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Comment by puranjay | Hacker News Reader

Crypto is a scam and the only reason anyone should partake in it is to either test your gullibility, or scam others.

Anything that 4chan's /biz/ board promotes aggressively is a scam 9/10 times

Many plants in nature will kill you if you eat them, but can you say that "Plants are deadly to humans"?

It's a bit like money. Money itself isn't bad, but people do incredibly bad things to get money. Likewise, crypto isn't "a scam". People make a lot of scams related to cryptocurrency, but that doesn't mean many of the concepts of cryptocurrency are bad or a scam.

Bitcoin may be quite imperfect, but it's also quite useful for exchanging value quickly and cheaply, and without banks getting to decide if you can or cannot.

would you accept payouts from a person(in the US) who only agreed to pay you in Zimbabwean dollars? that's the argument you're making...sure the currency has value but are you prepared to stomach the risk that dealing with it entails?

Well not to buy a pizza, probably not.

But if I wanted to buy drugs, then, yeah probably.

Also 90% of the population is in the developing world where it might actually be the case that BTC is more trusted than their local currency.

I think it’s myopic to consider the value of crypto against the 1st world’s banking system with respect to ‘standard’ transactions.

The value lies in either: ‘non-standard’ transactions (buying black market goods) or in developing nations.

Even in majority of developing countries, it's better to keep your money in Fiat or even USD account(where allowed) becuase you don't suddenly loose 80% in a month or two (Exceptions bring countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela). Sure, you could loose say 20 to 30% due to fiscal adjustments due to many factors over a year, but almost everyone in your country would likely be in the same boat as you and things like PPP (for locally manufactured goods) might adjust to minimize some of the impact

A lot of developing countries prohibit currency exchange. For example I moved from the US to Tanzania about 6 months ago and the government has outlawed currency exchanges. There are only 2 ways to get USD: 1) the black market, which is expensive, 10% above the “fair” price 2) the National bank, which is 25% over the “fair” price.

I think BTC might be an attractive alternative here.

Moreover, by some measures, annual inflation is 7-10%. So holding the local currency is highly penalized

Nearly 3B of the developing world population is in India and China. I'm Indian and BTC is virtually banned here. Not that it has much utility - our payment systems are very robust and essentially free. UPI, a mobile-first payment protocol, beats anything crypto can throw up.

Two very different beasts. When you use the mobile payment system all your traces and data are being exposed, even much more than using cash. While people who need anonymity, or at least want to be hard to track, be it for buying drugs or escaping the unstable local currencies, definitely have a valid use case for crypto. Lumping everything under the term "scam" is shallow.

What does a scam mean? That it doesn’t have value? That it only has value for a select few scammers?

Crypto as a way to avoid taxes, buy goods on the black market, and as an alternative to a shaky local fiat currency are all great examples of crypto’s value.

Also, there’s also the investment angle. It (hopefully) operates as an uncorrelated store of value much like gold or other precious metals.

I think it would be very hard to argue that BTC and ETH are scams, that is, created for the purpose of the scammer stealing from the “scammee.”

Crypto itself isn't a scam, but its strengths also helps scammers thrive because a financial institution can't reverse malicious activity. This can be thought of as the same risk of loss as any investment. "If I convert to crypto, there's a non-zero chance my money could just disappear". This is (usually) necessary to take this risk into account when valuing crypto assets, so in a sense, scamming is part of crypto as long as crypto wants to be exchanged for fiat currency.

Money is involved. What do you expect? Most of the finance world is scammy, too.

Bitcoin only got as much traction as it did because of the financial crisis.

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