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Comment by TimPC | Hacker News Reader

Sick of people calling everything in crypto a Ponzi scheme. Some crypto projects are pump and dump schemes, while others are pyramid schemes. Others are just standard issue fraud. Others are just middlemen skimming of the top. Stop glossing over the diversity in the industry.

https://twitter.com/patdennis/status/1518637225789042688

You (or the tweet’s author) seem to be very well versed in the fine art of distinguishing different sorts of poop.

I would never call crypto poop. Poop can be combined with water and light to nourish plants which create food, something real and useful for humans.

That’s just insulting to ponzi!

Crypto has exactly one non-scam use-case: a way to transfer value that's more resilient to government interference. Can be used for crime, grey areas or in the very rare case where there's no other financial infrastructure to transfer value.

Cryptocurrencies make various trade-offs around efficiency, energy use, user experience, etc to operate in such a hostile environment, therefore they should really be used as a last resort if there's nothing else that can achieve your objective.

For most people living in the developed world and for whom government interference isn't a problem, there is no need to use cryptocurrencies.

Anything else that's crypto/blockchain based but not a cryptocurrency for the purpose of transferring value is a scam - whether to scam the users (pump & dump, rug pull, etc) or to scam clueless investors who are happy to dump money into anything that uses a blockchain even though a database would be a better solution.

> Crypto has exactly one non-scam use-case: a way to transfer value

And even then, its usefulness in this regard is limited when its valuation is highly volatile. Probably not an issue when the full transaction life cycle can be fully completed (buyer acquires crypto, buyer and seller trade crypto, seller offloads the crypto) in a matter of hours. But this narrows the use case even further.

It's currently volatile because there's lots of hype about it. But when it all dies down the value would more or less stablize to the value it provides for its only true use-case.

Optimistic. Potentially true if the scale on a single blockchain is sufficient—which is multiple orders of magnitude more than it sees today—and thus opens its own set of fairly obvious problems.

Why do you think cryptocurrency solves this problem? Is it because you hope cryptocurrency solves some problem? It's a public ledger. All a hostile government has to do is find who performed the transactions and imprison them. Is that not considerable interference?

There are non-public ledgers such as Monero.

Being a public ledger doesn't mean your real world identity is automatically connected to a crypto address. In practice most people aren't diligent enough to separate the two, but it's possible.

And then you have private ledgers like Monero.

You’d think the case is very rare, but then a war happened and it literally saved me as an instrument of storing value using stable coins. Not so rare after all. And this is only one example.

Is 99% of crypto scam? Yes

Are there hundreds of legit use cases? Yes.

Stablecoins didn't allow you to store your volatile currency. Stablecoins allowed you to store your volatile currency in an uninsured instrument at an interest rate of zero. They are all scams.

After what the Canadian government managed to do with truckers crypto funds, I think it is more important than ever for people to understand what type of crypto to hold.

MPesa, Paytm, Worldremit, etc.

All worldwide. No need for a blockchain. Ever.

You obviously are not from a third world country. It is incredibly hard and often impossible to transfer money across borders from third world countries. Or even to store them reliably. So yes, there is a huge case for blockchain

So you can't transfer money across borders using MPesa and WorldRemit even though they have been there for 15 years?

Technology purist version:

Is it a token on top of another blockchain? Yes -> scam. No ->

Is it anything other than pure PoW? Yes -> scam. No ->

Does it have a ICO/premine/instamine? Yes -> scam. No ->

Do miners get less than 100% of block subsidy? Yes -> scam. No ->

Is the source code mostly cloned from another project? Yes -> scam. No ->

Is majority of supply emitted in first few years? Yes -> scammy. No ->

Do creators have any expected financial gain? Yes -> scammy. No -> Maybe not a scam.

Do the creators and bag holders hijack every possible thread and discussion to shill their coin all over social media? Yes -> scam. No -> Maybe not a scam.

So essentially this [0] isn't totally a scam then?

Ever since many Bitcoin clones and source derived projects with no other changes other a renaming, re-branding, block-size and tweaks and also now especially with Ethereum-based tokens that have proliferated, so did the scams.

Nano seems to qualify as 'not a scam'.

[0] http://nano.org

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