Fractional reserve banking is also a scam.
Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
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Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#22What about your work makes it scam? The lack of business utility? I've seen some communities have fun with NFTs like trading cards. I am not defending crypto, but I am curious how to better define scam as it relates to the hundreds for crypto proposals.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#23Frankly, this is the wrong audience. While, I love HN for technical advice and learning about new technologies and startup companies the vast majority of HN comments on finance and investing are flat out cynical, wrong, and the opposite of what I've done. There is a potent anti-capitalist sway to HN that misses the point about how to accumulate wealth. I'll be the first to admit, I lean fiscally conservative, and I get HN is not that, but as Warren Buffet famously says some people are just bad at money and finance.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#24Would you let your parents or grandparents invest their life savings in whatever you’re doing? Or in any crypto “asset?” If the answer is no it’s probably a scam. I wouldn’t try to sell junk bonds or penny stocks or Beanie Baby futures to my parents either, but the obvious fact that scams exist independent of crypto doesn’t make crypto any more credible.
Even if I had a 'legit' startup, I would not let my parents or grandparents invest their life savings into it. Startups are not for retail investor's retirement funds.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#25I don't work in the cryptocurrency space, but I've been following it since close to the beginning, and my personal conclusion is that yes, the vast majority of what gets peddled today is a scam, and we desperately need to find a way to nuke it all from orbit.
Reposting one of my earlier comments [0]:
Like many people back then, I also found the whole proof-of-work / blockchain concept to be interesting from a theoretical computer science / distributed systems perspective.
But these days, I can't help but think that we've inadvertently created a paperclip maximizer without even bothering to create an AGI first. Humans are the AGI, and we're going to happily use more and more energy to play this stupid game for as long as it looks like there's a profit to be made, even if the global outcome is to our own detriment.
If we want this mess to go away, we need to find a way to change the incentives globally.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#26You’re asking this on HN so are likely to get 95% of people agreeing with you from confirmation bias alone. Median HN hates cryptocurrency.
I’d probably suggest this: https://www.matthuang.com/bitcoin_for_the_open_minded_skepti...
I think it’s not “all a scam”, but there are definitely scammers in the community which add a lot of noise to what’s a pretty cool new capability to handle decentralized state.
https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/
I don’t know if what your startup is building is worthless, but the tech underlying the domain is not.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#27Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#28The ting is, money is all a scam. This is just new money. So what else do your work friends / bosses do? Are they into hookers and crack? Or do they help out in the soup kitchen on weekends and read to their grandmothers?
That's the elephant in the room that everyone is ignoring - the entire financial system is a scam. It's rigged in favor of the ruling class, which is why cryptocurrency originally became popular. The difference is that most cryptocurrency schemes are a different kind of scam - one of trickery rather than abject domination, and something you can avoid if you understand enough about how it works. Something that can't b…
The counter point (whether you believe it or not) is that the existing financial system also has benefits over any other political/economic system of resource distribution.
Crypto doesn't have that upside at this time I don't think.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#29It's one of the "out of question" questions As, of course, it's outright yes Cryptocurrency is one of the looniest forceful actions and movements by the elite Americans cabal, strongly tightly rooted so longtime ago to New World Order
I’m sure someone said the same thing about paper money when it first came out. You still remember older generations crying that would should go back in the gold standard for US currency/
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#30Would you let your parents or grandparents invest their life savings in whatever you’re doing? Or in any crypto “asset?” If the answer is no it’s probably a scam. I wouldn’t try to sell junk bonds or penny stocks or Beanie Baby futures to my parents either, but the obvious fact that scams exist independent of crypto doesn’t make crypto any more credible.
I think I get your point, but for clarity, I wouldn't have wanted my parents investing in startups I've worked at, or in my current startup, even though those are not scams - they are just high risk and suited only to a certain profile. "Crypto" is different because it's a scam - the potential return is undefined in a sense, because it's based on the greater fool theory and how long the scam can keep up rather than any connection to fundamentals (even the dodgy fundamentals that drive the current startup market). A risky investment is one thing, a exploitive scam is a very different proposition