Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

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It's because you can transfer money without paying fees, those fees are for convenience. You can not transfer crypto without paying fees.

Also, notably most banks will do SEPA transfers for free. There's nothing inherent in money which would make the action of moving it force giving a fraction of it to some other entity.

Indeed, the only disagreement I am aware of is whether the scam being run by multiple entities ("miners") is a significant difference to a Ponzi and so it's a new kind of scam (suggested name: "Nakamoto scheme") or the difference is aking to an LCD vs CRT TV, nothing significant and it's just a Ponzi. But the fact it is a scam is an indisputable and rather simple mathematical fact.

To quote Preston Byrne who coined the phrase Nakamoto scheme:

> The Nakamoto Scheme is an automated hybrid of a Ponzi scheme and a pyramid scheme which has, from the perspective of operating a criminal enterprise, the strengths of both and (currently) the weaknesses of neither.

Someone clearly has to pay to keep to SEPA infrastructure going, be it the banks crosssubsizing from profit on lending or taxes funding organisations in EU level.

Crypto fees are just much more straightforward. You pay a small amount to use the network and there are no strings attached, no hidden subsidy. In theory at least that is because most networks are still funded by inflationary payouts. But no one is forcing you to hold anything more than you need to pay for fees in the crypto currency at any moment in time.

Just like with most things crypto has been widely oversold and 99% of coins are basically scammy penny stocks. No one disputes this. But as someone who has moved internationally quite a bit I would LOVE for all my ETFs and bank accounts to live on an open Blockchain so I don't have to worry about migrating everything when I move to a new country. Even if I don't fully custody them, moving USDC through Ethereum or Solana is just 100x better than any international wire transfer. Stocks are basically stuck in whatever country you bought them in, I don't even want to know how difficult it would be to move my depot from one country to another. You'd have to sell everything.

>so I don't have to worry about migrating everything when I move to a new country.

Not sure what you mean. It's not significantly more difficult that it would be (and maybe easier) to be constantly transferring blockchain assets to local currencies/equities etc. ACATS makes the process pretty straightforward and handles most common financial instruments like stocks, cash, bonds, ETF's, and more. Then you're done, your entire portfolio transferred in a few days. Just choose a good brokerage firm in the first place: ACATS participation should be a prime criteria if you might move country at any point, ever.

Similarly, USDC/Ehtereum/Solana only seem superior to a wire transfer until you have to use them in a local economy. Then converting them to something compatible with the local economy isn't significantly better.

If you're imagining a future where local economies accept these things directly then I think that future is, at best, possible but mostly theoretical at this point. Crypto is not a major threat to sovereign-dictated monetary policy at the moment, and I suspect that the second it appears it might be then there will be rapid action to cut off that potential.

I don't see a way that crypto can bootstrap fast enough around such things when a government can, pretty much overnight, make every business own and retail cashier who accepts a crypto payment into a criminal if they so choose. Gray and black markets might still prosper, but it would make any vision of mainstream use, much less institutional use for things like inter-country investment portfolio transfers completely impossible.

You said:

> But the fact it is a scam is an indisputable and rather simple mathematical fact.

And:

> negative sum games and thus are scams

I don't think you know what the word "scam" means.

Merriam Webster defines it as "a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation". I don't think either Satoshi or Vitalik did anything deceptive or fraudulent.

Whether or not something is a scam is not a matter of "simple mathematical fact", but rather of intent.

Whether the operators of mining farms have mens rea is a matter for criminal courts. No one tried to sue them yet, perhaps no one will. Perhaps some aspiring DA will try. Who knows.

That doesn't change the fact they run the scam.

I wrote this up before but here it comes: if there's an empty room and a few people come, play a few rounds of a card game and then leave and the room is empty then it is obvious the sum of their money couldn't change. Some won, some lost but the sum is the same. This is called a zero sum game. If they decide to use plastic chips during the game and only use real money in the beginning and the end, nothing has changed.

However, if someone takes a cut every time the chips are being moved around then that person is guaranteed to win and the players in total are guaranteed to lose and a game where we know who wins without knowing anything about the game is quite obviously a scam.

Your only way to win is to hype up the game and sell your chips to an outsider who will now sit on an even bigger loss. Might not be realized yet but it is there.

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