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Comment by SCLeo | Hacker News Reader

Literally everyone (100%) I knew that are into cryptocurrencies are primarily using them as speculative asset. That alone is not a problem. The problem is when they advocate cryptocurrencies or blockchains, they always talk about "decentralization", "uncensorable", "privacy", "future of web" or some other crap that they are not use the cryptocurrencies primarily for. That is what makes cryptocurrencies fraudulent.

If most (in my personal observation, 100%) use cases of such sector seems fraudulent, I do believe it is justified to generalize to the entire sector.

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Yes, dumb people exist; and, apparently, you are even surrounded them! However, that doesn't mean that an entire concept of technology is inherently without substance: it just means that when something involves money and the world is in an uncertain time that lots of people are going to go overboard with it without any real understanding.

Decentralization, privacy, and censorship resistance are indeed goals of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. In addition, they also serve as speculative assets.

What's fraudulent about that? Cryptocurrencies do in fact provide all of that (not all of them provide all of these guarantees, but some do).

You completely missed my point.

Simply put: People use cryptocurrencies as speculative asset while they claim they are using them for decentralization and other properties.

I still don't see the fraud? Just because your friends/associates aren't using cryptocurrencies for that purpose right now, doesn't mean that other people aren't, or that they won't be in the future.

This is akin to saying that seat belts are fraudulent because they aren't saving your life every single day. You might not need the properties of censorship resistance, privacy and so on right now, until one day you do.

I would much rather live in a world where such currencies are available in case I need to rely on them.

Yes but do you understand what speculation means? Speculation means betting on future value.

Those things aren't so incompatible. You can hope they'll go up because they have useful properties.

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