[cslarson]

> The multi-level marketing ponzi scheme things would still be present.

Yes, there are scams. But even in 2017 ICO days these were easy to spot - wailing and teeth nashing over ICO scams was dumb then and still is now.

> Yes, but "crypto" means something else.

I'm sorry but words mean what people who use them want them to mean in order to communicate ideas between them. Meanings evolve and words are co-opted and probably people should get over that.

> It's not. It's about greed and creating money for yourself. Currencies are just more direct.

I guess I can agree if what you mean by greed I replace with self-interest based mechanism design. I don't believe this needs to be zero sum, though. Maybe we'd differ on that.

[ddevault]

>Yes, there are scams. But even in 2017 ICO days these were easy to spot - wailing and teeth nashing over ICO scams was dumb then and still is now.

https://signal.org/blog/help-us-test-payments-in-signal/

[tim333]

I think in 2017 you could mostly spot an ICO scam by looking if it included the term 'ICO.'

[knorker]

> I'm sorry but words mean what people who use them want them to mean

Yup, which is why I use the words how I want them to mean. See?

> I don't believe this needs to be zero sum, though.

Absolutely not. I'm a capitalist.

But bitcoin is clearly negative-sum. And (I don't want to retype too much from other comments) so's other cryptocurrencies.

And negative-sum is clearly bad.