I consider others and my company, good actors in the space: think about the space critically and giving transparent feedback and scenarios between the skepticism and the utopia.
And you may well be -- but I don't know you or your company, so I have no way of knowing. The space is generally so tainted that it's not unreasonable to assume the people in it aren't exactly good until proven otherwise.
>The space is generally so tainted that it's not unreasonable to assume the people in it aren't exactly good until proven otherwise.
I could say the exact same about the finance, defence, and health insurance sectors.
For over 40 years, I've only ever heard bad news about those industries. Still, it would be wrong to assume every single individual actor in those spaces is a bad actor; I know that bad news is widely reported in the media, and good news rarely is.
Logically speaking you are saying that there is no exist good people in the space. That is a really difficult assertion to probe. I am saying something simpler: there exist good people in the space.
Then, you are saying "but I don't know you or your company, so I have no way of knowing.". Well, that is not my job, do your work if you want to change your mind. If you need help I can present you to good people but I assume you can do it by yourself.
Also, again logically, saying that there is no good people in the space, we should first define good people in general. Not trying to sound pedantic but trying to show you that your assertion is about a lot of people, probably in the order or millions.
The point is that scammers are so prevalent it's not worth "doing your work." The ROI on vetting every player in a given transaction just isn't high enough to make it worth engaging. We don't have to do all this shit in the actual financial industry because of regulation and insurance. Nobody's presented a compelling reason to re-evolve those protections because blockchain.
And yes, the assertion is about a lot of people. That's why we put locks on our cars and houses instead of vetting everyone in town. You keep arguing about symptoms without addressing causes.
PayPal is full of scammers, it is not crypto. Even you can say that PayPal is wrongdoing in many aspects that will not resist in court. Just an example.
Another example: land in NY, buy a mobile SIM there, go to the Central Park and in less than 30 minutes someone calls me telling me that I won the lottery. I am very lucky.
Do you have some data on the percentage likelihood of being scammed in crypto vs in the traditional financial markets?
Let's just cherry pick on DeFi. DeFi had something around 10% of its entire TVL lost last year to hacks and scams. I guarantee you that 10% of the entire 'TVL' of PayPal wasn't lost to hacks and scams.
PayPal has almost 79B in assets. Pretty sure they didn't lose 8B to hacks last year.
The fundamental character of crypto - a market where police and regulators look the other way, but money moves freely - whose biggest rocket ride to fame came from Silk Road - is perfectly suited to attract crime and criminality. Without crypto nobody would even remember ransomware because you can't send millions of dollars in Starbucks gift cards.
This is its niche, like it or not. Because if you're not trying to do crime, classical finance is faster, cheaper and safer.
The focus of this thread was about cryptocurrencies as assets.
When you talk about hacks we are shifting the discussion to computer security. Computer security intersects with scamming but they are two different things, you are comparing apples to oranges, it is also a field that nowadays is weaponized and the money invested and gained in the field itself exceed the money in DeFi hacks. Do you know the price in the market of bugs and exploits for Google Chrome, WhatsApp, iOS, etc? The ones exploiting them could be scammers, state actors, etc. The specialthing about DeFi is that hackers are attracted because code is literally money.
There is one more thing that complement and give answer for posts above in this thread: big scams and hacks in the cryptocurrency space are difficult to cash out: significant exchanges use transaction tracing tools (KYT: know your transaction) to freeze assets connected to illegal activities.
> Logically speaking you are saying that there is no exist good people in the space. That is a really difficult assertion to probe. I am saying something simpler: there exist good people in the space.
No, that's not at all what I was saying. I actually said the opposite: I assume that there are good people in this space despite the lack of evidence for it.
> do your work if you want to change your mind
I don't think that my mind needs to be changed here. We're in fundamental agreement here anyway, so I'm not sure what you think should be different in my thinking.
I just have no way of being able to tell who the good people are. And, ultimately, it doesn't actually matter because I don't deal with cryptocurrency in my own affairs.