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m4c_4ddr3ss t1_je9vu4c wrote

It was obvious crypto was a scam from the start

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danielravennest t1_jea4emy wrote

It wasn't at the start. I was an early bitcoin miner (2011), and people were exploring the uses of digital currency. But it rapidly attracted scams and fraud once serious money was involved, due to transactions being hard to trace and irreversible. So it ended up like this

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400921FB54442D18 t1_jeac8t5 wrote

Sure, but at the start, people were asking "what are the use cases for this that don't include serious money getting involved?" and the answer that early bitcoin miners gave was basically "uh, I dunno, something something revolution?" So it was obvious that serious money was going to need to get involved, and from that, it was obvious that it would rapidly attract scams and fraud.

Just because early bitcoin miners couldn't read the writing on the wall doesn't mean it wasn't there for others to see.

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voice-of-reason_ t1_jeaj259 wrote

How exactly is Bitcoin a scam then? What aspect of its structure makes it a scam?

If you called the crypto market in general a scam I could understand but Bitcoin has been around for the best part of 15 years, has no CEO or leader and is literally just a payment network. Also it’s code is open source so anyone can see and read it.

I’ve never seen another scam that lasted as long and has those same features.

Bitcoin is a hedge against regular money, if you don’t see an issue with regular money then you won’t see the use for Bitcoin. I personally think regular money is one of the biggest issues the modern world faces.

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gansmaltz t1_jeam0et wrote

True, bitcoins are resilient for crypto, but why is it that, proportionally, so many of its users are scammers? I can't think of many situations where digital dollars would fail where Bitcoin is even accessible much less a useful medium of exchange where cash wouldnt be more useful.

Bitcoin wants to be the dollar bill of the internet but it can't even remain anonymous. By design every transaction becomes part of the blockchain for everyone, right?

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SlowMotionPanic t1_jeaqps5 wrote

> True, bitcoins are resilient for crypto, but why is it that, proportionally, so many of its users are scammers?

How do you know so many use it for illegal purposes—specifically scams? Over 1 million people own at least some Bitcoin. Most of its use is for investment, which is why wallet activity is chronically low. People buy and hold it like gold or any other asset they think will appreciate.

>I can’t think of many situations where digital dollars would fail where Bitcoin is even accessible much less a useful medium of exchange where cash wouldnt be more useful. >

  1. That doesn’t have anything to do with the claims that a disproportionate number of Bitcoin users are scammers.
  2. People don’t necessarily get into Bitcoin because they think a fiat currency is going to fail. They hold it like an investment because it tends to appreciate over time.
  3. Bitcoin’s strength has never had to shine thankfully. That is, governments you and I live under haven’t failed and experienced currency collapse. But, for an example here, it is cheaper and much faster for me to convert cash into Bitcoin and hold in my wallet and travel internationally than engage an international wire transfer. There’s risk involved, of course. But one thing I don’t risk is having any cash I’m traveling with summarily seized without any recourse. I don’t have to worry about my government turning fascist and freezing my accounts to prevent me from leaving. It’s a hedge, like any decent investment.

> > Bitcoin wants to be the dollar bill of the internet but it can’t even remain anonymous.

What an odd pivot. The USD isn’t even anonymous unless you pay in cash. Bitcoin was never founded to be anonymous. It was founded to be a trustless system with a fixed amount of currency. It cracks me up that so many people in this thread are asserting that Bitcoin is private which is why criminals use it, when it is ridiculously easy to track transactions. People even put watches on wallets for fun to write articles about dormant wallets becoming active again, and the world governments have caught criminals when they try to use or move funds after a crime, even years later, because it is all part of the public ledger.

And our bank accounts are equally not private. Bitcoin is at best pseudo anonymous because of how it spawns various wallets by default and doesn’t have a central database of users to lookup real world info about.

>By design every transaction becomes part of the blockchain for everyone, right?

Yes, that’s how it remains trustless and secure. Do you know my bank account number? No? Do you know my Bitcoin wallet address? I could send a payment right now and use a one-time wallet. This isn’t as big of an argument as you think. If anything, it disproves that Bitcoin is an attractive target for criminals because it isn’t truly anonymous. You have workarounds at best.

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400921FB54442D18 t1_jeatgdr wrote

I don't know or care enough about Bitcoin to address any of your technical points -- I'm sure /u/gansmaltz will take that on -- but there are at least two obvious flaws in your claims here:

> People buy and hold it like gold or any other asset they think will appreciate.

I'm old enough to remember when my grandparents were certain that buying a bunch of silver and hiding it in their garage would pay for my college education. When they died, we cleaned it out and sold it for about $20.

... I don't think I need to spell out where I'm going with this. Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

> People don’t necessarily get into Bitcoin because they think a fiat currency is going to fail.

In the early days of Bitcoin, this was the major argument that enthusiasts were using to try to encourage people to get into crypto -- being isolated from the risks of a state-backed fiat currency. So, to hear the crypto community now say that that isn't and wasn't the point, means that some substantial fraction of that community must be lying. Either they're lying now when they say that isn't the purpose, or they were lying 10-15 years ago when they said that that was the purpose, but either way, this doesn't say anything good about whether we should trust the crypto community with our money.

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voice-of-reason_ t1_jebw3a0 wrote

Have you read the Bitcoin white paper? It states it’s purpose in their.

You can’t judge a technology based on what some people on a subreddit say, you base it off of what the creator says.

Bitcoin is a decentralised peer to peer payment network - as described by the creator - that has been operating with no significant downtime (I.e. 0.000x%) 24/7 365 since 2009. If you don’t see how that is a good investment I don’t know what to tell you.

In you’re example you talk about silver being essentially worthless even though lots of people thought it had value. The reality is that this is the situation of the USD, GBP ETC. These currencies are seen by essentially everyone as safe but they have been collapsing slowly for the last 50 or so years, I’m sure as an older person you remember and have actively experienced this with the cost of everything increasing over your lifespan.

To me, in 2023 Bitcoin is the cash of your example and cash is the silver. It’s fine to disagree with that but every year and every recession more and more people realise the value of a neutral asset like Bitcoin.

Inflation over the past year has been bad, but hyperinflation (which is inevitable for all regular currencies) will kill your nations economy, Bitcoin doesn’t suffer that issue.

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gansmaltz t1_jeasn4n wrote

Nfts are good for artists too, right?

Edit: buy the dip! To the moon!

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danielravennest t1_jefl59e wrote

> "what are the use cases for this that don't include serious money getting involved?"

What people were trying to do back then was get it accepted as an alternate currency. It would be used for things like international money transfer, where the fees are very high, or online purchases, which wasn't near as developed as it is today. I used it as fundraising for my project, like GoFundMe but without fees.

Another proposed use was microtransactions, since bitcoins are divisible to 8 decimal places (0.01 microbitcoins). That would be for things like reading one article, without subscribing to an entire newspaper or magazine.

It was also assumed back then that the original Bitcoin was in no way "production software". It was supposed to be a rough proof-of-concept of a distributed time-stamp and record-keeping ledger (the blockchain). As it turned out, it became the dominant cryptocoin and the code never evolved much. All the evolution since then came from " altcoins" (other cryptocoins).

> "uh, I dunno, something something revolution?"

You either have never seen or are making fun of the forums where all of this was discussed, including several subreddits on this site.

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TrexPushupBra t1_jeaf4lw wrote

The fundamental problem with bitcoin and crypto currencies is that the people making them want them to be inherently deflationary.

So it is useless as a currency because it incentivizes not spending it on anything so an economy based on it will collapse.

https://n26.com/en-eu/blog/deflation

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danielravennest t1_jefp5ey wrote

The original bitcoin was intended to be a proof-of-concept experiment. It deliberately had a finite circulation to prevent inflation, and a declining block reward (which is where new bitcoins come from) to encourage early miners to participate and secure the blockchain.

New and improved versions were supposed to remedy whatever problems were exposed by the original. For example, a 1 MB block size turned out to be too restrictive once many people started using it.

New cryptocoins do exist, but way too many of them. 80% of the crypto market is represented by 6 coins, and the other 23,000 account for 20%. Most of them don't do anything new and improved, so we called them "shitcoins" because they "don't do shit" for users.

The so-called "stablecoins", whose value is closely tied to the US dollar, now account for 84% of total crypto trading volume. They are now the currency that people are using day-to-day. The original bitcoin and a few of the others are the "store of value" coins, like gold or real estate for everyone else. Not something you spend now, but hold for later. In fact, I never spent any of the bitcoins I mined. I held them for about 7 years and then sold them at a profit, not unlike I did with various homes and other property during my life.

NOTE: Despite my good experiences with Bitcoin, I now warn people away from crypto as a whole because it has too many scams and losses from hacks.

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voice-of-reason_ t1_jea97op wrote

I can’t read it coz paywall but this article is talking about cash app not crypto…?

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fractalfrenzy t1_jebx4t8 wrote

This article doesn't even mention crypto. You didn't even read it, you just want to shoehorn in your anti-crypto agenda.

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