How is cryptocurrency any more of a scam than fiat currency, ie. digits in the computer of some private bank or central bank?
This is astonishing mental gymnastics. Take the average crypto investor and ask them how the blockchain works. Not marketing fluff: the actual steps in pseudo-code for literally any step of the process.
"The code is all there bro" is an astonishing amount of bad faith. Yeah, it is. Big deal. I've been a software developer for my entire adult life, but I don't work in cryptography, so I can't tell you a single damn thing about how blockchains work. The average investor in crypto, the influencers that peddle it, the whales that flooded the market with money? None of them understand it even slightly. I'd bet my life savings on it.
> How is cryptocurrency any more of a scam than fiat currency, ie. digits in the computer of some private bank or central bank?
A short, non-exhaustive list of differences:
- Crypto has basically zero consumer protections and makes the implementing of them extremely difficult by it's nature
- It is "anonymous" (actually pseudonymous) unless you are technically inclined enough to interact with the chain yourself, with your own software. "Normies" get to use platforms built by... somebody? Who maybe did it right? Probably. If they did it wrong though good luck getting your money back!
- Complete lack of any oversight of any regulatory body, which is a selling point, up until there actually are those, which are the large miners, stakeholders and exchanges
- Runaway deflation is not only a possibility, it is the goal of all of these projects, it's what "TO THE MOON!" means. They WANT that. After which and during their attempts to achieve it, the currency is useless as a currency because of the volatility in value.
- The system has demonstrated multiple times that all the "ownership is truly yours" rhetoric is thrown out the window when the real monied investors in the background have their assets taken from them, in a way that is not against the rules, but no worries we'll just rewrite history for them because they're rich, they can't lose or this whole scheme falls apart
People that first understand it eventually find Monero and BCH and start investing everything they can afford.
Of course idiots can be on both sides.
"If you can be exploited, you deserve to be exploited."
Not all of them. One [1] has an emission of one coin per second forever, taking a century to get yearly inflation down to 1%.
[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
> The system has demonstrated multiple times that all the "ownership is truly yours" rhetoric is thrown out the window
In ethereum that only happened once back in 2016 when the DAO was hacked. In any case you're free to use Ethereum Classic.
Anyways you listed some legitimate concerns of cryptocurrencies, but none of them imply that crypto is a scam. Nobody is forced to use crypto, and anyone purchasing crypto should obviously do their own research and evaluate whether it makes sense for them. Crypto has legitimate use cases (eg. for people in countries with oppressive currency regimes) and many find it work the risks.
Literally the entire basis of free market ideology is the notion that buyers and sellers operate on an equal footing and a presumption of good faith can be assumed, or at least, that's how it's been sold historically. So, so much of crypto is just outright lies. The notion that every member of a project, for instance, can all walk away rich is at face value a lie: because crypto cannot create wealth, merely move it, the people who cash out big on top can only do that because so many others have bought in on the bottom. It's just a techy retooling of a bigger fool's scam: you can only make money on the asset you've bought by finding a buyer to buy it at a higher price later. The only way you can conceptualize these things as a store of value is to presume an infinite chain of bigger fools ready to buy it at an ever increasing price, ad infinitum. Or, if you prefer to operate in reality, there will eventually be a bag holder, someone who holds something that is now worthless and cannot sell it.
Like, for example, all the people who hold Ethereum Classic, which is probably why it's worth a tenth what Ethereum is: because the principles of this technology don't fucking matter, what matters is the traction the coin has with the investor class, and the people who are in this to make money (which is the vast, vast majority of them) are going to follow the chains that the big stakeholders go to.
> Again, a scam implies someone being "misled". If you buy some ecstasy and its laced with fentanyl, you were scammed (to say the least). If you buy ecstasy and you get ecstasy, you were not scammed as you got exactly what you asked for.
And this again is exactly the attitude I absolutely loathe in the tech space. This notion that if you aren't smart enough or knowledgeable enough to see the bad shit coming, if you, by your very basic human nature can be taken advantage of by someone who knows more, than you apparently deserve to be. Buyer beware.
That attitude sucks ass. If the crypto guys were really about changing the world for the better, they would be building a financial system that is, yes, detached from the current, highly biased and corrupting one that is rife with problems, and on-boarding people with education. With understanding of the underlying tech, imparting knowledge about the failings and foibles of the systems they're replacing, and showing a new, better version, decoupled from the corrupting influences of governments they claim render fiat unusable. That's NOT what they've done here. They have not built a replacement financial system, they built a near exact copy of the current one, minus all manner of consumer protections, any insurance of value, with a singular goal: to recreate the structural inequities of the old system, with them on top. That's fucking it. That is the entire difference between fiat and crypto.
It's scam in that you're being enticed to mislead yourself.
You're ignoring the obvious difference between "legal tender" and electrons. Most children understand that "monopoly money" isn't real "legal tender" --- but you don't?
Those running the crypto "marketplace" don't suffer from these sort of delusions.
That doesn't even make sense.
> Most children understand that "monopoly money" isn't real "legal tender" --- but you don't?
No one is claiming that cryptocurrencies are legal tender (outside of countries like El Salvador that made it so)
Neither does surrendering "legal tender" for money that is not.
This comment being repeated half a dozen times does not make it true or productive to conversation.
It's like the reverse of that famous HN post when Dropbox was announced and the top comment was that this probably won't work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Just empty attacks and idiots.
Cryptocurrencies increase in value as more people use them, but they don't fall to zero as a result of becoming widespread, because their sole value isn't for speculation. They can also be used as a currency.
Now, some of these valuations have built into them the assumption that their use as a currency will ultimately become widespread, because otherwise they would be worth a lot less than they are. But less isn't the same as zero, and volatility doesn't matter if you are using it as a currency because then you're not holding enough of it for a long enough period of time to be exposed to a major change in value.
With a MLM scam the value doesn't just have volatility, when you run out of suckers the value crashes to zero forever. With cryptocurrency the speculators can lose their shirts and at the end of the day you can still buy Bitcoin with cash and then use it to pay for a VPN.
It's the suckers whose "investment" in one of these things goes to zero, which happens all the time.
There are cryptocurrencies that go to zero, but there are also government currencies that go to zero. They go to zero when people stop using them as a currency, not when they become so widespread that you've saturated the market for suckers.
That isn't a scam, it's a gamble. It's the same as going to a brokerage and selling short, or buying a piece of land sight unseen. They are not allowed to lie to you. You are allowed to be an idiot and lose all your money.