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Comment by silasdavis | Hacker News Reader

What a wonderfully content-free discussion on hacker news regarding crypto currency. Again. They're all the same. Crypto scammers. It's so tiresome.

At least acknowledge the difference between ICO funds, NFTs, native tokens, inflationary or deflationary assets, liquidity pools, slush funds with voting and governance attached.

Even getting some nuance on the different ways in which one thinks different crypto assets are a scam would be nice. But here I see no engagement or interest in the particular assets in question or the details of the story. Why?

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The thing is that all of those are avenues for fraud and scams. And very little else. Even the apparently honest actors in the space seem to get wound up investing in fraud and scams somewhere down the line.

> It's so tiresome.

Yes, isn't it? Can we regulate this space under the same rules as other finance yet? Or do we need Joe Public to be ripped off for a few more billion first?

Let's note up front that Coinbase also did not engage with the particular assets in question, instead making a blanket statement that absolutely no securities are on Coinbase (but also that nobody knows how to define a digital security in the first place?). A cynical person like myself would see this as evidence that Coinbase knows there's no story to tell about how the world is better off for having these coins listed. But going to the tweet that started this all (https://twitter.com/cobie/status/1513874972552355846) and spot checking the first three coins:

* Indexed says that you'll "gain exposure to passively-managed crypto index portfolios represented by a single token" and references their $2.25m assets under management.

* Kromatika says that they'll be selling some reserved KROM tokens on an ongoing basis in order to fund their project.

* DappRadar says that, by buying their RADAR token, you will help scale their "Dapp store".

The second and third are perhaps arguable, although I struggle to believe that anyone would buy their tokens except as an investment in the future of their platforms. The first is the most obvious security imaginable. This kind of thing is why I don't usually engage with the details of specific coins; at least when we're talking about exchange-listed coins, they all end up being like this.

> At least acknowledge the difference between ICO funds, NFTs, native tokens, inflationary or deflationary assets, liquidity pools, slush funds with voting and governance attached.

They don't want to distinguish between any of that and instead want to blanket all of them and say that they are all the same. Not all NFTs are JPEGs and there is an obvious difference between a 'coin' vs a 'token' where those blockchains which allow tokens, you will see them have ICO launches since 2016.

> Even getting some nuance on the different ways in which one thinks different crypto assets are a scam would be nice. But here I see no engagement or interest in the particular assets in question or the details of the story. Why?

I think the right approach is to wait for the Ripple vs SEC case which will not only determine whether if XRP (Ripple's blockchain coin) is a security or not, but the wider implications on other coins and tokens. But as for ICOs in general, the SEC has already cracked down on unregistered ICOs in 2018, making them illegal in the US.

Overall I don't think you will get a rational response on this site about anything mentioning crypto. Instead, the typical response you will get on HN is always to the extreme: 'All of crypto is scam', 'Ban it all, ban everything crypto, all of it', 'web3 should die in a fire'.

It is indeed the same absolutist nonsense that doesn't add any new arguments other than spreading regurgitated garbage that is recycled from other anti-crypto supporters and repeated here.

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