> Someone not understanding what they're buying when the information is all publicly available doesn't make it a scam.
Literally the entire basis of free market ideology is the notion that buyers and sellers operate on an equal footing and a presumption of good faith can be assumed, or at least, that's how it's been sold historically. So, so much of crypto is just outright lies. The notion that every member of a project, for instance, can all walk away rich is at face value a lie: because crypto cannot create wealth, merely move it, the people who cash out big on top can only do that because so many others have bought in on the bottom. It's just a techy retooling of a bigger fool's scam: you can only make money on the asset you've bought by finding a buyer to buy it at a higher price later. The only way you can conceptualize these things as a store of value is to presume an infinite chain of bigger fools ready to buy it at an ever increasing price, ad infinitum. Or, if you prefer to operate in reality, there will eventually be a bag holder, someone who holds something that is now worthless and cannot sell it.
Like, for example, all the people who hold Ethereum Classic, which is probably why it's worth a tenth what Ethereum is: because the principles of this technology don't fucking matter, what matters is the traction the coin has with the investor class, and the people who are in this to make money (which is the vast, vast majority of them) are going to follow the chains that the big stakeholders go to.
> Again, a scam implies someone being "misled". If you buy some ecstasy and its laced with fentanyl, you were scammed (to say the least). If you buy ecstasy and you get ecstasy, you were not scammed as you got exactly what you asked for.
And this again is exactly the attitude I absolutely loathe in the tech space. This notion that if you aren't smart enough or knowledgeable enough to see the bad shit coming, if you, by your very basic human nature can be taken advantage of by someone who knows more, than you apparently deserve to be. Buyer beware.
That attitude sucks ass. If the crypto guys were really about changing the world for the better, they would be building a financial system that is, yes, detached from the current, highly biased and corrupting one that is rife with problems, and on-boarding people with education. With understanding of the underlying tech, imparting knowledge about the failings and foibles of the systems they're replacing, and showing a new, better version, decoupled from the corrupting influences of governments they claim render fiat unusable. That's NOT what they've done here. They have not built a replacement financial system, they built a near exact copy of the current one, minus all manner of consumer protections, any insurance of value, with a singular goal: to recreate the structural inequities of the old system, with them on top. That's fucking it. That is the entire difference between fiat and crypto.
Literally the entire basis of free market ideology is the notion that buyers and sellers operate on an equal footing and a presumption of good faith can be assumed, or at least, that's how it's been sold historically. So, so much of crypto is just outright lies. The notion that every member of a project, for instance, can all walk away rich is at face value a lie: because crypto cannot create wealth, merely move it, the people who cash out big on top can only do that because so many others have bought in on the bottom. It's just a techy retooling of a bigger fool's scam: you can only make money on the asset you've bought by finding a buyer to buy it at a higher price later. The only way you can conceptualize these things as a store of value is to presume an infinite chain of bigger fools ready to buy it at an ever increasing price, ad infinitum. Or, if you prefer to operate in reality, there will eventually be a bag holder, someone who holds something that is now worthless and cannot sell it.
Like, for example, all the people who hold Ethereum Classic, which is probably why it's worth a tenth what Ethereum is: because the principles of this technology don't fucking matter, what matters is the traction the coin has with the investor class, and the people who are in this to make money (which is the vast, vast majority of them) are going to follow the chains that the big stakeholders go to.
> Again, a scam implies someone being "misled". If you buy some ecstasy and its laced with fentanyl, you were scammed (to say the least). If you buy ecstasy and you get ecstasy, you were not scammed as you got exactly what you asked for.
And this again is exactly the attitude I absolutely loathe in the tech space. This notion that if you aren't smart enough or knowledgeable enough to see the bad shit coming, if you, by your very basic human nature can be taken advantage of by someone who knows more, than you apparently deserve to be. Buyer beware.
That attitude sucks ass. If the crypto guys were really about changing the world for the better, they would be building a financial system that is, yes, detached from the current, highly biased and corrupting one that is rife with problems, and on-boarding people with education. With understanding of the underlying tech, imparting knowledge about the failings and foibles of the systems they're replacing, and showing a new, better version, decoupled from the corrupting influences of governments they claim render fiat unusable. That's NOT what they've done here. They have not built a replacement financial system, they built a near exact copy of the current one, minus all manner of consumer protections, any insurance of value, with a singular goal: to recreate the structural inequities of the old system, with them on top. That's fucking it. That is the entire difference between fiat and crypto.