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Comment by rubyist5eva | Hacker News Reader

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Crypto currencies are the only part of blockchain/crypto/web3 that's actually not a scam. They do work if you treat them as a means of transmitting money, although they do make many trade-offs to be trustless, private and censorship resistant which means that in practice they are an inferior alternative to fiat currencies & traditional finance if you have the option to use those, so the only legitimate use that remains is either grey area/unlawful transactions or legal transactions in locations where traditional payment rails do not exist or are outdated.

The problem is all the "utility" tokens and other bullshit in the crypto/web3 space. None of that is required to operate a legitimate business in the real world, should there be an actual, sustainable business behind it. But the truth is that there's no business and the whole crypto/blockchain/web3 concept is used as a smokescreen to conceal that fact and be able to make off with the gains of the underlying Ponzi or pump & dump.

Bitcoin supports something like 7 transactions per second on the blockchain. That’s globally.

If currencies are the only part of blockchain that isn’t a scam, they really suck at the thing they’re supposed to be good at.

> although they do make many trade-offs to be trustless, private and censorship resistant which means that in practice they are an inferior alternative to fiat currencies & traditional finance if you have the option to use those, so the only legitimate use that remains is either grey area/unlawful transactions or legal transactions in locations where traditional payment rails do not exist or are outdated

Is this supposed to be an argument for cryptocurrencies, because this sounds like one that shows why they are a scam.

It doesn't show they are a scam. It shows they are useless to most people because fiat does what most people need, just better.

Crypto has actual use cases, just those use cases usually revolve around not being able to trust your counter-party, access to easy laundering systems or access at all when access to fiat is denied.

This leaves you with the very healthy of set of potential users being those oppressed by nation states, criminals and adult industries and maybe some variations on these that I can't think of right now.

So not a scam, just mostly useless and when it's not useless probably attracts unwanted attention vs fiat physical cash.

>All cryptocurrencies are a scam and any supposed benefits are an illusion. Pot, meet kettle.

That's simply not true. The benefit of Monero[0] in particular is that it lets me buy drugs on DarkNet markets at a significant discount to local, legal cannabis dispensaries.

I've yet to see any other benefits, but that's certainly a benefit.

Aside from that, I couldn't agree more.

[0] https://www.getmonero.org/

Don’t forget how bitcoin helps me get my data back if I get hit with a ransomware attack!

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