[kelthuzad]

Humans are the ones committing fraud for personal gain in traditional finance as well as in crypto. This does not negate the value proposition of crypto even one bit, in fact it strengthens it even more, because proponents have been calling for maximization of trustless open-source auditable smart contracts and minimization of human interference. ftx was a banking failure, not crypto. fraud is and always was illegal, no amount of regulation can prevent that, auditable open-source smart contracts are a good solution imo.

I'm so tired of these reddit one liners "but crypto bad" tho, hn should uphold higher standards of conversation

[NotYourLawyer]

Crypto is interesting technically, but it has been an absolute dumpster fire practically.

[kelthuzad]

In what regard?

- Scams? Yes, there are lots of scams similar to the early days of the internet where script kiddies could scam people without having special knowledge of computer science, just by downloading some tools with controllable trojans. I remember testing it out back in the days to prank my friends, but it could have been used for actual fraud and as such it was also used. There are many startups now that focus on security for the industry and the auditors are able to catch many problems because of the transparency of open-source. Anybody can read and check the smart contract before using it or trust the auditors, although admittedly there is still a lot of room for a better user experience.

-Investing? Stocks were hit similar or even harder, Facebook for instance is down -75% YTD, Peloton is done whopping -95%(!) from ATH, many more such cases. I find it kind of strange that people unfairly point at crypto while traditional finance is guilty of the same or even worse, remember the SPAC grift? People really need to actually do their due diligence - if they don't, can they really blame anyone except themselves?

Me personally, I find crypto to be an exciting driver for innovations in cryptography research and seeing its actual implementation working in live projects, especially ZK + verifiable computation related stuff. Most of it is working remarkably well _today_ although there is a lot of room for improvement (esp UI/UX wise), I am quite optimistic for the future.