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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

How do you tell a scam coin from a non scam one? It's like a cult vs a religion, as far as I can tell the only difference is popularity.

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In cases like this it is really easy to tell since the whole thing appears to have been some exchange website where you traded dollars for the supposed crypto coin but there was no way of taking those coins out (because the blockchain and coin didnt exist in the first place). In a sense it really wasn't an actual crypto scam, but a traditional ponzi scheme marketing itself with crypto buzzwords.

Not even a traditional ponzi scheme, that would be using new funds to pay returns to older marks. I can't figure out if just taking people's money and telling them it's going up but refusing to give it back has a name or if it's just, you know, lying.

Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely.

https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html

The difference between a cult and a religion is this: a cult wants it all but a religion just wants their cut.

I’ve heard it phrased differently: the difference between a religion and a cult is that in a religion the person at the top of the pyramid making the most money is dead.

Bruh. It’s 2024. Can we stop assuming only religion on the face of earth is Christianity?

Muhammad and Siddharta are dead too.

Muslims would be pretty firm that Mo was just a prophet. They're worshipping God, not this prophet bloke. The Christians have this neat hack where their prophet guy literally was God. If you haven't grown up with it, the logic of Trinitarianism is completely batshit but if you grew up around Christians it just seems normal. An Iranian friend was astonishing that Unitarianism wasn't the default because it seemed less crazy.

Now, we do say "God is dead" but by that we don't mean in the sense that "Mohammed is dead" or "Elvis is dead" or "Margaret Thatcher is dead". We're talking about the idea, and so that's rejected by the Faithful.

Please do note that not all Christians believe in the trinity. It’s mainstream, but far from universal. As an example, I am a Christadelphian, and we refute the doctrine of the trinity, as it simply doesn’t appear in the Bible, and is indeed well documented as having been developed from roughly 100–325 AD.

> Muslims would be pretty firm that Mo was just a prophet.

Nobody said that "the guy at the top of the pyramid making most of the money" is supposed to be god.

Doesn't matter anyway, y'all are taking a joke way too seriously.

But our prophet Muhammad pbuh doesn’t make money. There is no tax or obligatory donation in an Islamic state. Every wealthy Muslim is required to find a poor person and give 1/40 of their wealth to them every year, and we do this ourselves where I am. No authority is involved.

Despite not really wanting to go into a historic or theological debate, I can't help but notice that the guy went on to be an actual king of sorts - so there definitely was something in it for him, at the time.

I do agree that, overall, the formal structure of Islamic clerical organisations looks somewhat more horizontal (look ma, no pope!), and precepts towards charity look more stringent than the average "try to be good" message of other religions; but it's hard to deny that there are - and were - a lot of very temporal benefits accruing towards people of power under Islamic rule. Some rulers even derive their legitimacy from dynastic relationships to the prophet - that's worth a lot of money...

No one denies our prophet pbuh was the ruler of the Islamic state. As are the caliphates after him. It’s Christianity which has no doctrine regarding governance of people, or modern Christians who have weird ideas like religion should not be involved in governance. Someone needs to rule and spread the religion through territorial expansion, as it is the only way people can be saved. Say what you like, but it’s coherent.

The different between a cult and a religion is whether the main character is dead yet.

Part of the problem is that there is a huge space where something can be: A) Designed and deployed in good faith (not designed as an actively bad-faith fraud) B) Still is an extremely risky investment C) While there can still be participants (not necessarily the proginators), who operate in bad faith to exploit the shortcomings of a good-faith design

Figuring out which is which while avoiding getting rekt is not easy, but can be done.

Some scam coins are reasonably obvious if you look at the technical details: things like the code allowing the founders access to large pools of funds that they claim they don't have access to. Obviously it's possible to obfuscate or even run a scam-coin without this, but many of the largest rug-pulls have been pretty blatent in this regard.

It's genuinely a difficult question because there are projects that have the exact same technical designs that are still legitimate projects. So how do you evaluate this? From my perspective it used to easier. I'd just look at the problems that the company was focusing on and ask: (1) are they solving a real issue (2) are they making a valid contribution with their solution?

Normally both 1 and 2 would be eliminated as projects tried to intentionally use buzzwords to confuse investors into thinking they were doing something cool. They would write papers that mentioned nothing specific and you would sometimes come away thinking: 'what the fug are you even building' or often 'this exists already so what is your take on it?' The latter of which is hard to deny because many tokens, ICOs, blockchains really don't need to exist. Technically you could have argued that Ethereum didn't need to make a new blockchain because a third-party system could have been made that added smart contract logic on top of Bitcoin like a soft fork. This would have been similar to master coin.

I'd say that the quality of the people around a project can tell you a lot. Often scammers use impressive sounding publicists to make them seem like they're successful entrepreneurs. But when you dig deeper its all just paid shilling.

By that standard dogecoin is a scam.

Isn’t that the point of dogecoin? A literal parody?

A parody isn't a scam.

A well-done parody would look much like a scam without digging into it and recognizing it as a parody.

It's a parody of a scam wherein you actually lose your money. It's a scam with a winky-face emoji.

I think it is.

By my standards everything including bitcoin is... They do not provide any meaningful solution. Or their value proposition is not real.

Maybe some might offer a valid case like anonymity, but very limited pool.

Dogecoin does do something different - it has ongoing tail inflation. Whether that is a good idea or not is debatable. But it does operate differently then btc.

Bitcoin

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