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.<p>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.
> but there is still a lot of dissent crypto is a ponzi scheme or for fraudsters<p>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.<p>But it's not fair to paint with too broad a brush.<p>It's just the 99% that give the 1% a bad name.
Ledgers and cryptographic chains and proofs aren't scam. But, the entire pig butchery and like, is scam.<p>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.<p>Quorum, usually overlooked. Your transaction is final!! Not if the quorum decides to repudiate.<p>Forensic accountants love cryptos. I row with one who said evidence chains are delightful even with mixers.<p>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.<p>Merkle was smart. The logical structure is interesting for all kinds of things. PQC in dnnsec includes models using them.
Is crypto a scam? It basically works as advertised, so technically it's not a scam.<p>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:<p>POSITIVE SOCIAL BENEFITS<p>1. Money can be transferred from one person to another without intermediaries such as banks.<p>2. It provides an alternative to hyper-inflating currencies in places like Venezuela.<p>NEGATIVE SOCIAL COSTS<p>1. Data centers waste enormous amounts of energy mining crypto.<p>2. Crypto facilitates useless financial speculation and criminal activity, e.g., ransomware payments, illicit commerce, etc.<p>In the final analysis, the benefits are rather small, whereas the costs are significant and will continue to grow as the crypto industry expands.
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.<p>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.
Crypto exchanges sure seem like scams…<p>All the convenience and security of a bank account without the security or regulation.<p>People talk up crypto for being decentralized and then park their money in exchanges run by fraudsters…
It's 20% various scams, 70% speculation/ponzi, 10% cult-like obsession/people deriving their identity from it, and 100% energy-wasting tech.<p>As for having staying power, all kinds of scams have nonetheless enjoyed staying power (gambling, MLMs, scientology, major political parties).
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.
Crypto in theory should be very useful suffers from realities:<p>1. People want to use government controlled moneybdue to the stability benefits:<p>* Stable value in short term<p>* Legal system can clawback money<p>* Banks have anti fraud system and some level of accountability<p>* Security is taken care of<p>2. Shops don't generally take crypto, they take fiat money<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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).
Who do you think benefits from each transaction having a unique ID? Most cryptos are so brazen they even make traceability of funds unavoidable.<p>Crypto solves lots of agency problems and makes those that promote it rich.
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.
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.<p>Gambling seems like the best comparison to me.
A lot of things can be true at the same time:<p>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.
They can be here to stay and also be a scam. After all, people do get rich off scams.<p>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.
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.
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.
Bitcoin is stable enough. Don't look too close at Tether though. It's a god awful currency though.<p>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.<p>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.
The technology is not. How people have chosen to use it is by and large pretty scammy or at least purely opportunistic.<p>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.<p>At the same time rug pulls and blatant fraud / money laundering / corruption has been enabled with this tech.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>Probably one of the more legit uses was CryptoKitties, where it used blockchain as proof of ownership for game pet generation.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoKitties" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoKitties</a>
In my circle, nobody with some education considers crypto a scam.. And more joiners every day.<p>The fact that backbone financial institutions are replacing their dinosaur infra with XRP is a big indication that crypto is here to stay.<p>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)..<p>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.