[ElViajero]

> The US has huge financial industry partly because the regulation is so extensive. People from all over the world invest their money in the US because they know what when liquidity crisis happens, they still get their money back.

And that is one of the reasons so many people invest in crypto-scams. They are used to the safety of traditional banking, and think that it comes for free. Not realizing that it is a hard earned situation earned thru the pain of a past era and enforcement of regulations. Sadly, people that has no understanding of banking are for a surprise when they realize in what are they really investing and how little recourse they have when the crypto-scamsscams explode.

[elliekelly]

I like to follow the fallout from cyrpto/token scams on reddit as they happen and it’s the same thing every time: People who had been touting the benefits of “no regulation” are suddenly angry and outraged that the government hasn’t done more to prevent the scam from happening and isn’t (in their minds) doing enough to get their money back.

It’s a leopards ate my face situation. And it’s beyond frustrating but I can also sympathize with them a bit. Who among us hasn’t stubbornly needed to see something for ourselves in order to learn a lesson we could have (and should have) learned by listening to the people with a bit of experience?

[mrkramer]

Investing in crypto projects is the same like investing in dot com companies back in the day. You invest in concepts not in the actual product or solution and ofc 99% of these projects are unrealistic or team behind them is incompetent.

[dragontamer]

No. There's a big difference.

When Webvan went bankrupt, they truly bought all of those warehouses / refrigerated vans. They were honest about their business idea.

When "Africrypt" (a recent Crypto group) stole $3.6 Billion from its customers, that's straight up fraud and would not stand even back in the dot-com boom in the 90s. That's the sort of thing US Regulators are trying to protect investors from.

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You still might invest into a bad idea (ex: Webvan or Theranos), but those CEOs are truly spending money on vans / warehouses / poorly designed blood tests and not just actively stealing it from their investors.

Even when companies criminally lie (ex: Enron or Worldcom), its a far lesser crime than what the Africrypt brothers did just a few weeks ago. The size and scope of the scams currently going on in the Blockchain world is far worse than what happens in US regulated markets.

[mrkramer]

I agree with you on Webvan but Theranos was pure fraud.

The so called "Crypto" industry will mature when regulation happens and when real cryptographers and real computer scientists enter the scene and start innovating. Until then we have hyped up teens playing with the buzzwords like blockchain and decentralized finance.

>The size and scope of the scams currently going on in the Blockchain world is far worse than what happens in US regulated markets.

I somewhat tend to believe that governments all around the world are giving the "Blockchain world" grace period of not being tightly regulated so they can catch as many crypto criminals as they can because let's be honest if these guys were not stealing in the crypto world they would be stealing somewhere else. And I also tend to believe that current financial regulations are enough to regulate crypto as it is but governments are moving slowly as usual.

[arcticbull]

It's been almost 14 years, so where are the "real cryptographers" and "real computer scientists?" I suspect they've been searching and realized there's no "there" there.

[mrkramer]

I guess they are not interested; Microsoft recently shut down its Azure blockchain service[0] for example. Facebook made its own crypto coin but I am afraid that will lead to nowhere. Google and Amazon are not very interested as well so real cryptographers and real computer scientists are working on other stuff and on other problems.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-shutting-down-its...

[dkshdkjshdk]

Maybe you can find some here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=zksnark

[mrkramer]

For example in Cryptology Eprint Archive for current year[0] majority of research papers are unrelated to blockchain and cryptocurrencies although you can find couple of dozens of such papers.

P.S. By quickly searching through the list there are around 900 papers of which around 30 are blockchain, cryptocurrency and electronic/digital cash related.

[0] https://eprint.iacr.org/curr/