Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

stephendiehl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 396 posts

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#261

Post by 411111111111111 »

rvz wrote: post #235
nic_wilson wrote: post #181

It may have already been noted elsewhere but it seems important to note that the author was (is?) the CTO of private blockchain start up and choosing to not disclose this in any of his crypto criticism seems very dishonest https://twitter.com/dystopiabreaker/status/14701269278180679...

I guess it would be embarrassing for him to admit that he tried to compete against Ethereum after Cardano destroyed his private blockchain startup. Stephen Diehl is also no better than the crypto maximalists with his extreme absolutism. You won't see him debate and test his arguments with a balanced panel discussion so that you can easily see how extreme his arguments are. He has a book to sell and is full time, 24/7…

> Not all cryptocurrencies, tokens will survive, but only a select few of them and their technologies will still be around to be used under regulations.

No chance in hell. The only sustained market this technology has are illegal transactions/black market.

To begin with: a regulated Blockchain is an oxymoron. The technology ceases to have any meaning if the government has the ability to regulate the chain. They'd be able be more effective with regular acid databases and certificates for the web of trust, like they've been doing for a very long time now. You be combining the downsides of Blockchain with the downsides of traditional banking, gaining only the weaknesses of both.

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#262

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

j16sdiz wrote: post #108
psychlops wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> E.g. China rolled out the the e-yuan currency last year. Not a decentralized blockchain but it obviously incorporates some of the technology. Other countries are doing similar things. Governments will do it as they need a regional monopoly on their fiat scam. The new centralization and financial tracking are features.

Fiat money is protected by the government, military, etc... with gun and power. What is policing crypto?

What was policing money (gold and silver) for all those thousands of years before the fiat scam?

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#263

Post by amelius »

shagymoe wrote: post #241
amelius wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto is also a gift from heaven for ransomware operators.

This is a similar argument to "We need to ban encryption to protect children."

Meh, you can justify any use of technology that way. What matters in the end is how the pros and cons are weighed by society.

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#264

Post by birracerveza »

ur-whale wrote: post #251
birracerveza wrote: post #66

Then don't buy it. If it's a scam it will go to zero and be forgotten as it does not have any fundamental value, as you say. If it does have fundamental value, then it's not a scam. What a stupid hyperbole. What's the point of making yet another article blasting it with the same old tired arguments that have been continuously repeated ad nauseam for the last 12 years or so? I'm honestly surprised the article does not…

> Then don't buy it. Ah, but then what would he apply his savior complex to? There's only so many "worthy" causes in the world, and the market for self-righteous do-gooders is a very crowded one.

It's weird. As I noted in another comment, he's extremely vocal against crypto... yet he worked on it and apparently got destroyed by it. It's not savior complex, it's just sour grapes.

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#265

Post by leesalminen »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #255
leesalminen wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Lightning Network is being used to send BTC with instant confirmation & near zero fees. I just used it to pay someone from a US bank account to a Costa Rican bank account. $1000 payment, it reached their bank account in 12 seconds (we counted) and we paid a total of $1.80 in total fees (18 basis points). I can’t think of a faster or cheaper way to pay internationally. On the US side, I used the Strike app so my b…

What part of this is enhanced by involving BTC, as opposed to just being an unlicensed money transmitter?

BTC enhanced the transaction because it's a bearer instrument, not a promise of future settlement. This reduces the cost to process a transaction & increases the speed of settlement.

Strike [0] has money transmitter licenses in every state in the US (except NY?).

Ridivi [1] has a money transmitter license in Costa Rica.

[0] https://strike.me/legal/licenses/

[1] https://www.ridivi.com/_files/ugd/0ce37b_fbf83bcbfa934cffadf...

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#266

Post by sidewndr46 »

mabbo wrote: post #212
sidewndr46 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's three arguments there: 1 - Banks can make mistakes. 2 - Banks can be slow. 3 - Banks making it really hard to do transfer large sums of money. I can't solve 1, but I can tell you that crypto definitely doesn't solve it. Because making a mistake with crypto is irreversible. The money is just gone. Mom forgot her password because she's getting old? Well, too bad, now Mom is broke and her money is gone forever.…

So because you are a self described idiot, I have to deal with ancient pain in the ass banking systems?

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#267

Post by shrimpx »

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…

Paradoxically, extreme positions like this implicitly argue in favor of crypto because they attack a strawman that is far more useless and bad than crypto, so you walk away feeling like crypto is actually kind of useful and good.

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#268

Post by astrange »

jacknews wrote: post #131
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gambling. Crypto is globalized gambling. It's a money laundering vector, for sure, but for the same reasons crypto competes poorly in the transaction market it's close to a last resort for high-volume launderers.

"Gambling. Crypto is globalized gambling." Completely and utterly unlike and in no way whatsoever similar, at all, to stock markets, futures exchanges, CFDs, options, CDOs, etc, etc, etc. Crypto is just a speculative digital asset. Sure it's been a playground for all kinds of scams and charlatanry, because there's no oversight, just as stock markets once were (and still can be in some areas eg pink sheets), but crypt…

> Completely and utterly unlike and in no way whatsoever similar, at all, to stock markets, futures exchanges, CFDs, options, CDOs, etc, etc, etc.

Those things are backed by cash flows, which crypto isn't because noone ever wants their coin to be considered a security.

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#269

Post by luckylion »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #185
luckylion wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin will not freeze your assets for 90-180 days if you suddenly make twice as many sales.

Bitcoin itself won't, but the exchanges will; even when your coins are not on an exchange, addresses will be listed as suspect and watched closely if for example a hacked exchange's cryptocurrencies are transfered to it, basically freezing it. No exchange will touch it, and in extreme cases, the blockchain can be forked to undo a transaction.

> Bitcoin itself won't, but the exchanges will;

Sure, that's true, but you don't need the exchange to transfer value if you're using Bitcoin. Granted, you need them to get that value in your local currency and in cash (just like you need another Bank to transfer Paypal into cash).

> No exchange will touch it, and in extreme cases, the blockchain can be forked to undo a transaction.

How often has the fork happened though ... twice? three times? If we're getting into that kind of rareness, we'll lose all relevance. Banks sometimes outright steal from their customers, but it's so rare that I wouldn't put it up as an argument against using a bank.

As for receiving tainted coins: that's a more interesting point. Has anyone ever tried tainting large wallets by transferring known-bad coins to them?

Re: Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam

#270

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

naasking wrote: post #215
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but no one expects that the 25K they have in their savings account to be worth tommorrow 250K. With crypto that could be a possibility, it more certainly could be 0, but a possibility nonetheless. I just don't think a society should have a gambling mechanism as a large scale economic operator.

Arguably a big part of crypto's volatility is because it isn't widely used enough. If as many people traded in Bitcoin as currently traded in USD, I think that would average out most fluctuations. I'm also not sure how you delineate between speculation and gambling. Are you for the current system of speculative trading of regular currencies?

I could agree in principle on the volume argument, perhaps after looking over some economic models. However, a big part of the USD stability in the past 78+ years stems from the causation chains which make the following fact possible: the US Navy is the second air force in the world [1]. In order to believe in the stability of BTC, I must ask the stalinist question: "how many divisions has Satoshi?" [2]. It is a sad reality but might will make right in this silly world of ours for the foreseeable future. Now that's an invariant which I would have loved to see cryptocurrencies tackle, but they seem to have no interest in this, it's more of a changing of the guard ceremony, this crypto-fiat dance.

Coming to your question, to regulate or not to regulate [3]. I come from the very far left field (pun intended). The most different approach that I've seen recently, one which could maybe move the world in a significant way, is the financo-fiction detailed in Yanis Varoufakis' Another Now [4]. One of the more radical proposals from the book is that the persons starting a company should have only one share each: more of a library card system than a market. In another presentation, Varoufakis says something along the lines: compounding interest becomes a tool of exploitation when the poor are forced to borrow more and more from the rich which only get richer. Therefore, no, I am against the status quo as much as you can get, and although I am not an optimist, I believe it is up to us to decide in what kind of world we want to live and what kind of future we want to nurture.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/largest-a...

[2] https://wordhistories.net/2019/08/23/how-many-divisions-pope...

[3] I asked ChatGPT to make a poem starting from Shakespeare's verse:

    "To regulate or not to regulate, that is the question asked,
    Whether 'tis nobler in the realm of finance to keep markets free,
    Or to take action against the sea of risks and save us from a crash.
    The pitfalls of speculation oft bring economic pain,
    Should we not protect, regulate, and keep it in check to gain?
    The choice is ours, the consequences dire,
    Let us ponder, deliberate and make a wise decision, not retire."
[4] Varoufakis presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJKHWrs4h5w, in depth explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNfvR0lwP4Q
Post reply on HN