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Comment by gitfan86 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is scale. If society only had 400 people, the 390 people that were not scammers could remove the 10 people who are scammers from their economic system manually.

If you create a online store, one million strangers could connect to it. You need a way to understand who is a scammer in that situation.

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That problem is actually solved though. There are plenty of online stores where you can create an account and buy something via invoice after it got delivered to you. This works just fine.

This is true, and why all political ideologies fail. They can't cater for scale, or when they do, they do so by tyranny, which also fails eventually.

Blockchain/Bitcoin has already been thoroughly corrupted, so ironically will prove itself to be entirely untrustworthy before it even gets established as whatever wonderful thing is assumed is still coming from it.

Who has bitcoin been corrupted by?

The exchanges. Clearly and factually.

I dont understand what you mean. Is there somewhere I can read about this?

For a straightforward start, this guy piles on a bit, but also holds a lot of the history/evidence on record too: https://mobile.twitter.com/Bitfinexed

Thank you.

However that's not bitcoin being corrupted, he suggests that tether, and an exchange are corrupted.

When people use USD for crime, is USD corrupted?

Corruption is probably a bad description. It is more like what happened to Tulips during Tulip Mania, or Beanie Babies during that bubble. Beanie Babies are not "corrupted". They are "associated" with a bubble. Crypto as a whole is becoming increasingly associated with zero sum scams like Ponzi/MLMs. And it is partially due to the fee extraction entities that are making a profit of off the "investor's" cash.

I mean Mt Gox was almost a decade ago. Bad people try to do bad things with other peoples money.

That's the value in bitcoin though. You dont need to use these exchanges. If you're smart, you dont trust large institutions of any kind with your money.

That mitigates these risks for people who are able to have an in-depth understanding of Bitcoin, which is in itself extremely complex and requires tons of prior knowledge. Everyone else has to trust someone with their crypto needs and is left to be fleeced with no recourse at all. As of now, that merely replaces the group that profits disproportionately with a crypto bros and the like.

Crypto Bros are the vaguely defined boogeyman, scape goat, and hate magnet for a coordinated disinformation campagain against crypto .. Are you sure you want to associate your position with that kinda PR?

Don't try to stand up a strawman. The exchanges are manipulating the value of Bitcoin, which affects those not using exchanges' ability to trade at a 'proper' value.

The strawman here is dividebyzeros fictional people who are too dumb to use bitcoin but somehow smart enough to navigate the financial system.

Crytpo bros are a PR boogeyman.

The vast majority of people are well able to have a bank account and pay for things within the existing banking system without getting fleeced (or at least only to a small degree). If you want to solve trust at scale, that'll all have to become some sort of distributed ledger or the like. Scaling this tech to the point where it can do that will pretty much certainly not make it any simpler, so you'll get intermediaries who I've summarized as "crypto bros", but you're free to call them something else, but who will be in a terribly good position to fleece the masses. That's true for almost all areas; if it is to be absolutely governed by a highly obscure piece of software, people who understand the details will have great leverage to game the system, and I don't think that's an improvement over what we have now. It just transfers trust to another level in the chain and power to other people (possibly).

A distributed ledger.. Like bitcoin? It's already solved! Sorry, Im struggling to understand your point. If you want people not to get fleeced, education is the key. Explain the value of bitcoin to them. Explain why it was created.

And the financial system is obscure already and actively fleeces people all the time. Bitcoin was a direct response to the 2008 financial crisis (read: fleecing). Theyd destroyed lives and got bailed out.

This is a redundant argument as it applies just as well to the current financial markets: education is key.

But it's not reality, and Bitcoin opened up to fleecing at massive scale as its growth increased and middlemen services popped up to manage the 'complexity.'

Not that I'm saying the current financial system is good or not corrupted, it certainly is. Bitcoin is not the answer people think it is though.

You havent made that case, yet, to me at least. If anything I'm more interested than ever. I mean, you want to talk massive scale fleecing? Let's talk about destroying the global markets with bogus real estate. Global markets! And then double dipping by having the very people you fleeced bail you out against their will. That's triple A fleecing. It's such a flagrant demonstration of a corrupt system that it makes me totally understand why bitcoin was conceived in the first place.

If I use my private key to send a transaction to your public key, the exchanges have no say in it. You can choose who to trust. If some exchange is corrupted, just don't use it.

The price of the coin is being manipulated by the exchanges, no matter if you use it or not. One exchange in particular (Bitfinex) is helping to keep the largest fraud scheme in history (Tether/USDT) around.

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