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Do people still think crypto is a scam in 2025?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Do people still think crypto is a scam in 2025?

#11

Post by kingkongjaffa »

The technology is not. How people have chosen to use it is by and large pretty scammy or at least purely opportunistic.

Most consumers holding crypto are doing so in the hopes of cashing out later, most (virtually all) retail investors barely understand what a blockchain even is, they're just random people who downloaded coinbase.

At the same time rug pulls and blatant fraud / money laundering / corruption has been enabled with this tech.

Memecoins etc. are frankly the financial wild west and with institutions like the SEC in the bin completely right now the average consumer has no business investing in crypto other than speculatively and, depending on the coin, with a pretty high risk of losing their investment.

Re: Do people still think crypto is a scam in 2025?

#13

Post by bediger4000 »

One big use I'm anticipating, but haven't seen materialize yet, is denying refunds. Grey area vendors sell people goods, say, brain pills, or low-T boosters, or emergency food buckets, that don't work. The vendors can absolutely refuse to do refunds, and there would be no recourse whatsoever. Couldn't even get a bank or payment processor to dump a notorious grey area vendor, because it's decentralized.

Re: Do people still think crypto is a scam in 2025?

#14

Post by sejje »

manbart wrote: post #3

Scamming is endemic in the crypto world, but it’s not inherently a scam. I don’t think it solves any real problems either though. Gambling seems like the best comparison to me.

I think it's most akin to gambling / "investing" in gold.

Gold barely solves any real problems, but it has a pretty active market. People readily buy it. The price fluctuates quite a bit (nothing compared to crypto though).

The utility of gold vs BTC is kinda moot--they're both good at a few things. They're a lot like gambling for the way most people get involved.

Some shitcoins seem like scams, but it's not inherent in the tech, and I don't feel like BTC is a scam for any reason. Sure, it's not a tangible asset, but you know that going in.

Re: Do people still think crypto is a scam in 2025?

#16

Post by acdha »

asasidh wrote: post #7

A lot of things can be true at the same time: 1. A lot of scammers launch crypto scams, rug pull tokens, phish/scam people out of their money. 2. Bitcoin is a hard, censorship resistant, permission less money. 3. Outside of Bitcoin, Crypto / blockchain is still experimental and looking for its usecase. We have seen smart contracts, tokenization of assets, NFTs and meme coins all being tried out here.

Bitcoin isn’t “censorship resistant” with its public ledger turning that into a data mining exercise, especially since it’s not widely used in the real economy so enforcement can be gated at the exchanges.

Re: Do people still think crypto is a scam in 2025?

#17

Post by light_hue_1 »

The only large scale use of cryptocurrency is to evade laws and do things that actively harm society from killing people with drugs to scamming old people out of their money devastating their lives.

That's because crypto solves no large scale problem that anyone legitimate has. The only large scale problem it solves is how to facilitate crime.

Just look at how people are effectively bribing Trump through crypto. We should immediately legislate all of this out of existence just like we got rid of other scams back in the day (like how banks used to mint their own currency).

Re: Do people still think crypto is a scam in 2025?

#18

Post by acdha »

I think one answer comes by asking why the scammers love it because the answer that it’s easier and safer for them to transfer large amounts without getting caught. That’s also shows why there’s relatively little mainstream usage. If you’re comparing it to all of the other options people have, it’s unappealing – harder to use, slower, riskier, more volatile and expensive – but the scammers and ransomware gangs accept that because it’s still better than traditional money laundering.

Re: Do people still think crypto is a scam in 2025?

#19

Post by anonym29 »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #17

The only large scale use of cryptocurrency is to evade laws and do things that actively harm society from killing people with drugs to scamming old people out of their money devastating their lives. That's because crypto solves no large scale problem that anyone legitimate has. The only large scale problem it solves is how to facilitate crime. Just look at how people are effectively bribing Trump through crypto. We s…

Your government has murdered uncountably more innocent people than those who've died from voluntarily choosing to ingest drugs.

Re: Do people still think crypto is a scam in 2025?

#20

Post by anonym29 »

acdha wrote: post #16
asasidh wrote: post #7

A lot of things can be true at the same time: 1. A lot of scammers launch crypto scams, rug pull tokens, phish/scam people out of their money. 2. Bitcoin is a hard, censorship resistant, permission less money. 3. Outside of Bitcoin, Crypto / blockchain is still experimental and looking for its usecase. We have seen smart contracts, tokenization of assets, NFTs and meme coins all being tried out here.

Bitcoin isn’t “censorship resistant” with its public ledger turning that into a data mining exercise, especially since it’s not widely used in the real economy so enforcement can be gated at the exchanges.

You seem to be misunderstanding censorship resistance. It means that no government can block or stop a crypto transaction the way they can credit card and bank transactions, and has nothing to do with FIAT on/offramps at CEXs, nor with the traceability of past transactions that were made successfully.
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