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Comment by sertbdfgbnfgsd | Hacker News Reader

I've been saying this from day 1, and here it goes again: 99% of the people involved in crypto is a scumbag. And every day that goes by evidence accumulates in my favor.

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In practice there are only a handful of reasons people actually get into crypto:

  1. Speculation
  2. Purchasing illicit items/services
  3. Payment for ransom
  4. Money laundering
  5. Tax evasion
  6. Ideological

All of the other reasons barely register. One thing you may note about the list is how many are crimes or are crime adjacent. Even the honest speculators are living in a world that promises unreasonably high returns funded by the criminal activities of the rest of the items. You're probably saying "but ideological reasons doesn't necessary mean crimes", but when you ask them what those ideological reasons are they pretty much always boil down to not paying taxes or evading law enforcement for reasons they don't want to explicitly state.

To elaborate further on the ideological angle:

I've seen folks mention that it's about "the future" in a hand-wavy, abstract, nebulous sense. But their actions demonstrate profiteering, opportunism, and the greater-fool theory in action. Basically, for me, it seemed like all the ideology was intellectual cover (aka rationalizing) for plain ole greed, so they don't have to admit to themselves and others that it has nothing to do with the betterment of humanity and the future, and they just want to get rich quickly. To call it greed would be somewhat unbecoming, and the ideological arguments sounded good enough to assuage any psychological conflicts in oneself.

Might not be a generous interpretation, but if the ideology were indeed at the core of it, I feel like other areas of their lives would reflect said ideologies.

For the record, greed was at the core of my own interest in crypto when I was looking into it, so I could be projecting. Or it could be that said people and myself both experienced this as the driving force behind our interest in crypto as laymen.

I think there is a strong technological interest in crypto, Bitcoin kicked off a triple-entry bookkeeping system so there is a new tech interest and ability to make money in a new financial space, many good communities have arisen out of that.

There is many tech communities buzzing with blockchain related tech and some serious innovation, a lot of interesting new projects from lower cost faster international transactions through to distributed GPU rendering, identity systems, and the possibilities with NFT's have barely got started.

It's also a new asset class for investors with ETF's from BlackRock etc round the corner its evident it's a now a rapidly maturing space, what's happened with Binance is evident that regulation is starting to catch up, but its regulation being so slow and indecisive that has made it easy pickings for illegal activity to occur.

I think that there are a lot of legitimate reasons to work on developing new distributed ledger tech. There are interesting potential use cases. However, I do think that pessimistic list applies to most people who are currently investing a substantial amount of their wealth into crypto. Whatever the potential for the technology, most of the current use isn't great.

This is so cynical it's hilarious. Why is ideological mentioned last? Most people I know who are into crypto (and I know a lot) are into it because they believe in economically sound, censorship resistant currency.

One of my favorite responses to this...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410

Learn about Gresham's law, and the reasons gold became valuable (clue: it's not because it's shiny)

I think you are largely correct but I don't think it was always this way.

When I first heard about Bitcoin the price had just hit $5 and everyone was either a hardcore libertarian or they thought the idea of a digital currency was very scifi and exciting. I fell into the latter camp and became increasingly disinterested as the years progressed despite making really good money off a brief mining stint.

I'll take the other side of this argument and point out: it probably took decades if not centuries to start using paper currency. Will crypto fail? Maybe. But to say that people building an alternate currency to the one we currently have are "scumbag" is a bit much. They are building a financial system that we might one day decide is better than what we currently have available to us. Sure, some are opportunistic bad-actors, but 99%? I don't think thats fair.

Imagine how scammed the first people who had to accept paper instead of gold felt.

The first people to accept paper were almost certainly scammed. That's because the thing was totally unregulated in its first hundreds of years of use.

I think first paper money appeared in China, and was government issued.

Wikipedia has a quote ostensibly from Marco Polo where he discusses this peculiarity of people accepting paper as if it was a golden coin.

finally, i can be in the 1%

And each one of them is moving over into ai.

Right back atcha pal. Crypto trades full transparency for full autonomy. It's hell for authoritarian regimes and corrupt middlemen both. 99% of people against crypto benefit from one of those two.

I'm confident that I personally know more than 1% of the engineers who contribute to production crypto codebases, and I have to say, I've not met the cohort you describe.

Every ethereum event is filled with the most tolerant, peaceful, healthy, hopeful, lovely, hard-working people.

I love playing these events, because the crowds are always so warm and enthusiastic and so apt so break into sing-along. :-)

Where are all these scumbags?

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