[wslh]

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.

[arcticbull]

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.

[wslh]

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.