I honestly never understood how Lemmy, a privacy and decentralisation focused community, is so vehemently anti-crypto. It’s worse than genAI. Every time it is mentioned, everyone goes “crypto is a scam”. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any good faith discussion around it, just “scam”, “pyramid scheme”, and “only criminals use it”.

Let’s get something out of the way immediately: shitcoins are a literal pyramid scheme and a scam. Anyone can make their own cryptocurrency in an evening, and anyone who throws money at them is either a fool or a gambler.

But I really don’t understand what people mean when they say Bitcoin, or Ethereum, or Monero are a scam. Sure they can be used to scam you, just like Amazon gift cards can. Maybe it’s about the price volatility, but the price of all 3 mentioned before is up on a day, week, month, 6 months, year, and 5 year scale. It’s volatile, but is not a scam. But if you bought and sold at two random points in time, it’s more likely you made a profit than “got scammed”.

“Criminals use them” is just the worst fucking argument, especially in a space like this. Are PGP, VPNs and TOR for criminals too? Do you think getting rid of crypto would stop crime?

And yes, proof of work fucking sucks. The energy consumption of Bitcoin mining is a problem. I am not a cryptobro who spends all his time making trades and is here to tell you that crypto is the salvation. They are far from being “good” for everyday use. I just wanted to point out how it seems that critical thought gets shut down at the sight of those 6 letters, and I hope someone can explain to me what they find so terrible about crypto (aside from environmental concerns)

I can’t say I’ve ever seen fascists pushing Bitcoins, but then again I don’t frequent those spaces. I struggle to see how they are ideologically similar though. Doesn’t seem like a very authoritarian concept

And can we really say we know what brought about the publication of the bitcoin whitepaper?