate crypto like you can other assets (unless obv. you have the key or miners somehow collude). Is this worth $1 trillion? Probably not.

> You cannot confiscate crypto like you can other assets.

You're correct. In most cases it's dramatically easier to confiscate the crypto. See: the horde of people who've had their cryptocurrency and NFTs stolen. To say nothing of the uncountable Bitcoin billionaires who've had a hard drive crash, lost their keys, forgotten a password, etc.

this is not the same as the cryptography being broken

losing crypto due to hardware failure or forgetting keys is not the same as someone taking it by breaking the cryptography . If this were possible, there is tons of crypto right now for the taking. It's a self-funding bug bounty.

Yes, but being cryptographically broken is not matter, does it? First rule of computer security is any system is no more strong than its weakest link.

Relevant xkcd [1]: why worry about breaking advanced cryptography when you can just socially engineer the passphrase out of people?

[1] https://xkcd.com/538/

Why does that matter? People care if they do or don’t have their money. Not if their money was taken or screwed up for a whitelisted type of reason.

https://xkcd.com/538/

What do you mean it’s a “solution in search of a problem”? It solves a very clear problem: lack of scalability of traditional Ponzi schemes. That’s why most of the answers to criticism of cryptocurrencies is usually “it’s not much worse than the kind of thing that led to the 2008 crash”. For crypto enthusiasts the problem is not that scams exist; it’s that they didn’t get to join them early enough.

Traditional ponzi schemes didn't have a scalability problem, they had a marketing problem. Cryptocurrency solves that by adding hand-wavy tech hype.

I disagree strongly that moving outside of the financial system is primarily used for money laundering. Bitcoin is great for censorship resistance, and for offering an alternative to oppressive monetary policies. Here's a good article touching on some of the use cases outside of the US: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-pri...

In the long run, I hope Bitcoin's existence will also lead to better monetary policies since governments have always assumed a monopoly on money, and now there's finally some true competition. And competition leads to better outcomes for consumers/citizens.

Currencies did a lot of centralizing on their own. One currency is much more useful to its owner than 500.

Ain't nobody want to spend time converting from the 500 down into one so they can buy an expensive widget that only accepts a specific currency

I've followed Coffeezilla for a while. I was doing an AI course from another youtuber named Siraj Raval in 2019. The course ended up being totally amateur and full of empty promises.

Mr Zilla did a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jmBE4yPrOs 'AI Guru makes $238,800 with misleading paid course. doesn't credit developers. | Siraj Raval FGF'

Then Zilla started exclusively focusing on crypto/NFT scams. The first few were interesting. Now... its a quite tedious, "the blockchain never lies...look they pulled the rug..." yawn

I hope he goes back to covering other interesting topics again.

Agreed. It was a much more interesting channel when it was about scams in general. I suppose bsc shitcoins and what not are just easier to make videos about and it gets the views

Before this he had a long streak of exposing business gurus selling online courses.

I guess crypto videos get him more views. Most of the videos are super boring, like yeah who would have thought that some shady YouTuber promoting a token on Binance Smart Chain would turn out to be a scam.

Yep. Ironically I felt he turned into the very thing he was uncovering. Towards the end of 2021 he made this promise to donate X dollars to a charity if he reached a million subs. It came across as pretty disingenuous.

Coffeezilla himself is invested in crypto, so this type of content is now very much in his wheelhouse.

After all, being a youtuber is all about monetizing your hobbies.

Good for crypto. I'm a crypto enthusiast and I think crypto has a great future and work in the field.

However because of many scammy projects the whole crypto ecosystem now has a bad name.

I'd love to see more and more scams being exposed for healthy adoption with less manipulation and real investment to projects that have the potential to change things instead of 400000% APYs.

So what are real use cases in your opinion?

Something which really need crypto/Blockchain and is really trustworthy?

Something which doesn't break the trust Anker of a Blockchain by having any dependency outside of a Blockchain.

"Something which doesn't break the trust Anker of a Blockchain by having any dependency outside of a Blockchain."

Only the critics look for this type of weird ideological purity. the rest of us just want somewhere to use the value we create.

I'm totally lost on your statement.

So you try to use this tech for tech sake?

Independent if there is already an existing solution?

A project is trying to add Blockchain technology into a project I'm working with. Just that the Blockchain is owned by some company and that company was publicly asking people I don't know if they are able and motivated to operate a node for them.

This for example sounds way more complex than just creating a company which has the purpose of being the trust Anker, implemented with technology like CA, contracts etc.

> Only the critics look for this type of weird ideological purity. the rest of us just want somewhere to use the value we create.

Yeah it's called the entire existing global financial network. You're creating things that have no value. Sorry, it's tough to hear, but you've been building baloney. Just building isn't good enough.

I think we shouldn't try to "retrofit" existing mechanics into blockchain.

It brought a whole new potential of "programmable money" and being able to tokenize everything with users in control and no censoring (at least generally in theory).

We should be building dApps that incentivize sharing/hosting things (e.g. Databases (Bluzelle), files (Sia/Filecoin/IPFS), hosting (again IPFS and perhaps some Tor-like layer that can "talk" to blockchain with any kind of servers), providing data (prediction markets/Augur) which can all coordinate with chains and tokenize any good behavior and sharing resources with incentives at a global level.

Crypto should not be for "web2 and below", it should be for "web3 and above" (sorry for the buzzword, but it really defines the culture that I'm talking about). It should perhaps be a whole new layer on top of TCP/IP, and can coordinate with the regular web at interface points, otherwise being a whole new thing by itself.

But we will need some sort of transition and Metamask on "regular" sites is doing well (but not enough yet) for now.

Most of the examples above have perhaps more efficient applications already, but they are all controlled by other entities. I believe blockchain is more about philosophy of every "thing" being addressable and "actable" using a private key that can sign anything publicly with no authority (which is the most important point), and blockchain is the main application of it, yet.

Yeah like network of trust with pgp keys.

I'm a big fan of it and joined plenty of signing parties but I will tell you a secret: no one else cares.

No one cares about 2fa, backups, decentralization for decentralization sake, security...

Even the crazy Snowden findings.

I'd still give some time. People will most likely be more inclined towards crypto when they start understanding having power in their hands instead of authorities is much more important than they envisioned.

I'm seeing it now. All one needs is a heavily corrupted government.

I'd like to see someone like this really try to explain the global non-crypto currency system as it exists today in similar detail. This after all was one of the touted reasons for crypto - it would allow people around the world to hold wealth in a stable currency that wouldn't be subject to market crashes and currency devaluations.

There are so many interesting questions that remain undiscussed - such as, to what extent does petrodollar recycling matter any more in terms of the value of the $USD relative to the euro and other currencies, such as Chinese and Japanese? If investing in crypto is a scam, why isn't investing in these other currencies also a scam? It would be nice to see some real in-depth compare and contrast writeups accessible to people who aren't professional currency traders etc.

Don't hold your breath waiting for The New Yorker to publish it. Expect something more along the lines of, "Central Banking: Why all detractors are conspiracy theorists, by Paul Krugman"

You can’t store wealth stably in inanimate things. Wealth is always social in nature. Currencies are claims on the future production of people who want them. Their future desires and capacities defines the value.

Gold. Other precious/rare metals. Property.

You are speaking of collectibles, not wealth/currency.

Gold's value is other people's belief in it being worth something, so they will trade other things for it. Same with other rare metals. Property has something close to intrinsic value in that it provides shelter, but the value of property is only realizable if the social context allows it to be realized -- your claim to a house is only as good as the government's willingness to recognize that claim, and to protect it for you when it is challenged by others.

Point is, the devastating attacks people think they're lobbing at bitcoin when they say that it's not 'backed' by anything are neither devastating, nor unique to bitcoin: unless you're talking about a commodity that people are consuming directly, nothing is backed by anything other than socially held belief.

That's all money is, when you unwind it all the way. The important question is what is the relevant society, and what beliefs do they hold?

You are talking about a break down of society. In which values would indeed change drastically. Women of child bearing age, seeds, potable water, would instantly become precious.

I'm talking about normal ass society. These may fluctuate, but there is a reason that since the beginning of human civilization we have currencies.

Crypro is too volatile as a way to store wealth, that's why to this day the rich are hoarding gems and gold and property.

I think all of it is ridiculous personally, even the dollar is no longer backed by gold.

Point being you cant compare volatile, scammy, etc crypto to pretty much any normal value store.

IMO.

Property isn't always good investment. How well Detroit and other communities where manufacturing went away are doing?

The natural rate of return “saving” in metals is negative. Rust, security, and other storage costs are real, and inanimate things provide no return to carry them. And property is only valuable in the context of social uses. Else why is land so cheap in Detroit?

Inanimate things like mutual fund shares?

Mutual fund units are a claim on future production. They connect to the the animate. A gold coin can never pay you a dividend.

Great — then you agree that your original standard, animacy, was not quite what you meant as the distinguishing factor. I hope you’re more precise about that in the future.

* > If investing in crypto is a scam, why isn't investing in these other currencies also a scam? *

I know very few people who recommend investing in currencies to begin with. You invest in either hard assets (intrinsic value that currencies get pegged against), productive assets (companies value that can increase as they become more productive) or government bonds (interest rate means you get more fiat currency back than you put in.) The advice for how much fiat currency to hold at any given time is to have an emergency fund and then put all other assets into something that can at the very least keep pace with inflation. The purpose of currency is to be a medium of exchange, not an appreciating asset.

The entirety of modern money seems to me like a scam. Questionable abstractions left and right, legal fictions left and right like there's no tomorrow. I started reading The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson so that I can understand more, the first chapter explains Fractional Reserve Banking and... Holy Shit, that's a scam, no 2 ways about it.

It's terrifying what Modern Money is and how it works. It scares and enrages me. It enrages me how the 'Store of Value', the things we exchange for our precious finite labor, is now whatever legal fan fiction that an influential someone at wall street or an equivalent finds a funny idea and convinces enough of his or her ilk to accept.

When you use modern money you get the knowledge that the biggest militaries in the world are invested in maintaining its value.

You don't get that with many other stores of value

Value exists only in the eyes of the buyer. Trying to lock value in whateverthing outside of the context of its use is exercise in creating false idols. And in that line of thought, central currencies have value just because the government says that they have value. As far as the common agreement is that governments are worth it, then central currencies will be the default stuff. This is the non-technological chain of trust that crypto bros are trying to fight. If they were not scammers, they would've noticed that this is the wrong place to attack it.

Find something that can do government's job better than the government itself and its mechanism of value exchange will dominate the world. In the meantime, do not invest in scams.

The forex environment is barely less corrupt and scammy than the cryptocurrency environment. It does have legit use (arbitrage mostly) that are 'useful' for the global economy and production chain, but most of the guys pushing it to regulars people are crooks.

And "investing" in a currency is a scam. It's like investing in an company with not only no profit, but also no sales.

> If investing in crypto is a scam, why isn't investing in these other currencies also a scam?

Isn't the answer to this that other currencies are backed by the might (both economic and military) of nations? I don't think mainstream blockchains like bitcoin and ethereum are scams, but this is an important distinction between sovereign currencies and cryptocurrencies.

Just because you don’t understand how the traditional market works it doesn’t mean it’s a scam. Sure, there are scams, and sometimes they are big and problematic, but there is also a global network of honest people working, producing, creating, and selling real, useful things, and all that is connected by the global market. It is not perfect, but human beings aren’t, so it will always be flawed, but the good things far outweigh the bad ones. Investing in crypto is not a scam by nature, in theory; it is a scam in practice. It is just how people use it, because there simply is no other use. The only reason someone buys crypto is to wait for it to grow, for whatever reason, so they can get rich easy. There is no other reason (right now) to expect crypto coins to grow in value other than speculation and hope. And scammers feed on that hope, that’s just how it is. They are not that different, by nature, from the traditional market, but right the bad parts are exacerbated and there are no good ones to counterweight. Once cryptocurrencies are connected with enough real products, services, etc they will have a better reason to exist, and to become a better investment. After all a currency is just a way to trade things, it is not a value in itself.

> I'd like to see someone like this really try to explain the global non-crypto currency system as it exists today in similar detail.

There was a video and thread on 'How (inter)national money transfers works' a couple of months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30540125

Coffeezilla is right.

ALL crypto is 100% scams. There is no 99%.

In fact 100% of the time, they have no use case at all and they are even worse than the current system.

Crypto has totally failed time and time again to prove itself.

We now need to come to terms with this failed experiment and call it all off and make them all illegal, where it rightfully should reside in.

I lament to think of the time wasted of many engineers building this distributed casino and ruining people's lives, these engineers in this 'web3' space should instead direct their time towards solutions to make the world a better place.

This is the problem with the internet, it’s so hard to tell satire from actual cranks.

I don't know whether its attempted satire or not - but I unironically agree with it 100%.

Now, I wonder if this isn’t just a pot-calling-the-kettle-black comment. Who’s the crank? Who’s the satirist?

The whole "proof of work" concept regarding crypto is a sham. Normally, the expenditure of energy produces tangible products or services. In the case of crypto currency, massive amounts of heat is wasted to produce a number with questionable "value". I just can't wrap my head around this.

I've been thinking for a while that proof of work should be replaced with some other type of real work, such as training a Neural Net, but that runs into major issues after thinking about if for more than a second. Hopefully though, someone much smarter than me can figure something out

The "value" must be produced outside of the crypto system then moved into the system as a value store. I don't know how this is not an obvious concept.

Thats one of the very obvious drawbacks.. Money is a store of value, but crypto just tries to 'be' the value, which doesn't go well, because well it's not valuable at all

It produces objective immutability of the transaction history.

It's a terrible way of doing that, and it isn't even necessary to produce an immutable record of transactions. Seriously, spend some time thinking about other models for distributed transaction records.

Blockchains are designed the way they are to prevent governance and oversight, meaning, if someone scams you or steals from you, there's no way to get your money back. "No backsies" is the most fundamental principle of their design.

Isn't it subjective immutability?

Your transaction might disappear from the history if the view changes to have some other branch be the accepted one

The PoW on top of a tx produces immutability in the sense of a minimum cost imposed on a rewriting of that tx. If no attacker is willing to bear that cost, then the objective longest chain rule (i.e. most cumulative difficulty) will preserve the history up to that tx. Without PoW you have no objective way to determine the true history.

> We now need to come to terms with this failed experiment and call it all off and make them all illegal

Who is “we”? Ironically, crypto was invented to protect individuals against the authoritarian tendencies of people such as yourself. Your comment is making the case for decentralization.

>crypto was invented

What are you talking about? David Chaum? NSA? Mesopotamian cryptography?

We stand on the shoulders of giants

You know that Edison didn't need to invent wires and glass-working to invent the light-bulb, right?

So who invented "crypto"? What is it even, cryptography? Where can I read their thoughts on authoritarianism?

"We" would be any nation with legitimate climate targets.

People should remember that blockchain does not require Proof of Work consensus. If you want to ban PoW, be specific about it. If you want to ban blockchain, don’t simply advocate for killing PoW since blockchains will exist without it.

In case you didn't read the article, it clearly mentions that Coffeezilla himself owns some Bitcoin. So no, he doesn't think that "all crypto is 100% scams".

Peak Silicon Valley. Shit on the latest trend. Say engineers should "make the world a better place.". Well done.

Not 100%, but just as bad.

I'd say that is wild mix with hard-to-measure ratios of...

* scammers and crooks - who are attracted to crypto like flies on s***.

* the naive marks of scammers - who the scammers (and everyone else) are extracting from

* true believers - who find value in the concepts. They're willing to overlook the s*-show and actually believe in a libertarian pipe-dream of a better future with crypto as money.

* amoral speculators - who could not care less wtf crypto means but just want to dip-and-pull. They're "in it" ONLY insofar as they can convert the funny-money into real-money.

> `“I try not to be too negative about crypto,” he told me. “I think about how we can shape it into something better—more like the future that the people making it say they want. In that way, we’re on the same side.”`

Have you read the article?

This statement is false. Coffeezilla does not believe that "all crypto is 100% scams". Not even close. In fact, he stated in a recent video that he personally holds cryptocurrency.

And yet the livestream giveaway scams persist on YouTube. Scammers earning so much. At any moment you can find at least 10 videos running concurrently, each with money in the associated crypto addresses.

The smart scammers are not doing NFT tomfoolery, they are doing fake Saylor and Musk giveaways instead and earning far more money much more consistently. While YouTube does nothing. Cofeezilla is not going to stop people from continuing to fall for these much more persistent scams. Its going to have to come from youtube.

As long as there are stressed and/or gullible people, there is an avenue for these "smart scams".

I distinctly remember getting junk spam physical mail as a kid, saying if you send back $60 dollars they will share the method to work from home / easy money scheme. It feeds on desperation and stress to hinder rational decision making skills.

We also have things like the lottery where people buy in to the idea theres a infintismely small chance to actually win but the emotional side of the brain takes over and ignores it.

Love Coffeezilla. Found his channel after someone posted his Tether exposé on HN a while back - subscribed and have been watching ever since. He's genuinely entertaining, smart and fair. Very much recommended if you haven't seen any of his videos.

I think I shared this on HN before, but highly recommend this podcast: https://cryptocriticscorner.com/

It covers Worldcom all the way up to the recent Terra

I've been in crypto for 8 years. Still it's one of my favorite podcasts.

A couple of years ago I watched a lot of Coffeezille, Spencer Cornelia and some others who exposed online scams. Initially, I found it entertaining but over time I came to the conclusion that their videos aren't really protecting anyone. They themselves (Coffee, Spencer, etc) admit on some of their videos do basically nothing to protect anyone from scams. You can literally shove tons of evidence in someone's face that guru X is a scammer, and they still won't believe it.

So, I have come to the conclusion that they (Coffee, Spencer, etc) are as much part of that whole ecosystem as the scammers themselves.

They don't do this to protect anyone - if they wanted to they can simply go with their evidence to the authorities. They depend on these scammers to make videos from which they can make money. And that is all it is about to them in the end - about making money. If the scammers went away tomorrow they'd be out of a career as well.

One of the more ironic xposers, was a guy named "waronrugs" Who then went on to make a coin and rug everyone. https://twitter.com/Rekt_Tekashi/status/1394871896148172803?...

Archived: https://archive.ph/3wlkM

Also, bitfinex'ed on Twitter (and previously Medium)

Coffee's videos are great. I am a crypto enthusiast but also recognize that for each semi decent project there are 1000 more that are straight up scams. We need more folks like Coffee exposing these people in order to help clean the space.

I think his content used to be way better on his previuos channel CoffeBreak: https://youtube.com/c/CoffeeBreaks

Implying crypto isn’t a scam anyway. Is there a word for that?

Coffeezilla will hate this, but he is Tai Lopez of Scam-busting ;)

How so?

HN hasn’t been this rabidly, vocally mad at something since levels.fyi outed FAANG comp.

Ads? Evil, useless, fuck those people making 10x me. Recommender systems? Evil, creepy, fuck those people making all that money.

You can short this shit. You can short Google stock. You can short Bitcoin.

So if it’s all one big phony ads tracking machine learning Ponzi scheme scam? Don’t bitch and moan to the choir, profit from it!

Repeating the same arguments ad nauseum on here takes calories you could be using grind leetcode and get that leet job. ducks

Shorting something propped up by insane levels of hype is a recipe for massive losses. As they say, the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Shorting things you disagree with morally is also a terrible idea, unless you also think they are bad business. I disagree with a lot of “money printing” tech on moral grounds, if I shorted those I’d be bankrupt.

Sure, and for most people the right amount of short to be is just not long.

My broader point is that HN is pretty selective on which “useless” or “evil” things it will utterly lose its shit over and it seems to be, roughly, things where other hackers make a pile except YC portfolio companies.

> Don’t bitch and moan to the choir, profit from it!

I'm not going to throw away whatever little dignity I have left in order to try and profit off of anything relating to cryptocurrency.

There is no dignity in watching your life savings evaporate from inflation caused by politicians and governments beyond your control.

Inflation is the cruelest way to invalidate the fruit of the labor of a man’s life.

Cryptocurrency was a massive asset bubble two weeks ago. Also a year ago.

But if anyone took the time to read about the history of tech startups and the culture around them over the last 50-ish years, or ECNs over the last 25-ish years: it would become immediately apparent that there is nothing new here!

Most of “crypto” circa 2022 will wash out. Most of it is tulip-mania bullshit. And in fact, the well-traveled chestnuts (e.g. “when your shoe-shine boy starts asking for stock tips, hold, when he starts giving them: sell”) date from the last time the robber/renter class kicked out this many rungs on the prosperity ladder and tried to paper it over with expensive bonds. As a society: been there, done that.

But there is true innovation hiding in little corners: Parity has figured out how to roll an update to every nginx box in the world as the price of serving a web page via WASM! That would be huge news in any other context. And I wouldn’t count the IO-HK people out just yet on beating dumbass Algorand PBFT.

But just so the ground rules are clear: you want some inflation. Just ask the guy who bought a pizza for 1BTC in like 2013 or whatever. We used to kill each other and try to enslave continents over a limited supply of gold. The Spanish were especially good at this. Look at them now.

If your roll is maintaining or increasing in value you have no incentive to back some profitable venture with it.

Inflation out of control is a problem. Deflation is knights with swords fighting over mud.

God I wish people read books.

> profit from it!

Empathy for other humans guides us to not take advantage of others for our own benefit. People's lives are getting ruined by this stuff, and even if they are shortsighted or gullible, they are still people who we should care about.

I think the one university that closed in Illinois due to a ransom attack made possible by Crypto will in the long run prove to be more valuable to society than all of crypto. If only we had some way of preserving all the things crypto destroys.

Was ransomware really not a thing before Bitcoin?

It was far rarer because it was much more difficult to collect payments.

It was rarer because we had less computers and less interconnectness. Major incidents are caused by supply chain compromise, or very targeted attacks, all of which gets worse as the population grows.

Taking payments over the internet has been fairly easy for decades. If not, do you really think we would be where we are today.

I get you like to blame cryptocurrency on crime, but it is but a component, of which other components are just as critical and yet we cannot have a modern digital society without them.

Taking regulated payments subject to financial law as a Russian hacker group is quite difficult. Bitcoin is used in nearly all ransomware attacks precisely because it is unregulated. The idea that they’d just take PayPal without Bitcoin is laughable.

It may have, but crypto allowed it to become truly scalable. Before, you had to coordinate with each of your victims about how to receive the ransom while trying to evade the authorities. Now you can just take over a random machine, paint a Bitcoin address on the screen, and voila, you're done.

Except it doesn’t really work that way these days. The bad guys run onion payment sites where you exchange an id and get a unique address — they still need to coordinate with the victims.

And before cryptocurrency was big, it was shady credit card gateways in non-friendly jurisdictions. You cannot blame cryptocurrency any more than you can blame onion routing, encryption or the internet. It’s all just tech that is evolving and getting more efficient.

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