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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

Without the exchanges, buying and selling for 'real' currency would be next to impossible.

Without access to 'real' money, the get rich quick crowd (and probably a lot of the scam crowd, and probably a lot of the dark market crowd) move on. With them gone... there's probably not very much left of a cryptocurrency user base.

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Seems like there's two ways of looking at exchanges: using it to buy/sell, then immediately transferring to a personal wallet. Or using it as some kind of investment. I'm criticizing the latter

Wrt to the get rich quick crowd, things were fine before they showed up. They should go somewhere

10 years ago I used to hold the concept of 'accredited investor' in disdain. It's largely just creating a giant paywall (or at least wealthwall) preventing lower income individuals from accessing some of the most potentially lucrative ventures. But yeah, the past ten years of seeing people decide to go buy BTC on news of "BTC reaches record high! It's going to to the Moon!" and then decide to go sell it on news of "BTC is crashing! This is the end!", and then [loudly] complain about losing money, or even that it's all a scam, has really made me change my mind and, in part, my worldview.

> I'm criticizing the latter

I think if you remove the latter there won't be many people left playing with cryptocurrency. Which would be fine from my perspective (a lot fewer people being ripped off in what appears to basically be a huge unregulated casino). And it sounds like from yours too.

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