'People were sucked into schemes': Inside Molly White’s campaign against crypto

This is still an impressive imbalance. Though I have to admit I have heard nothing from european regulators....

I’m having trouble seeing how this is separating average people from their money. That’s not an assertion substantiated by data. It’s sensationalism based on news headlines about crypto scams.

By contrast, Bitcoin is almost 15 years old, but in all this time, no one has been able to find a large-scale use for crypto, other than financial speculation and buying illegal drugs and evading national capital controls -- in other words, it remains almost entirely used for criminal activity.

This really doesn't sound like the same thing at all. Just saying “bad ideas exist everywhere” isn’t a valid retort. Plus unlike crypto, web and software technology has actually almost consumed every inch of our reality.

Crypto is one very specific thing, even at he broadest interpretation and acknowledging possible future ideas based on it. The web is more than just one order of magnitude broader and basis for a far wider and more diverse set of ideas and use cases. So to me, your comparison looks more than just a little weak.

Good ideas will out. In crypto, they don't even have to be good, just not utterly shite, corrupt or broken.

crypto as cash, has it's downsides, (total visibility, low transaction volume, difficult to secure) but it more or less works. legally, thats pretty simple. all you have to do is make people think 1 token is worth is x dollars.

The problem is, people think that you can apply the same logic to everything else. looks at the NFT crowd The big problem is that for legal stuff, you can't just go full digital. You need to provide a stable and workable link to "old school" legal processes for your crypto stuff to be valid.

For example NFTs could have been useful, if they were backed by a real contract system. The price that they were going for, it would have been simple, if it wasn't money laundering. Allowing quick and simple exchanging of digital content regardless of country of origin is a really useful tool.

sure in 20 years, it might be as simple as something like a signed database update, but we've got to do the work to get there first.

And every post is short, to the point and links it sources at the end.

I find this really refreshing in contrast to the avalanche of SEO optimized "Let's start with the history of money in 6000 BC" spam.

This respects both our, mine and her, limited lifetimes.

Look at the amount of work she puts into SEO and her own Wikipedia page. She's a Wikipedia editor that edits her own page. Can't get more self-absorbed than that.

It often feels like it's just "number go higher" gambling, à la 1987 stock "investing".

I leveraged $200 to $650 in BTC a couple of years back and quit to buy a Pixel 1. It felt like gambling. Never going back.

1) digital signatures to enable transactions without exposing secrets like credit card or account numbers

2) block chains to ensure the integrity of the entire system

These are both critical for moving to a sound monetary system that does not rely on trusting institutions that operate in a legacy paradigm.

You can't actually talk about the project, because once it gets too big it's just a farm for speculators. The devs don't give a shit because their project getting buzz boosts their coin's value, but it also means the project itself stops mattering.

robber barons 2.0

When they lose money, it's all a scam, they were cheated, someone fooled them.

I don't know why we, as a society, listen to whining like this. But people lap it up. We should just require a big red disclaimer saying "your money is at risk" and let people do what they want (and I'd do the same for shares and bonds and gold and anything else really).

What the skeptics fail to realize is that they often occupy just as much, if not more of a ‘team mindset’ than those engaging in the space. Their skepticism becomes more like the failed D.A.R.E. program to reduce adolescent drug use by exaggerating the virtues of abstinence and the worst case scenarios. And ironically, they can’t even articulate the worst parts, because they never engaged enough to have a deep understanding.

If you really want to find the deep dark secrets of crypto, no group will do it better than devout followers or developers of competing projects. I have read far more useful takedowns and warnings from people heavily engaged with and passionate about crypto currencies than the cynics are even capable of.

You can, but in most cases society tries to protect the naive from being defrauded by such things. We regulate what sort of things can be offered. Ponzis and Pyramids are generally verboten. As is, generally, fraudulent selling practice like advertising insured investments where they are not insured, or (for instance) selling land for development where there are government restrictions on that sort of development, those sorts of things.

People are taken in by all sorts of shonky schemes, and yes, often they should know better. But that doesn't mean that we don't try to prevent them, or that the people running these schemes should escape blame.

So you must believe her a lot, given that she is a senior software engineer that dedicates a large part of her time to cryptocurrencies.

Nobody would compare a heavily constrained MySQL and the Internet, why it is any different for blockchain? It's at most that, a (bad) piece of software that allows you to store data in a convoluted way.

It's not a business, not a business model, not a revenue source, it's a piece of technology.

Not only is it not always possible (what if the blockchain states that a certain house belongs to X, but Y is currently living in it - do you have the legal authority and/or a team of goons to forcibly kick out the current occupier?), but it throws away most of the advantages of using a blockchain if a centralized entity is ultimately responsible for applying (or not applying) the blockchain's wishes.

At that point, why not just run a database, thus no longer being a "crypto" project.

There are legitimate businesses that can be done all on-chain but I find the space to be very tiny. There's only so much people can do entirely on-chain (as most business, not to mention people, live in the real world). Even something like sports betting would require an oracle to feed real-world sports results into the blockchain for the betting smart contract to do its work, at which point the oracle can just run the betting site directly (and publish data augmented by Merkle trees if transparency is desired).