[neilv]

> I think part of this sentiment boils down to the commenter seeing no point to Bitcoin.

I thought cryptocurrency was an interesting and promising idea. But I got away from it around the time it became clear the entire space was overrun by wall-to-wall scamming. And it's safe to disregard anyone who doesn't acknowledge that.

If someone says "Yeah, it's wall-to-wall scamming, and other than that, the main use of it is for organized crime transactions, but there's this silver lining of X", then I might listen to X briefly, even though it seems irrelevant at this point.

If someone doesn't phrase their advocacy with acknowledging the massive BS, then I assume the person is just another scammer (and they might be even if they acknowledge it).

[dcolkitt]

I guess what exactly do you define as scamming? In terms of outright fraud, I agree there's a lot. It shouldn't be super surprising that scammers tend to prefer decentralized permissionless financial rails, for the same reason that political extremists and pornographers were some of the biggest earliest users of the decentralized permissionless publishing rails of the early Internet.

But I wouldn't characterize all, or even most of crypto as scams. Gambling, maybe. Are memecoins a scam? I would say they're more like a massively multiplayer form of gambling. Which you might argue is a bad thing, and certainly is dubious from a social standpoint. But if the code is openly public and autonomous, and there's no outright deceit, I don't think gambling is really gambling.

Even beyond that, there's a lot happening in crypto that most certainly isn't scams. You have stablecoins and payment rails like USDC, stores of value like Bitcoin, smart contract chains like Ethereum, decentralized finance applications like permissionless exchanges and lending markets, social applications like farcaster, decentralized AI, and gaming.

Now you might argue that all of these things are stupid and pointless and wastes of money, but that's a separate debate. Of the large projects in these categories almost none are outright scams. They're teams experimenting with new ways to run financial markets or move payments or train models or hedge inflation. Like most technological experiments most will fail. But if that was the criteria for "scam" then the entire startup sector is also wall-to-wall scams.

[lmm]

> Are memecoins a scam? I would say they're more like a massively multiplayer form of gambling.

They're practically indistinguishable from penny-stock scams, and they almost always involve a bunch of outright lies in their promotional materials; the only reason you can argue that many buyers aren't deceived is because lying is so rampant and expected in that space that people take it as given that the claims are going to be lies, which is hardly an argument that it's a healthy activity.

> Even beyond that, there's a lot happening in crypto that most certainly isn't scams. You have stablecoins and payment rails like USDC, stores of value like Bitcoin, smart contract chains like Ethereum, decentralized finance applications like permissionless exchanges and lending markets, social applications like farcaster, decentralized AI, and gaming.

All of which still fails to add up to anything actually working and useful, 15 years in. The best cases people can come up with are sympathetic criminals like people evading capital controls. What minimal practical use of cryptocurrency there was is already in a clear decline; fewer and fewer stores are accepting it for payment, the few efforts at interesting crypto games have already collapsed...

> Like most technological experiments most will fail. But if that was the criteria for "scam" then the entire startup sector is also wall-to-wall scams.

There's a big difference between "most" and "all". The startup sector as a whole has enough successes to balance out the failures and end up as positive ROI (and even then, a lot of startups really are scams - just not all of them).

[dcolkitt]

> All of which still fails to add up to anything actually working and useful, 15 years in.

The first packet switched network came online in 1969. Fifteen years by 1984 almost all the use cases were hobby, and it'd be another ten years before the Internet really started changing life.

Decentralized consensus is a fundamentally new computing primitive, similar to packet switched networks. Developing applications on top of new primitives is hard and long, and there will be a lot of time required just to build out usable infrastructure.

Turing complete smart contracts are only 7 years old. Layer 2 scaling is only two years old. Decentralized exchanges and other on-chain financial contracts about four years old.

[ivancho]

Except with packet switching networks I can immediately point to the problem they are solving and can also make a guess how things will change when we create 000s of bigger and better ones. And the timeline is definitely not what you are making up here - the 70s had immense development of networks and protocols, every telco was building new networks across the country, it was most certainly not hobby stuff, there just weren't that many computers until the 80s.

What problem are we solving with decentralized consensus? How will things improve if we have a giant one? Say every mobile phone was a part of the consensus mechanism, churning Turing-complete smart contracts. Billions of nodes. What do we get out of that?

[lmm]

> The first packet switched network came online in 1969. Fifteen years by 1984 almost all the use cases were hobby, and it'd be another ten years before the Internet really started changing life.

By 1980 CompuServe had thousands of paying subscribers, both home and business - and I suspect they'd invested far less getting there than the amount of VC money that's gone into cryptocurrency. You can say the home users were "hobbyists", but they were getting real value out of the network; online chat or games might not have had a clear business purpose, but they were fun, and that's real value.

I've seen literally one niche for cryptocurrency that people seemed to actually enjoy for its own sake rather than as a crime tool or get rich quick scheme, cryptokitties, and that seems to have proven itself fundamentally unviable (either your collectibles are too cheap to be interesting, or they're too expensive to be fun). Cryptocurrency is not merely wildly unprofitable to date, it's not generating value and there is no indication that it ever will generate value.

[the_gastropod]

This is comically ahistorical

[ivancho]

I meet some people in crypto occasionally, and it's hilarious that most of them no longer talk about technologies, projects, applications - all they discuss is sentiment. "Oh, there's a wave of positive outlook", or "new patterns of participation are emerging". At least it's honest, I guess, instead of pretending that we are changing the world with DAOs or whatever, they are just sizing up the next bubble.

[AlexandrB]

> But if the code is openly public and autonomous, and there's no outright deceit, I don't think gambling is really gambling.

But there's plenty of outright deceit. Many (most?) memecoins are some form of pump & dump. It doesn't really matter whether the code is openly public if the winners are chosen ahead of time by pre-allocating tokens.

Edit: Also actual gambling meets your criteria here. While the source code of slot machines is not public, it is typically audited to ensure it offers the odds that are advertised.

[obviouslynew]

I agree that Bitcoin is that perfect storm of technological and financial obfuscation that's made the ideal air cover for charlatans.

However, organizations contributing to this space are trying to extend the functionality and utility of these technologies. For example, check out Chainlink https://chainlinklabs.com/research,

But if you would like a less self-serving narrative, check out what the WEF https://www.weforum.org/organizations/chainlink/ & SWIFT https://www.swift.com/news-events/press-releases/swift-unloc... think about their decentralized tech.

Other forms of interesting decentralization applications look no further than IPFS & Filecoin. https://protocol.ai/

You're not wrong; there are scams and a lot of snake oil, but don't let that deafen you to what direction thoughtful applied use of the technology can produce.

[baobun]

And yet, you use e-mail?

[amjnsx]

And fiat...!