[tbonesteaks]

What’s the reason for you thinking it’s an enormous grift? I ask as someone who has read enough to feel it is useful and have a hard wallet with some bitcoin (well not a full bitcoin) but I am not into it enough to do anything stupid or evangelize it to others. So, you feeling the whole thing is a grift, I would really like to know if I’m missing something.

[pavlov]

It has almost no usage as a money transfer system, but it has essentially replaced all other forms of get-rich-quick schemes peddled on retail investors.

Last week I was in a developing country. The amount of crypto-related advertising was striking. And none of it was about remittances. These ads were not saying “Here’s something better than Western Union.” No, they were showing trading screens on a mobile app with shitcoins going to the moon.

I believe Western crypto enthusiasts are badly in denial about the volume seen on third world exchanges. The people putting their nairas or liras or whatever into crypto are not doing so because they think it’s a great system to send money internationally and because they don’t believe in central banks. They’re only doing it because a local influencer on YouTube told them it’s how you get rich.

(Of course everybody in the West buys crypto for that same reason — maybe the source of the “insider tips” is more often Twitter, but the motivation is the same. The important point is that third world crypto adoption is a core narrative told by crypto pumpers, and it doesn’t exist any more than first world crypto adoption.)

[mrguyorama]

They aren't badly in denial. They KNOW exactly how grifty the whole thing is. They KNOW that things like mpesa and similar exist in a lot of the supposedly developing world, and that the US banking infrastructure being stupid is more a matter of lacking policy than lacking technology. They KNOW that stupid "play to earn" game only really gave a few thousand people in the Philippines an income, while thousands and thousands more spent hundreds of real dollars to buy in and play and spend over ten hours a day "playing" a "game" that is closer to a slot machine than anything else. They KNOW that concept was no different to trying to earn a living by buying, opening, and selling CS:GO cases.

They don't care, or ignore these things, because eventually everyone figures out that there's not much to do with or for crypto that isn't scamming someone out of money or providing a vague crypto adjacent service. Nobody wants to buy regular products with crypto because for normal people, it is a pain in the ass to participate in crypto without getting scammed, and for crypto diehards, they know any dollar spent in the crypto ecosystem is inefficient because they are often purposely deflationary assets. They know that they spent a shitload of their savings on shitcoins, and that if the crypto world continues to struggle, that's an existential threat to them. They know that people NEED to buy in so that the price can go back up so they can cash out and save themselves. It's no different from desperate people in an MLM getting pushy with their facebook friends because they have $2000 in credit card debt buying Dotera product to stay "in their tier" or whatever nonsense the particular MLM uses, and the only way to get money back out of it is to become a conman.

[jasmer]

Because it's not pragmatically useful, and the speculative nature of it attracts enormous amount of grifty/spammy types of money and people. There is a reason most of it offshore, there is a total lack of transparency etc..

[RosanaAnaDana]

It's been in vogue for a couple months. The meta issue is that it lost a ton of value as a store. But so did many many stocks. Idk percentage wise how many companies lost a greater percent of their stock value than Bitcoin has in the past year, but we don't call them grifts. I think digital assets and coins are a pretty neat technology, much of the last bubble was solutions looking for problems. But it's how it goes.

[tpxl]

> Idk percentage wise how many companies lost a greater percent of their stock value than Bitcoin has in the past year, but we don't call them grifts.

Companies generally do other things besides being a vehicle for speculation.

[RosanaAnaDana]

I mean, so do digital assets. There is plenty of bullshit out there, but when Nikola had a market cap of 14 billion based on someone pushing a hollowed out semi truck down a hill, is that radically different?

I don't see it as radically different. And Nikola still has a market cap of 1 billion. The idea of digital assets, of trustless contracts, its still very very interesting to me. That a bubble formed and popped is more of a 'well of course it would' result to me than something to be feared.

And maybe someday Nikola solves the truck thing and dominates shipping. I don't know.

I think they whining about coins being a vehicle for speculation is puritanical hand wringing. Especially when it comes from the left and is focused on how people, who were quite literally engaged in speculation, lost money.

[miguelazo]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26885008

[colesantiago]

The reason why it is an enormous grift is that Bitcoin has failed in its original aim to be used as a means of payment. It is completely slow, volatile and the majority of people use it speculate on exchanges.

The current price of Bitcoin is pumped up by Tether and it is only a matter of time till the entire thing crashes down.

For comparison, UPI achieved its aim of fast payments in India MUCH quicker than Bitcoin ever did in it's nearly 15 years of its existence and now UPI is expanding.