Do people still think crypto is a scam in 2025?

[to-too-two]

I'm late to the table, but I've been reading about blockchain. Searching 'blockchain' led to lots of discussions about what its purpose is and which problems it solves - if any.

The general consensus (in my opinion), seems to be that its only real useful application had been in cryptocurrencies. From my view, cryptocurrencies are here to stay, but there is still a lot of dissent that crypto is a ponzi scheme or for fraudsters.

[kirubakaran]

> but there is still a lot of dissent crypto is a ponzi scheme or for fraudsters

There are a lot of other great use-cases you're missing: Money laundering, circumventing sanctions (North Korean missile program is not gonna fund itself), buying drugs online, ransomware, assassination markets, illegal political donations, hard to trace bribery, and I'm sure a ton more.

But it's not fair to paint with too broad a brush.

It's just the 99% that give the 1% a bad name.

[ggm]

Ledgers and cryptographic chains and proofs aren't scam. But, the entire pig butchery and like, is scam.

POW is bad for the planet and turned out to have issues in 50%+1 capture. POS is dependent on real world value and constrains behaviour to loss of stake.

Quorum, usually overlooked. Your transaction is final!! Not if the quorum decides to repudiate.

Forensic accountants love cryptos. I row with one who said evidence chains are delightful even with mixers.

Went to meetings on the chain a decade or so back and the fin regulators said its a great mechanism if you distrust your peers, need to co-relate and don't want a regulator in the transactions. So as settlement logic between central banks, or for certainty in complex supply chains where people repudiate the 90 day settlement they can help. Or where middlemen take bites out of transactions as they flow but regarding that, the big vig on transaction processing suggests nothing is free.

Merkle was smart. The logical structure is interesting for all kinds of things. PQC in dnnsec includes models using them.

[diogenes_atx]

Is crypto a scam? It basically works as advertised, so technically it's not a scam.

But the real question to consider is whether society is better off with crypto. Using cost-benefit analysis, we can draw up a simple balance sheet showing the positive benefits and the negative externalities:

POSITIVE SOCIAL BENEFITS

1. Money can be transferred from one person to another without intermediaries such as banks.

2. It provides an alternative to hyper-inflating currencies in places like Venezuela.

NEGATIVE SOCIAL COSTS

1. Data centers waste enormous amounts of energy mining crypto.

2. Crypto facilitates useless financial speculation and criminal activity, e.g., ransomware payments, illicit commerce, etc.

In the final analysis, the benefits are rather small, whereas the costs are significant and will continue to grow as the crypto industry expands.

[ulfw]

I still don't see why on earth I'd need crypto for "1. Money can be transferred from one person to another without intermediaries such as banks."

Especially as people deal with real fiat currency. Let's say I am at a restaurant. I pay $200. My friend wants to give me $100 for their part of the bill. They'd have to convert $100 to 0.00115987 BTC. Transfer those to me and I convert 0.00115987BTC back to $100. This will incur losses. So I ain't even getting my money's worth.

Or alternatively my friend sends me a wire from their bank account to my bank account and I receive it within seconds. This is country dependent but e.g. here in HK FPS takes 2 seconds and costs nothing. SEPA Fast Payment in Europe is similar as is Australia's NPP or Singapore's FAST etc etc etc. For international my banks all provide free SWIFT transfers. Not instant, takes 1-2 days but hey. Free of charge send and receive for my bank accounts here.

It's a technical solution that can easily be done by banks and banking regulators and doesn't need another 'currency' as intermediary.

[duskwuff]

> 1. Money can be transferred from one person to another without intermediaries such as banks.

By replacing them with the intermediary of cryptocurrency exchanges and the blockchain itself - both of which charge fees on transfers which are often significantly higher than traditional banks. Is this actually a benefit?

> 2. It provides an alternative to hyper-inflating currencies in places like Venezuela.

Can you point to any evidence that cryptocurrency is actually used as a medium of exchange within these countries? Or is it primarily a means of capital flight?

WRT. negative social costs, I'd add that the anonymous and irreversible nature of cryptocurrency transactions leaves consumers with little to no recourse if they're scammed or make a mistake.

[disqard]

> By replacing them with the intermediary of cryptocurrency exchanges and the blockchain itself - both of which charge fees on transfers which are often significantly higher than traditional banks. Is this actually a benefit?

Your puny brain can't grasp the 4D chess here... it's just like how those Federal agencies are so bloated, that completely bypassing them will fix everything (hint: follow the money -- who's going to get rich when they replace the "bloated" middleman with their own infrastructure? In the case of crypto, it rhymes with boin-case).

[mrbombastic]

Can’t speak for Venezuela but I know it is fairly common in Argentina to use crypto for currency exchange and a hedge against inflation. Not sure about straight commerce but sure it happens as well.

[czhu12]

Can someone help me understand: in the Venezuelan example, wouldn’t holding USD be the same as an inflation hedge if you live in Venezuela?

In countries that have strict currency control so you can’t hold USD at all, wouldn’t those areas also prevent you from buying crypto?

Do Venezuela s banks not allow you to open an account for USD, but allow you to on ramp into crypto currencies?

[muzani]

I think the problem is also "Venezuelan banks". Bank runs tend to happen in these countries. A bank run is when people expect a bank to collapse, so they pull out money, forcing the bank into debt, and actually collapsing them. The patch for this is government insurance but Venezuelans likely don't trust their gov enough. Bank runs happen plenty in uninsured finance e.g. crypto too, but crypto exchanges today are more stable.

So crypto helps as an alternative method of holding money. You can buy/sell in USDT over some wallet or exchange. Your wallet is your own, in your device. The government can make it illegal, but that doesn't mean they can stop you. It doesn't collapse, but there's always the risk of being robbed, as with cash or jewelry.

[muzani]

"works as advertised, so technically it's not a scam."

It often does not work as advertised. It is not an efficient form for transferring money compared to say, Wise. I used to be able to buy a game off Steam or a burger off a crypto wallet, but neither of these things are available today.

So the use case then becomes that they hodl on to something that increases in value in time. But that sounds a little like a scam as well.

Stablecoins are in actual use and not a scam, but they're effectively USD to USD, at a loss.

[sdsd]

I'm not a crypto guy, but I wonder if:

>Data centers waste enormous amounts of energy mining crypto.

is still as relevant in the era of proof of stake and such?

[hooverd]

If you're not Etheruem, yes.

[dzhiurgis]

Maybe a better analysis would be placing it between other industries to compare its uselessness/usefulness?

[bigyabai]

From my view, cryptocurrency is also here to stay, but there is still a lot of dissent that cryptocurrency doesn't facilitate sanctions evasion, illegal commerce and ruinous speculation/fraud markets with zero regulation or consequences.

Which is to say... yes, I think cryptocurrency is a scam in 2025. I will say the same thing in 2030, and again in 2050, assuming nothing changes.

[BobbyTables2]

Crypto exchanges sure seem like scams…

All the convenience and security of a bank account without the security or regulation.

People talk up crypto for being decentralized and then park their money in exchanges run by fraudsters…

[B-Con]

This is my favorite part of the whole crypto ecosystem.

"It's decentralized! Code is law! I own my wallet!"

*proceeds to use third party wallet service that handles 40% of all wallets and then gets mad when they're hacked and there's no recovery process".

I genuinely believe the vast majority of crypto proponents are financially illiterate.

[codegeek]

For me, at best it is a useless rhing that is only used for speculation. At worst, it is a scammers dream.

[coldtea]

It's 20% various scams, 70% speculation/ponzi, 10% cult-like obsession/people deriving their identity from it, and 100% energy-wasting tech.

As for having staying power, all kinds of scams have nonetheless enjoyed staying power (gambling, MLMs, scientology, major political parties).

[acdha]

I think one answer comes by asking why the scammers love it because the answer that it’s easier and safer for them to transfer large amounts without getting caught. That’s also shows why there’s relatively little mainstream usage. If you’re comparing it to all of the other options people have, it’s unappealing – harder to use, slower, riskier, more volatile and expensive – but the scammers and ransomware gangs accept that because it’s still better than traditional money laundering.

[cryptbro]

Crypto in theory should be very useful suffers from realities:

1. People want to use government controlled moneybdue to the stability benefits:

* Stable value in short term

* Legal system can clawback money

* Banks have anti fraud system and some level of accountability

* Security is taken care of

2. Shops don't generally take crypto, they take fiat money

Crypto therefore services the world where these disadvantages are outweighed by advantages, which is mostly going to be various illegal or quasi legal activities or simply price speculation.

[Ekaros]

Also doing crypto properly is complicated and risky.

If I give wrong IBAN to someone good likelihood is that transactions fails and I keep money. Or I have at least some legal chance to claim it back.

[cozzyd]

Scam isn't really the right word. It's useful for speculation, fraudsters, technofetishists and for illegal transactions. It does have some more legitimately interesting uses (e.g. escrow) but that's not worth all that much.

[light_hue_1]

The only large scale use of cryptocurrency is to evade laws and do things that actively harm society from killing people with drugs to scamming old people out of their money devastating their lives.

That's because crypto solves no large scale problem that anyone legitimate has. The only large scale problem it solves is how to facilitate crime.

Just look at how people are effectively bribing Trump through crypto. We should immediately legislate all of this out of existence just like we got rid of other scams back in the day (like how banks used to mint their own currency).

[anonym29]

Your government has murdered uncountably more innocent people than those who've died from voluntarily choosing to ingest drugs.

[empthought]

Why would you say something so obviously false? A half-million people in the USA have died of drug overdoses in the last five years alone.

[anonym29]

You think the death toll of the US government is below 500,000? I have some most unfortunate news for you...

The US government killed over 250,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and remains the only government to ever deploy atomic weapons in combat, to say nothing of knowingly and intentionally deploying it against civilians.

The US is responsible for a substantial portion, though not outright majority, of the >1.5 million civilian deaths on the Northern side during the Korean War.

The US government killed over 180,000 civilians in Vietnam - miraculously few considering they dropped over 7 million tons (14 BILLION lbs) of ordnance on a force of only 860,000 troops occupying less than 110,000 km². For reference, that's about 63.5 tons / 127,000 lbs of high explosives per square kilometer of the entirety of Northern Vietnam. That's also over 8 tons / 16,000 pounds of high explosive per combatant.

These represent just the civilian deaths of just 3 of the 123 military conflicts that resulted in at least 1 civilian fatality (5 ongoing) that the US has been involved in - a microcosm of the all deaths that have ever been inflicted by the US government.

Remember, not all military combatants voluntarity chose to fight. Think about how many Russian and Ukranian men have been conscripted against their will (at gunpoint), never killed another person, and were killed in a war they didn't even want to be fighting, left with no alternative choice. Are those men's deaths morally justified simply because they were in uniform, or is it possible many of those, too, were innocent, good people forced to participate in an ugly tradition?

If you add even 10% of combat fatalities inflicted by the US government, that figure exceeds the combined total of all documented drug overdose deaths in American history, though it's worth noting that records on that don't go back very far, as the war on drugs that has destroyed millions of lives is a very, very recent thing in American history - it started less than 60 years ago as a plan to weaponize government against political opponents (anti-war activists who care more about preserving human life than about enforcing American political will around the globe).

Read a history book or two, you might learn something that your government-funded schools conveniently skipped over.

[empthought]

You really scooted away from the fact that yes, since drug overdose deaths have been tracked, more people have been killed by drug overdoses than by the US government in combat. You brought in a bunch of irrelevant data to hide the fact that you are lying out of your ass.

You are a pathetic excuse for a propagandist.

[anonym29]

Your assertion is factually untrue, unless you include deaths from comorbidities arising from the use of government-approved carcinogens like alcohol and tobacco.

Remember, the war on drugs isn't about protecting you from harmful substances. POSIWID. The purpose of the war on drugs was to silence and oppress Nixon's political enemy, the anti-war movement.

You cite no data, just unsubstantiated ad-hominem attacks against my character. This makes you appear to be engaging in bad faith.

I hope you're at least being paid well for advancing the interests of the US federal government against the interests of innocent people. Regardless of your intentions, that's the effective result of your words.

[throwaway519]

Who do you think benefits from each transaction having a unique ID? Most cryptos are so brazen they even make traceability of funds unavoidable.

Crypto solves lots of agency problems and makes those that promote it rich.

[bediger4000]

One big use I'm anticipating, but haven't seen materialize yet, is denying refunds. Grey area vendors sell people goods, say, brain pills, or low-T boosters, or emergency food buckets, that don't work. The vendors can absolutely refuse to do refunds, and there would be no recourse whatsoever. Couldn't even get a bank or payment processor to dump a notorious grey area vendor, because it's decentralized.

[manbart]

Scamming is endemic in the crypto world, but it’s not inherently a scam. I don’t think it solves any real problems either though.

Gambling seems like the best comparison to me.

[sejje]

I think it's most akin to gambling / "investing" in gold.

Gold barely solves any real problems, but it has a pretty active market. People readily buy it. The price fluctuates quite a bit (nothing compared to crypto though).

The utility of gold vs BTC is kinda moot--they're both good at a few things. They're a lot like gambling for the way most people get involved.

Some shitcoins seem like scams, but it's not inherent in the tech, and I don't feel like BTC is a scam for any reason. Sure, it's not a tangible asset, but you know that going in.

[asasidh]

A lot of things can be true at the same time:

1. A lot of scammers launch crypto scams, rug pull tokens, phish/scam people out of their money. 2. Bitcoin is a hard, censorship resistant, permission less money. 3. Outside of Bitcoin, Crypto / blockchain is still experimental and looking for its usecase. We have seen smart contracts, tokenization of assets, NFTs and meme coins all being tried out here.

[acdha]

Bitcoin isn’t “censorship resistant” with its public ledger turning that into a data mining exercise, especially since it’s not widely used in the real economy so enforcement can be gated at the exchanges.

[anonym29]

You seem to be misunderstanding censorship resistance. It means that no government can block or stop a crypto transaction the way they can credit card and bank transactions, and has nothing to do with FIAT on/offramps at CEXs, nor with the traceability of past transactions that were made successfully.

[acdha]

No, you’re trying to define it too narrowly. The term censorship has never referred solely to prior restraint, for the simple reason that it’s hard to know in advance what someone will do. What makes it effective is the idea of consequences: if you’re thinking about saying “military fighting machine male” in China, you know that you’re not cleverly evading the government but rather setting yourself up for retribution.

For a financial system, this is even more true because nobody sets a flag on their transaction to say it’s criminal and so any government knows that they have to retroactively pursue activity after identifying it as forbidden.

For all forms of censorship, that idea of retroactive consequences is extremely useful because it encourages people not to do things they might otherwise consider because they don’t want to leave a permanent record, and that favors those in power. For example, say someone was thinking about donating to a women’s health clinic but is worried about leaving an indelible Bitcoin record just in case that later is deemed criminal – the other side has harmed their political opposition without even having to do a thing.

Once you understand that, the connection to the exchanges is easier to grasp: that’s where they can deanonymize people and institute transaction blocks without having to go after the entire network. Since statistically nobody pays their bills in Bitcoin, this is quite effective because anyone who needs to participate in the real economy has to go through one of few companies with legal presence, and those companies can be compelled to identify their customers and block transactions involving specific IDs.

Bitcoin is a great design for censors: imagine if the Stasi could’ve blocked every transaction someone made even without knowing their identity! Send or receive a political donation and _poof_ you can’t buy food or pay rent.

[jazzyjackson]

Ok, Bitcoin has censorship resistance as long as you pretend CEXs aren't a factor, you can send money to whoever you want, as long as that person never wants to use a KYC'd offramp

[anonym29]

CEXs aren't a factor unless you wish to trade your valuable, scarce Bitcoin for worthless pieces of paper and linen, backed by nothing for the last 50+ years, that have had a 40% expansion in supply in the last 5 years (AKA counterfeit currency), for whatever bizarre reason someone might want to make such a bad trade.

[codingdave]

They can be here to stay and also be a scam. After all, people do get rich off scams.

What makes it a scam is that there is nothing real behind it, but people think there is, so those who don't understand what is going on can get utterly and completely hosed while other people take their money.

[rlpb]

Is money a scam? Not in itself, but you don’t have to go very far to find a scam that involves money. Similarly, it’s hard to answer your question if you consider “crypto” to be a general concept, unless you properly and narrowly define it as something specific first.

[JohnFen]

The tech itself isn't a scam, but the industry overall seems full of extremely questionable people. I personally won't touch anything crypto because of that. Well, that and I don't see how it's worth bothering with in my own life.

[hooverd]

Bitcoin is stable enough. Don't look too close at Tether though. It's a god awful currency though.

Ethereum is probably the most interesting crypto currency. But most of the real life applications of Eth smart contracts are shitcoin pump and dump scheme.

I don't think crypto is a scam because you know exactly what you're getting. Done crypto finance ransomware gangs who attack hospitals and make their operations possible? Yes. Is it a scam? No.

[adamredwoods]

Bitcoin is stable? I assume you mean in versatility, not value.

[whateveracct]

crypto the tech is not inherently scammy

crypto the industry is mostly built on magical thinking and grifting people tho

[kingkongjaffa]

The technology is not. How people have chosen to use it is by and large pretty scammy or at least purely opportunistic.

Most consumers holding crypto are doing so in the hopes of cashing out later, most (virtually all) retail investors barely understand what a blockchain even is, they're just random people who downloaded coinbase.

At the same time rug pulls and blatant fraud / money laundering / corruption has been enabled with this tech.

Memecoins etc. are frankly the financial wild west and with institutions like the SEC in the bin completely right now the average consumer has no business investing in crypto other than speculatively and, depending on the coin, with a pretty high risk of losing their investment.

[koolhead17]

It's a16z real currency and scammers dream for rest.

[adamredwoods]

The crypto-currency value is manipulated by billionaires, and get-quick-rich schemes. Consider Hawk Tuah and Trump-meme coins. It's overall poor for monetary value, with daily radical fluctuation.

As a technology it's interesting. I think NFTs was an interesting idea, looking for a problem to solve. Proof of ownership can still be substantial. Kickstarter was attempting to use it, but I think took the wrong attitude towards it. And selling NFT "art" was an exploitive get-rich-quick scam from the beginning.

Probably one of the more legit uses was CryptoKitties, where it used blockchain as proof of ownership for game pet generation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoKitties

[rxmmah]

it's like the dotcom bubble, 90& of coins will perish. only 5 or 7 will survive. bitcoin of course, maybe solana, cardano, eth, Monero too.

[486sx33]

Crypto is only monero! Everything else is just a traceable mess

[riskyingo]

In my circle, nobody with some education considers crypto a scam.. And more joiners every day.

The fact that backbone financial institutions are replacing their dinosaur infra with XRP is a big indication that crypto is here to stay.

All the arguments against crypto are still superficial and non-convincing. It seems like most financial institutions could be replaced by smart contracts. People who are into speculation also have a place away from the exclusive stocks club. Others who dont trust governments and banks have a solution now (truckers protest in Canada)..

We are somehow back to the "is internet a scam", or before it "is electricity a scam".. They are not, they are a necessary evolution to meet people'd needs.