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Comment by nebulous1 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand people trying to defend absurd positions like this. What's even the point? It doesn't seem like it's necessary for this to be true if you want to argue that crypto "should" be eliminated, all you need to do is argue that it's decisively more bad than good. When somebody makes weak arguments like this I'm just going to ignore their thoughts in the future because they've demonstrated that they have faulty reasoning.

Crypto is awash in scams. On top of the scams you have people who are not intentionally scamming but are misguided and will end up doing harm to others and/or themselves. On top of that there is crypto that could genuinely work under certain circumstances (ie have a use-case that provides value to its users without significantly adversely affecting others).

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Crypto takedowns are basically what this guy does. [0] Just like you have the religious crypto evangelists, you have the religious anti-crypto people. This is about feelings, not reason so that's why the arguments tend to be a bit far-fetched/weak. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=stephendiehl.com

> On top of that there is crypto that could genuinely work under certain circumstances (ie have a use-case that provides value to its users without significantly adversely affecting others).

To me personally, this is the biggest lie there is about crypto/ blockchain. To this day no application has been identified that could not be better solved with existing tech.

The whole crypto space seems to be a solution in search of a legitimate problem to solve. (Plenty of illegitimate use cases sure)

Let’s not hand wave: Can you actually spell out the use-cases that provide value to its users without significantly adversely affecting others?

The trouble with crypto is most of the use-cases it claims to solve, either aren’t solved, or they’re often better solved with more efficient and time-tested solutions.

So, let’s get specific and jump into the technical details of specific use cases.

What use-cases does crypto solve?

Let's say I wanted to order weed, or lab tested LSD, MDMA or whatever from the internet and from a reputable seller. Can you show me how I'd do that with USD?

(It feels weird to defend crypto as I've always been extremely dismissive of the entire tech/community but again, the GP is right. You don't have to make absurd arguments, like that all crypto is just being used for scams or that it has absolutely 0 use, to make a coherent anti crypto argument.)

"could genuinely work under certain circumstances"

Ok I will be that guy. Not trolling. But after more than a decade, isn't it clear that crypto as a whole has failed to live upto the promise. The idea of decentralization is awesome but doesn't work in practice especially for payments.

I am not necessarily dismissive of crypto but increasingly, it is becoming difficult to see any real practical applications. Almost everything around it is a Scam.

Ransomware was made possible by crypto so.. uhm.. there's that.

Ransomware has been happening long before [1] crypto existed. Maybe a similar, but also ridiculous, statement would be:

> Ransomware was made possible by computers so.. uhm.. there's that.

1. https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/ransomware/his....

Seems I hit a sore spot to provoke such a pedantic reply.

Obviously the cryptography was not enabled by crypto currencies, but the possibility to accept ransom payments at scale with little risk. Are you going to argue that crypto didn't facilitate the absolute boom in ransomware we've seen the past few years? The article you link says it did.

Paradoxically, extreme positions like this implicitly argue in favor of crypto because they attack a strawman that is far more useless and bad than crypto, so you walk away feeling like crypto is actually kind of useful and good.

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