Muppets come in and buy the token on Uniswap. But they can't go back and sell it. Essentially all the Ethereum in the liquidity pool becomes the personal piggy bank of the scammer. There's nothing Uniswap can even do to prevent this type of scam, because the malicious code is in the token tracker contract, not Uniswap itself.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UniSwap/comments/jew0id/1000_reward...

Now, people willingly buy into pump & dump schemes, hoping to not be the ones left holding the bags. Just go to r/cryptomoonshots or /biz/ where a new coin is shilled practically every hour and everyone just hopes to ride the pump and dump it on the next round of gullible buyers.

There was a massive wave of food-themed DeFi tokens recently with multiple exit scams.

Non-native English speaker here but doesn't "by design" refer to something being designed explicitly for that purpose? I agree that lots of ICOs were indeed scams and/or attempts of just taking money for low-quality work, but I don't think fund-raising was initially designed for that. It just happened to be that lots of fund-raising are scams.

But to say that it's by design it's going a bit far, and making your point weaker, not stronger.

I'd even argue that the juggernaut BTC was _designed_ to be trackable, and as the recent history shows, law enforcement successfully and multiple times did exactly that when needed - tracked, identified and penalized bad actors.

I suppose you're right that there wasn't any requirement for that design for the ICOs to be scams, there just wasn't any particular need for them to not be scams.

Virtually all (actually all?) ICOs themselves have been designed to have scam friendly terms-- e.g. no real ownership or control for the buyers, no accountability for the sellers, and little to no transparency. Even the least scammy of the ICOs have some term or another that effectively enables their issuers to just walk off with the funds with no recourse in the contract.

The abundance of scams in ICOs (and the cryptocurrency ecosystem in general for that matter) has more to do with the heavily regulated nature of the mainstream financial space, than the design of the cryptocurrency space itself. Because most of the world is regulated, fraudsters are now funneled to cryptocurrency. They come where they are the most free, but there is nothing in the structure of cryptocurrencies that encourages scams over legitimate enterprises. Honesty and hard work is still most rewarding. The absence of barriers to prevent scams other than regular social signals and the user's own vigilance, is the natural state of the world.

This same type of argument is repeatedly employed against free-speech platforms, that keep ending-up hosting the neo-nazis and other undesirable groups that were ousted from Facebook and co.

Shared reputation systems layered over a free platform like Matrix announced[1] a couple days ago should provide relief, but simple increase in adoption will also tilt the ratio back to the average.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24836987

Magic.

This is about the dynamics between a set of entities, being mischaracterized as a fundamental property of one of these entities. (Here: migration of a pool of bad actors from traditional finance to cryptocurrency).

Like saying Iraq is an evil country by design because it harbors terrorist groups. Most people would agree by now that the emergence of these groups isn't directly caused by the nature of the country's culture or religion. For good reasons we have enough respect for these things to dig deeper in our understanding than a superficial glance. You're free to not do this with cryptocurrency, but then you probably shouldn't hold your opinions about it too strongly.

Comparing Bitcoin with a country like Iraq is pointlessly simplistic. Countries are complex social entities that aggregate behaviors through a large number of mechanisms. Bitcoin is a single mechanism whose characteristics have entirely predictable consequences.

Any sympathy for the University of California? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53214783

Bitcoin doesn't kill people. People kill people...right?

Cash is a single mechanism, that also predictably allows robbers to more easily offload their loot than if it was livestock, jewels or silverware. Are cash and other fungible assets automatically evil once they're on the internet?

You can cite random examples of crimes committed using Bitcoin, but that still doesn't begin to address the initial argument to which I replied: is cryptocurrency inherently evil? Will it cause more good in the world than bad once it is widely adopted?

They attract different animals for this reason.

The bitcoin ico scams attracts many predators.

Crypto scammers, overwhelmingly, simply fool people chasing easy profits. Hacks and actual offensive behaviors are uncommon, you're safe from predators in your den and you don't need to leave it.

Wait until smart contracts have been live for a certain amount of time before interacting with them. You won't fall prey to predatory behavior if you mint DAI with Maker or trade well known tokens on Uniswap for instance. The danger comes when sending money with no guarantees of getting anything back, in the hope of multiplying your money.

So do ponzi schemes. The early investors into them make money, and have a lot to gain by spreading the word to other people.

Investing into a growing ponzi scheme is a rational investment strategy. That's why people do it, and that's one of the reasons for why they are illegal.

As far as I can tell, the majority of interest in ICOs comes from people who are hoping to dump their investment onto a bigger fool. Ironically, the worse the ICO is as a business, the more fools will be interested in it, which makes those ICOs more attractive to invest in.