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