this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
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BECAUSE CRYPTO IS A SCAM
I had an acquaintance ask me about my opinion on crypto a few years ago and I explained it only has the perceived value and is highly volatile as a result, and that all but a few coins were basically rug pulls waiting to happen. He was satisfied with that and moved on. About a year later crypto had roughly doubled in value and he gave me shit about bad advice (it was an opinion not investment advice) and proceeded to move $10k into some coin I'd never heard of. About a month later a mutual friend said the other guy had lost like $8k of his $10k investment. Next time I saw the acquaintance there was no mention of crypto.
Yeah, it's like those people who fall for ads where people get rich going to the casino.
i notice that is usually conservatives that buys into the scam, and the ones that peddle it too.
Fundamentally, no. That's just what it's become.
I agree and in fact I feel the same with AI.
Fundamental cryptocurrency is fascinating. It is mathematically sound, just like cryptography in general (computational complexity, one way functions, etc) and it had the theoretical potential to change existing political and economical structures. Unfortunately (arguably) the very foundation it is based on, namely mining for greed, brought a different community who inexorably modified not the technology itself but its usages. What was initially a potential infrastructure for exchange of value became a way to speculate, buy and sell goods and services banned, ransomware, scam payments, etc).
AI also is fascinating as a research fields. It asks deep question with complex answers. Research for centuries about it lead to not just interesting philosophical questions, like what it's like to be think, to be human, and mathematics used in all walks of life, like in logistics for your parcel to get delivered this morning. Yet... gradually the field, or at least its commercialization, got captured by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, regulators, who main interest was greed. This in turn changed what was until then open to something closed, something small to something required gigantic infrastructure capturing resources hitherto used for farming, polluting due to lack of proper permit for temporary electricity sources, etc. The pinnacle right now being regulation to ban regulation on AI in the US.
So... yes, technology itself can be fascinating, useful, even important and yet how we collectively, as a society, decide to use it remains what matters, the actual impact of an idea rather than its idealization.
Apart from all the other deflationary stuff...
I can't get past the adjustable difficulty lottery system they use for mining blocks every 10m... :/ there has to be a better way.
It's like diagonalizing huge matrices repeatedly just as a wait() function.
there's better methods than how Bitcoin works (PoW) like Proof of Stake, but that has its own problems, like bringing more centralization to the network. Like how with bitcoin if a miner controls more than half of the global hash rates, they can mint more money than should be, in a currency with PoS they could just buy half of the coins and do it. They probably wouldn't because its not in their self interest, but its still a problem
Idk. I've been reading about Bitcoin since the very beginning and while I don't think it's necessarily a "scam" the whole project was based on a flawed hyper-libertarian economic theory that inflationary currency is inherently evil and that the ideal currency has a fixed quantity, requires effort to produce, and becomes rarer over time. From that standpoint, I feel like Bitcoin has failed in its original mission. You simply cannot use it as a day to day currency and everyone is just using it to gamble essentially. I do agree that if crypto had been an outright scam from the beginning, Satoshi would have rugpulled already, though.
What any unregulated market becomes.
A lot of scams are dependent on the presence of regulations.
Regulations aren’t perfect, but the banking industry has gotten vastly more full of scams since congress repealed Glass Steagall. Regulations offer a structure to punish fraud and scamming. We need clear defined rules to at least attempt to control markets from their worst possible outcomes.
But a lot more are dependent on the absence of them.
That is almost a fundamental statement, requiring logical proof.
It's like with a computer program that can contain vulnerabilities - fixing vulnerabilities might introduce new ones, and new functionality intended for security can contain new vulnerabilities in itself, possibly making the whole even less secure than without it.
It's not, but there are plenty of crypto scams. It's not an investment and it's also not a particularly good store of value, but it is decent for P2P transactions, with some coins also providing privacy.
If that's not your use case, don't buy cryptocurrencues. Most people shouldn't buy them until more places accept them for payment.
It's not going to happen. You can't price things when the value of the currency changes every 10 minutes.
That is not what's stopping people from paying for things in bitcoin. When you buy something in BTC you pay the equivalent to whatever you would have paid in the local fiat. And on the vendor side, merchant services often convert that paid BTC into fiat in the moment after the sale. Both parties are insulated from volatility in the context of the exchange. What actually keeps people from paying for day to day goods and services in BTC is Gresham's Law, the observation that nobody wants to pay for purchases with an appreciating asset, so long as there's also a depreciating asset they could pay with instead.
You’re aware we just use the conversion price in fiat, right?
That happens to every currency, BTC is more volatile than many, but things can be priced.
Also until twiddling is made illegal, prices can be set by some other currency or some function, and be calculated in BTC from that, and displayed on electronic price tags for example.