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Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

stephendiehl.com

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Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#221

Post by espadrine »

atdrummond wrote: post #179

Be grateful you live in the EU or the US and don’t need crypto. It has been a major lifeline for my family and friends in Lebanon and Venezuela, both of which lack fully functioning financial services. I can send Bitcoin just fine though!

Out of curiosity, could you describe the last-mile experience for those remittances? Once they receive it in their wallet, can they easily spend it at local merchants, or do they need to convert it to an account in the local currency? If the latter, what prevents the account’s bank from receiving a transfer?

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#222

Post by tromp »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #173
mabbo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The killer app for crypto is "KYC-less" which usually means "I can evade taxes or sell illicit goods". Otherwise, real money is faster, more scalable, and more resilient to users making mistakes. Nothing I do is illegal; I pay my taxes; sometimes I make mistakes. Why would I ever want to use crypto over real money?

Have you ever paid for anything substantial with real money? It's a huge pain in the ass. I have to go into a bank, even during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have to pay outrageous fees to transfer money & participate in something called a "wire". Where my money will simply be magically transferred to another party somehow. There are a zillion steps, none of which are disclosed to me. It should work fine, bu…

> There are a zillion steps, none of which are disclosed to me. It should work fine, but it is also takes an indeterminate amount of time.

Curiously, this also describes the process of mining the next block in a PoW blockchain...

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#223

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

valdiorn wrote: post #27

Crypto absolutely has value, and the price of Bitcoin will never go to zero. NFTs are useful. That's because the value these things provide is money-laundering, bypassing of international financial regulations and tax fraud. Yeah that's a superb value proposition right there, and definitely something we want to keep free and available /s The current system is flawed in many, many ways, but none of it happened arbitra…

Financial regulations differ. For example, in a certain country at this very time, transferring money for another country's defense fund is punishable by 20 years of hard labor in very very cold places. The system where governments have complete control over money transfers is only a few decades old. Before that, people actually had some freedom in how they spend their money.

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#224

Post by steego »

nebulous1 wrote: post #78

I don't really understand people trying to defend absurd positions like this. What's even the point? It doesn't seem like it's necessary for this to be true if you want to argue that crypto "should" be eliminated, all you need to do is argue that it's decisively more bad than good. When somebody makes weak arguments like this I'm just going to ignore their thoughts in the future because they've demonstrated that they…

Let’s not hand wave: Can you actually spell out the use-cases that provide value to its users without significantly adversely affecting others?

The trouble with crypto is most of the use-cases it claims to solve, either aren’t solved, or they’re often better solved with more efficient and time-tested solutions.

So, let’s get specific and jump into the technical details of specific use cases.

What use-cases does crypto solve?

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#225

Post by bayesian_horse »

In my opinion this is not quite true, because there's a basic form of "investment" scheme going on. People exchange value (money, energy) for some kind of token, expecting to get some value back. They may actually be satisfied with getting only a fraction back in many cases (money laundering...).

Cryptocurrencies do have some non-scam value because they fulfill the technical end of such a belief based value store. Don't get me wrong. Plenty of scams in that business...

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#226

Post by Veen »

ShowalkKama wrote: post #16

I'd like to remind the readers that some people use crypto as a payment method and do not speculate. As far as I know there is no alternative with the same level of convinience that crypto provide (KYC-less and fast payments to anyone in the world with just one secret). Remember that next time you suggest something among the lines of "crypto should be made illegal".

But most cryptocurrencies are terrible for payments because they are so volatile. The ones that are useful for payments are stablecoins, which are scams in a different way—when Tether falls a lot people are going to lose their shirts.

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#227

Post by gloosx »

I disagree with this, it seems to me that if you follow author's logic you can call US dollar scam too - a lot of it's value is same thin air called "debt"?. The problem with argumentation and particulary with church comparison is that in order for something to be called scam, as per definition provided in the article, someone must be there who planned it, who gets all the profits. But crypto has no central entity, no final scammer, there are just programmatic rules - and crystal transparency, everyone is free to do whatever fits in this paradigm, and this is future of currency

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#228

Post by bayesian_horse »

leeroyjenkins11 wrote: post #26

I just want currency that won't be arbitrarily inflated, is digital that some group of people can't control my spending. I just want something that is a unit of value that I can trade for things I want. And it doesn't need to be traced either, I don't want the government to know how much I spend on steak.

Many government-backed currencies have been less volatile than bitcoin.

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#229

Post by codegeek »

nebulous1 wrote: post #78

I don't really understand people trying to defend absurd positions like this. What's even the point? It doesn't seem like it's necessary for this to be true if you want to argue that crypto "should" be eliminated, all you need to do is argue that it's decisively more bad than good. When somebody makes weak arguments like this I'm just going to ignore their thoughts in the future because they've demonstrated that they…

"could genuinely work under certain circumstances"

Ok I will be that guy. Not trolling. But after more than a decade, isn't it clear that crypto as a whole has failed to live upto the promise. The idea of decentralization is awesome but doesn't work in practice especially for payments.

I am not necessarily dismissive of crypto but increasingly, it is becoming difficult to see any real practical applications. Almost everything around it is a Scam.

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#230

Post by louwrentius »

capableweb wrote: post #205
louwrentius wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not really a vindication of crypto, it’s just an extra condemnation of what is happening in Lebanon and Venezuela. And although it may help individuals it is not a sustainable solution to the issues in those countries. 99.99% of crypto is unsustainable speculation on a game of musical chairs or outright scams / ransomware. If you look at the entire picture, crypto has such a negative impact on this world. It…

> although it may help individuals it is not a sustainable solution to the issues in those countries Sometimes what you need are not "sustainable solutions", that's something you can afford when you are not struggling daily just to stay alive. Sometimes you just need something that solves the problem right now, damned by "sustainability". Just like most people in poverty don't give a fuck about climate change, there…

If people in countries like Libanon or Venezuela have to survive by “dumping a barrel of oil each day in the ocean”, and this is basically the only “legitimate” use case for “oil” this is clearly not a vindication for the existence of oil.

It’s just all bad, there is no justification for “oil” to exist.

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