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Comment by colesantiago | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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?

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".

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.

> `“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.

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.

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

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