Comment by louwrentius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by louwrentius | Hacker News Reader

> She said that investigators had proof that a Nexo client, who used the company’s platform to transfer cryptocurrencies, was a person officially designated as financing terrorism, but gave no further details.

All crypto is some form of crime, money laundering, evading sanctions, funding terrorism, or just a ponzi scheme, it's just different sides of the same thing.

I wish this space would totally collapse. Maybe if Tether (which is totally insolvent) collapses the whole space just dies.

That would make the world a better place.

Yes, it's true: the dollar or any other currency can be used for nefarious purposes as well, but that's why we have so much financial regulations and oversight (which should be better). And most of all, the upsides of regular currency (if you can call crypto a currency at all) is that it's the foundation of our societies.

I just want to see all crypto die in a fire. The profound negative impact crypto has had on our world with zero benefits makes me so sad.

It's not fair to say that cryptocurrency has had "zero benefits" as it's clearly being used more and more for legitimate purposes such as zero fee international money transfers and providing a more cost-effective option for merchants compared to credit cards. It is important to consider the potential benefits and drawbacks of any technology or innovation before making blanket statements about its overall impact.

There is always an on/off-ramp from/to a local currency, that wants to be paid so zero fees is not realistic.

And for most people sending money overseas isn’t a use case at all.

Crypto is a solution in search of a real problem to solve. A Rube Goldberg machine to do elaborate things with no (legal) point.

> It's not fair to say that cryptocurrency has had "zero benefits"

"Zero" is not fair only because the total sum effect has definitely been negative. Ignoring all the ponzis, frauds, scams and rugpulls, you can't discount the massive amounts of wasted energy.

> as it's clearly being used more and more for legitimate purposes such as zero fee international money transfers and providing a more cost-effective option for merchants compared to credit cards.

All of the major cryptocurrencies are pretty terrible at zero-fee money transfers, given the fact that none of them have zero fees and have laughable bandwidth. And that's not even considering on/offramp fees for turning crypto into usable money. There's very little proof to actual adoption in ecommerce, since most merchants "accepting crypto" actually accept money, there's just a middleman that does the conversion.

By this logic most large scale human suffering before crypto was created by fiat.

Most of current human suffering is still fiat.

Crypto is barely a blip in the grand scheme and I don't see how it differs from, say, gambling.

> Crypto is barely a blip in the grand scheme and I don't see how it differs from, say, gambling.

Gambling is also, almost always, a negative for society. It's why it's so heavily regulated.

No, the comment didn't say that most of the bad things were crypto, just that most of the crypto stuff was bad things.

Sadly, this level where people don't distinguish "A subset of B" from "B subset of A" is typical to all discussions related to crypto.

Dude, reading comprehension much?

I literally started 'by that logic' to underline how broken the whole initial comment was!

Do only smart people use fiat? Like... it's not even worth dissecting your reply.

To be fair, crypto was the easiest option when I ordered some stuff from Russia, so score one to it.

Which website, may I ask? Or were you literally just buying from one Russian individual.

Just a Russian individual. They were selling Russian foil magic cards, which are rare enough to warrant a premium.

do you drive a car, heat your home, or use shipped goods? that's about the same level of criminality as using bitcoin as far as i can tell.

Is Bitcoin a Ponzi? How exactly?

The only way to make money investing in Bitcoin is to convince a greater fool to buy your coins for more than you paid for them.

And that greater fool must in turn convince an even greater fool, etc, etc

It's not a Ponzi, but it has similar dynamics to a Ponzi in that you can only gain money through other people losing money.

Why does it have to be about making money? Bitcoin is a currency, not an investment. That's where a lot people get confused.

Bitcoin will never gain mass adoption as a currency, that leaves it as a "value store" - and the only people buying bitcoin are suckers buying bitcoin from others in the hope that they can in turn sell it to a bigger sucker down the line.

It's because that is the primary "use case" of Bitcoin right now as Bitcoin is even worse at being at currency than an investment.

Bad price stability, slow transactions, high fees under any amount of load, bad privacy, terrible adoption, etc, etc

The overwhelming majority of holders of Bitcoin disagree with you.

It's a garbage currency - fees are too high, transfers too slow. It's a garbage technology that encourages wanton energy wastage. Its only "value" is as an investment.

Bitcoin isn’t a ponzi scheme. no crypto is really a ponzi scheme, but a lot of them have similar characteristics. basically they’re fine while people are continuously investing in them, but once people lose interest they drop off a cliff. but then you could say that about any volatile investment

> but then you could say that about any volatile investment

Or even about modern fiat currencies. Just look at the Turkish Lira (~343% vs EUR / 5y), Argentinian Peso (~758% vs EUR / 5y) or a dozen other currencies that lost insane amounts of value over the last years [1], mostly because of political misgovernance and resulting economic devastation.

[1] https://www.goldseiten.de/kurse/devisen-topflop.php

I can't really agree with that.

Any investment is supposed to have a return that exceeds inflation or some other reasonable index, eventually in the eyes of some kind of reasonable investor.

If it doesn't meet that criteria then it is more likely a social phenomenon interchangeable with scam instead of a valid investment, i.e. a pump and dump OTC stock is an investment being involved in a scam if it has acquired actual rights or business that have a small probability of paying off significantly better than inflation that's not easy to disprove with basic research. It is a pure scam if the underlying company is only on paper or generally incapable of actually doing anything it claims because it was created or is pumped with just enough cash to continue to operate purely for the purpose of having a stock but is incapable of ever making a real profit.

Some coins may be different than what I described as a scam, but if you accept that only holding value remains as a probable use of BTC then any suggestion of it as a valid investment or holder of value is a scam.

Odds that a final crypto collapse will spill over into the real economy?

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