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 think it’s because, at least in the case of bitcoin, it has no practical real world use other than hoarding like beanie babies, and therefore no real value. As a currency it’s entirely useless.

I have a bit more sympathy for ETH, maybe someday DeFi will produce something truly useful enough to justify the money in crypto, but it hasn’t so far.

This is really getting into the weeds of what you define “value” to be. You could equally argue that a banknote also has no practical real world use other than hoarding (and to trade to others).

A banknote is accepted as a means of exchange, ie a currency in a way that bitcoin and other crypto coins are not and cannot ever be due to the fees and delays in the system, not to mention the absurd volatility or lack of liquidity in the smaller coins.

Crypto is also accepted as a means of exchange. There are plenty of merchants willing to accept it as payment, but they are just not geographically concentrated in one location like banknote-accepters are. With a banknote, you have a very high concentration of merchants who will accept that as a means of payment in one geographic area (i.e. the country or region whose central bank issued that banknote), while it is not accepted anywhere else. With most cryptocurrencies, they will be acceptable worldwide, but the concentration of people willing to take it in any given geographic area is low.

It is important to note that you can’t take properties of the smaller coins (the ones which you are probably thinking of are derisively referred to as “shitcoins” and most are deserving of that epithet) and apply them to every cryptocurrency. Just like you can’t use properties of the Zimbabwean dollar to smear all fiat currencies in general.

Bitcoin transactions on its Lightning Network are typically instantaneous, and fees are lower than most credit cards (usually on the order of 0.1%). An on-chain Bitcoin transaction currently has a fee of about 1 USD, which would make it competitive to credit cards for transactions greater than 40 USD. Bitcoin fees, despite being notorious for being the highest among all cryptos, are actually very competitive with most traditional payment methods. This transaction from the most recent block at the time of writing paid about 117 USD to move over 411 BTC worth 48.5 million USD. That means they paid about 0.00024% in fees and this is the highest-fee transaction in this block (meaning they paid the highest fee rate of any transaction in this block). The going rate for this block was actually much lower; whoever sent this transaction overpaid by about 50 times.

It’s accepted almost no where. And the list of issues go on. Crypto is easily stolen, very difficult to secure. Difficult to use for most people. Proof of work crypto is still in the majority and wastes absurd amounts of energy, etc. But the biggest issue is that it doesn’t solve any problems that were not solved long ago unless you are conducting criminal activity (which I do have to acknowledge as it’s one stand out use case).

The notion that “crypto is easily stolen” is completely false. It’s definitely harder to steal than, say, cash in a wallet. That it is “accepted almost nowhere” is also false. Look hard enough, and you can find someone who will sell you almost anything for crypto.

It depends greatly on how it’s stored. Most people just keep it in an exchange, which are robbed fairly often. Which wouldn’t be a problem with real cash as there are laws in place to protect you. With crypto you have no recourse.