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>There are many lists created by reputable players such as Aave and Gemini which cover the entire gamut of projects users want to trade without exposing end users to scam tokens.

Reputable how? like ftx a couple weeks ago? Gemini holds an F rating by the BBB and a massive amount of complaints on trust pilot.[1][2]

This is their marketing message "Put your crypto to work. With Gemini Earn, you can receive up to 8.05% APY on your cryptocurrency." This is done by buying and holding stablecoins. Just curious how do you suppose they return such high APY on stablecoins without doing the exact same scam as FTX?

[1]https://www.bbb.org/us/ny/new-york/profile/cryptocurrency-ex...

[2]https://www.trustpilot.com/review/gemini.com

[edit] added quote for clarity

BBB is an organization meant to scam companies. They provide no value or merit.

> an organization meant to scam…They provide no value or merit.

I hope this irony was intended!

You're mostly right about the "A+" ratings--businesses that pay can get their ratings cleaned up--but I'd certainly take an "F" rating as a datapoint.

Not sure what gemini has to do with this, but most people who actually think crypto is interesting will tell you that _any_ centralized exchange (to include coinbase, gemini, the NYSE, even the ones in the future that haven’t been made yet) is against the ethos of crypto. Uniswap is an entirely different class of thing.

The only scams possible in the _logic_ of Uniswap are those which would be considered bugs in the code.

Obviously, as this article points out — that’s not a panacea for _all_ scams. But I am surprised that people on a forum about hacking can’t see why eliminating an entire class of bugs could be useful.

Ah the “No True Scotsman” fallacy.

No true crypto enthusiasts would use a centralized exchange. If they’re using an exchange, they must not be a true crypto enthusiast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Sure, differentiating between two categories of things is a logical fallacy I guess.

"Not your keys, not your coins" has been repeated ad nauseum on crypto forums for years. It is very much part of the ethos and received wisdom, even if often discarded.

To say that centralized exchanges whom you trust to keep your assets in their custody run counter to the spirit of a system conceived with trustlessness as the defining feature is not rhetorical voodoo or fallacious reasoning.

They would use one, but they wouldn’t complain when it went down and swallowed customer funds.

Is there a “Every Man a Scotsman” saying?

Is saying “most of something” a universal generalisation?

The comment didn’t say “you’re not a crypto enthusiast _unless_ you believe X”. It just made an assertion (which, for what it’s worth, I think is incorrect) that the majority have a certain belief.

You’re both completely missing the point (hence, my somewhat terse original reply).

It really doesn’t matter to the meaning of my comment whether the first sentence exists or not. You can simply remove it if you like, the rest of the comment is still comprehensible. And, most importantly, its main point - to differentiate between the kind of exchange the gp was referencing and the kind the post is about, still stands.

This is all just a case of nitpicking some small detail that is so common and annoying. It’s the “your battery is dying” to a screenshot.

Even disregarding that, are we really posting wikipedia links to No True Scotsman in 2022? Has anyone not heard of NTS? It just comes across as pedantic.

Finally, you’re all hung up on the definition of “crypto enthusiast” — but it doesn’t even have meaning in the specific context. It’s just an attempt to shorten a much longer comment (like this one).

In my head, crypto enthusiast was just the 15 character version of “that group of people who are very interested in the programming and theory of decentralized economies. They tend to attend crypto conferences, program solidity or other smart contract dsls, and use phrases like ‘not your keys, not your crypto’”.

In that context the statement was mostly tautological stage setting for the rest of the comment, so for the whole thing to get derailed by low effort, kind of rude, attempts “but it’s an almost, but not quite logical fallacy (well, NTS isn’t actually a logical fallacy, but I am going to snarkily imply it is one)” sniping is not only wasted space … it’s boring.

Ah the "Straw Man" fallacy.

Not addressing the argument, but pointing out a fallacy on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

I get your point, and it's worth pointing out.

It's just neutral infrastructure. Trying to think of an analogy, I thought... "It would be like saying 98% of transactions in $USD are scams, that wouldn't mean $USD are unsafe to use."

But once i said that in my head... it would definitely say something about a traditional currency if 98% of transactions were scams. (I know uniswap isn't a currency, that just came out of my attempt at an analogy). Something not good. About something. Maybe it doesn't mean uniswap is unsafe to use, but wow, it means something is a mess.

If it just means that there are a crazy ton of people trying scams with tokens, that sure seems like something to be aware of.

It's important to note that this paper is discussing listings and not transactions/volume. Almost no one used or bought these tokens and 99% of Uniswap's volume is normal safe things like ETH, DAI, etc.

If 98% of Uniswap trades were scams then I definitely wouldn't be here discussing it.

No, because the number of tokens doesn't matter, the trade volume does. It's not the case that 98% of trade volume/value is scams.

The same applies to your USD analogy. It doesn't matter if 98% of transactions are scams if these 98% are worth a few dollars only. A scammer could make a million transaction worth a cent each. That's very different from a trillion dollars being used in a few big scam transactions.

"which provides a guaranteed way to swap any asset for any other asset no matter who created it or how controversial it is which is a good primitive for humanity to be able to rely on."

Finally, somewhere I can sell my slaves easily!

do you dispute the OP title claim?

Why would I dispute it? At best the title is misleading though as most readers likely aren't aware of how Uniswap works and will think "97% of the tokens are scams so Uniswap is unsafe to use" which isn't true in the slightest.

Yeah, people should remember that they have 2.3% chance of not getting scammed on uniswap. That's the definition of safe to use.

Misconceptions like yours are why the title is misleading. If you go to Uniswap right now you will not see any of these tokens and have a near 0% chance of being scammed.

> If you go to Uniswap right now you will not see any of these tokens and have a near 0% chance of being scammed

If there's 100 tokens listed on the front page, and one of them is a scam, that may be near 0%, but it's equally near to 2%.

I'd be pretty confident that there's a >1% chance of being scammed on a platform like this. FTT wasn't thought to be a scam until it was proven to be.

Unless a token issuer does so with fully audited accounting with real assets backing their tokens, why should any token not be default assumed to be a scam, instead of default assumed to be valid?

Popularity and usage doesn't change this point. USDT may be incredibly popular, but it also lacks credibility.

Disclaimer: I still remain long BTC (lol@myself)

> ...but it's equally near to 2%.

Ignoring anything else you might have gotten wrong, the comment you are responding to didn't say a 2.3% chance of being scammed, it said a 2.3% chance of NOT being scammed, which is nowhere near 0% or 2%, as it comes from abusing the 97.7% figure from the paper.

As amused as I am to be roasted by the great cydia himself, ignoring all the other things I got wrong, I wasn’t actually responding to the 2.3% claim, but rather the original claim that the top 100 tokens on the front page weren’t scams.

I think the majority of those top 100 tokens are not properly audited with tangible assets backing them.

FTT remains the most recent glowing example.

It's not misconceptions, it's accepting that the whole ecosystem is fraudulent, and that as an intermediation layer, uniswap fails to protect consumers. If any payment processor was letting 97.7% of its merchant users be fraudulent, they would be closed yesterday.

This paper is discussing listings and not volume. No one is claiming these tokens had any amount of meaningful volume and most likely weren't even traded by a real user. If 97% of Uniswap's volume was fraudulent then I wouldn't even give it the time of day.

To fix your analogy, it's like a payment processor having thousands of fake storefronts able to accept payment. If 97% of their volume was to those fake entities then definitely shut them down but most of the volume would be Amazon and Walmart and the fake storefronts wouldn't even be a rounding error.

Volume info: https://info.uniswap.org/

This is logically incoherent. It would only be true if you chose a token completely at random instead of choosing a widely-used token you wanted to use.

Reminds me of "it either works or it doesn't, so there's a 50/50 chance"

Trusting all individuals to make safe decisions in a marketplace flooded with scams is just not scalable. You cannot educate every user in how to identify a scam.

And excluding users who haven't gone through that education hardly seems like the democratization of finance that these services advertise.

If we’re talking about Uniswap specifically, it actually does a decent job of adding guardrails (only listing curated tokens from the Token Lists standard) and warning about unsafe actions (confirmation prompts when you are adding an unlisted token to swap).

So uneducated users would really have to go out of their way to get scammed through there. Like having to go out of their way to follow up on a solicitation from something caught in a Gmail spam filter.

As much as If genuinely like a marketplace for shitcoin/scamcoins that I can gamble on and hope to beat the exit dump crash, I admit that uneducated consumers protections probably should trump my desires to participate in this gambles.

97% of the tokens are scams so it is safe to use? Or am I misunderstanding your point?

If you go to Uniswap right now you won't see any of these tokens. You run no risk of getting scammed by using Uniswap unless you go out of your way and manually add them.

Which you have to do to use Uniswap, right?

No. Uniswap will display the Uniswap Labs default list from Token Lists[0], which covers a lot of the legitmate tokens. Token Lists has additional lists from other protocols if you want to expand the listings. Unless a token is playing a long con (FTT I guess) it’s unlikely to be listed in these.

If you want to trade an unlisted token by adding the contract address manually, sure you can do that. But then it’s on you if you get scammed, like if you follow through on a solicitation from a spam email.

[0] https://tokenlists.org/

Looking at the paper abstract, it says the identified scams by looking at transactions. So it seems at least some people are manually adding them and getting scammed. Or are you saying anyone who does that is by definition using Uniswap wrong and shouldn’t be counted as being scammed on Uniswap?

The paper does not analyze the transactions directly unless I'm missing that piece. There are a number of reasons accounts would interact with the scam tokens such as the scamming group filling up the liquidity pool, creating fake volume to add legitimacy, and other steps to complete the scam.

There's also the obvious case of the scammers getting a user to actually buy the token (perhaps through spam email or "pump groups" that give explicit instructions on how to perform the swap) which I'm not saying has never happened but I do claim is more rare. Even the obviously silly scam emails do have the occasional person click on them and lose their money. The upside is that getting scammed on Uniswap is actually harder as you need to manually bypass safety features.

> The paper does not analyze the transactions directly unless I'm missing that piece.

It looks at transactions and attempts to classify coins as scam or not.

It doesn’t make any claims about the volume in scam coins. That’s more a clickbait headline and HN thread thing.

It’s most trying to contribute an algorithm for identifying scam coins.

See the appendix for features from the transactions that they used for their algorithm.

They are not using it wrong the same way someone being scammed by Nigerian prince spam are not using email wrong.

Uniswap filters the tokens available the same modern email providers filters email. If you go looking in the spam folder and fall pray to a scam there, it is your fault, not the fault of the email provider.

That makes sense, but would you say email then is safe? Or is it something you should watch out for scams on?

I am mainly wondering about Uniswap being described as safe.

If you are a scammer, you would typically do wash trading (or hire someone to do wash trading) for your own token to make it look like there is legitimate activity. Just because these tokens have been swapped doesn't mean this was done by retail. The vast majority of these tokens are probably "failed scams" where the scammers tried but failed to generate traction.

Remember that you can be aware of something being a scam but still trade it, since you believe that the thing won’t collapse just yet. A very risky behavior of course, but it doesn’t mean that you have been scammed yourself.

Does Uniswap prominently advertise that as a warning to users?

I don't know anything about the space, but it sounds like a fact and statistic that should be front and centre in peoples face all the time.

Yes, when you add a token manually, you’re warned that anyone can add a token and that you should exercise caution.

How is it misleading it's an accurate statement of the findings of an analysis. Your argument is they won't see those tokens cause they're gonna search out the one they like (and that one won't be a scam?)

What they'll conclude reading this is "wow, crypto is full of scams" and be right.

It's accurate in the sense that "97% of email is scams and phishing" which is a neat fact but doesn't indict email as a failure.

Email and Uniswap are both useful tools that are safe to use for even non-technical users. In fact Uniswap is safer as spam filters aren't 100% reliable but Uniswap's lists nearly are.

Great analogy!

Sargos explained how it’s misleading.

> “97% of the tokens are scams so Uniswap is unsafe to use"

People are likely to draw the unsafe assumption.

Sargos attempted to clarify that some safety is created with filtering via a trusted list.

He explained his argument. I disagreed.

My conclusion reading it was, crypto tokens are 98% scams. Uniswap is an exchange. It's a utility, using an open protocol. It's makeup reflects the makeup of the domain.

You asked how it was misleading.

I told you.

97% of the things available in my vanguard or Charles Schwab aren't scams.

It's preposterous to call a marketplace where less then 3% of the offerings are "legit" a safe market to use.

This misconception is exactly why I made my comment. If you go to Uniswap right now you won't have access to any of these tokens. You are just about as safe as using Charles Schwab.

My Schwab account has insurance and oversight…there’s no universe where Uniswap is anywhere close to as safe as Schwab.

Uniswap is open source, and if you use it as an exchange, it doesn't even hold your funds. I'd argue that since your funds are not there, then your funds are safer than with a custodian and insurance. Lehman was also insured, wasn't it?

Yeah? You can't pick apples from an orange tree either. What do shares of a company/futures/fund have to do with this market in particular?

Its a digital marketplace. The digital space is full of attempted scams that never come to fruition, and their presence is no indication of engagement. Is that really that hard to wrap your head around?

What percentage of the internet consists of pornography and scams?

I’m sure the AOL walled garden had much higher quality content than the internet at large.

I agree. This is the problem that Google has. A big chunk of the websites are seo spam, fake support scams, and other nasty or untuneful sites. And Google has to find the few useful ones. Some people ask to not use pagerank[1] and just show all the results in random order, but in that case you would get a irrelevant list.

[1] or whatever they are using now

there are over 12,000 OTC stock tickers, these are mostly scams. I know Schwab allows OTC trading. The NYSE+Nasdaq combined also have around 12,000 tickers. So 50% of the things available on Schwab are scams.

Maybe not these days with the popularity of index funds, but it wasn't that long ago that places like Charles Schwab would push actively managed funds that would enrich fund managers while underperforming the market, and then they would close those funds and start new ones. Not quite a rug pull, as you'd keep the remainder of your money, but not great!

Any system that is open to the public will (sadly) have to deal with bad actors.

85% of all email is spam[1]. But that's not a value judgment on the technology--Humanity can still get value from email.

Sturgeon's law says 90% of everything is crap. If you deal with other humans, you need a way to sift through that crap. In the case of email, that means use a spam filter. In the case of crypto, it means don't buy shitcoins.

[1] https://dataprot.net/statistics/spam-statistics/

Judging by some of the kneejerky comments in this thread, we should definitely shut down email.

The OP title is misleading because the relevant number to think about with regards to scams on Uniswap is the percentage of value traded, not the percentage of tokens launched.

People can and do spam Uniswap with fake tokens, because it is wide open and anyone can interact with it. That doesn't necessarily mean that large amounts are being lost trading these scam tokens. I don't know the numbers myself, but if 99% percent of Uniswap trades are WBTC, ETH, LINK, USDC, DAI, and other big-name tokens, and 1% are scams, then the scale of the problem is not at all what is implied by the headline.

If someone is serious about measuring fraud on UniSwap, they would look into the percentage of value traded accounted for by these scam tokens.

This question matters from a policy perspective because headlines like this disparage one of the best things to emerge from crypto in recent years (DeFi) and deflect criticism away from where it is deserved (centralization).

DeFi apps like Uniswap are safer than centralized exchanges because you can see everything that is happening on-chain, and maintain custody of your own tokens yourself. Most people who were relying of FTX have been screwed by the exchange itself, regardless of the market value of the token that they thought they owned. If you lose money on Uniswap it's not because the exchange did something wrong, but because the issuer of the token did something wrong, or simply because the token you purchased fell in value.

If you are trading ETH, WBTC, LINK, USDC on Uniswap, you are better protected than if you are trading these same tokens on any of the centralized exchanges.

How are you evaluating which tokens are legitimate here?

I'm not. One of the points is that I don't have to as TokenLists provides a distributed way of curating legitimate tokens which means you can choose who you personally trust to determine what is legitimate.