People fall for scams/cults/MLMs for all kinds of reasons: because they're bored/lonely, because they're in a bad place in their life, because they put their trust in a person they shouldn't have, etc. Not just because they're idiots.

My personal belief is that the best way I can set myself up to fall for a scam is by incorrectly believing that I would never fall for one. "Pride goeth before the fall." That's why I try to remind myself I'm as fallible as the next human.

Everyone scammed is an idiot until I'm scammed. There are many ways you can undo traditional scam transactions. Even Western Union can be undone. Cryptocurrencies have no such means except for forking which is not going to happen for small amounts.

I lost 600€ last year in an traditional transaction.

Told the police, they said, they can't do a thing, because the scammer stole the bank account and probably lives in Estonia or somewhere.

So, while I use banks on a daily basis, simply because I have to, I don't believe they are much safer.

Did you try to work with your/estonia bank? Police can do something, but usually for small values is too much trouble, but with the police report, most banks are very accommodating (Estonia is in the EU and has to follow EU banking laws, so it isn't like the money went to some backwater, no law country)

Yes, they said, a standard transaction can't be reverted and I should talk to law enforcement.

Strange, I had something similar happening and they reverted/refunded me/did something (needed the police report first though).

In any case, sorry it happened to you.

Did you talk to your bank? Getting police involved is nice and all but often times the banks themselves are a lot more helpful!

Also, depending on how it was possible for the scammer to "steal the bank account" in the first place you might be entitled to damages or something, though that heavily depends on your legislation and where your bank is located of course.

A friend's not-so-bright boss was recently scammed into buying Amazon gift cards, scratching to reveal the codes, and then emailing the codes to the scammer. Can that be undone? This isn't intended as a "gotcha" question. I honestly don't know.

it's all about effort/reward. I'm sure "technically" with a police report you can get Amazon to return the money.

I got packages stolen in front of my porch and got my money back from Amazon. Did Amazon go find the thief? Probably not. Will this always work? Probably not. But I had someone to talk to. In blockchain nobody can change the past.

> The best way of fighting scams is intelligent, critically thinking people.

This sounds like "if everyone was a good driver, we'd have less auto related deaths". C'mon - that's not how the world works, this is just wishful thinking.

The problem with crypto scams is there is no clawback. If someone commits wire fraud and I accidentally send the wire for my $100k down payment for my new house to <insert imposter> the bank can potentially reconcile it. With crypto? Nope, you're f'd. Sorry there's no trace.

> intelligent, critically thinking people

Like the Winklevoss twins who store their wallet keys in....BANKS so they don't get scammed. The irony is hilarious.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/technology/bitcoin-winkle...

As people age they tend to become more susceptible to con artists. Society should protect our elders not leave them vulnerable.

Victim blaming is a bad idea.

Regulators exist for a reason.

From the article:

> This is especially true among younger people who are digitally savvy but less financially literate.

> People ages 18-to-39 were more than twice as likely to report losing money to social media scams as older adults last year.

Seems like maybe we should be protecting the "young know-it-alls" from themselves?

Do the same rules apply to slot machines and carnival games? Should we make those illegal also because people fall for them? Is it victim blaming to say "you know what you're getting into when you walk into a casino"?

They’re already heavily regulated, the machines inspected, odds posted and support available. You can’t do it online due to the increased risk. And casinos are few, far between, outside of most population centers, and broadly not easy to get to for most people.

If publicly traded companies started putting their treasuries into Caesar’s chips, you bet we’d see more regulation.

We aren't talking about that though, we are talking about whether someone who falla for a scam bears any responsibility for that, at least in this thread started by the parent comment. When you walk into a building with a big sign above it that says "warning: scams ahead" can we really say "blaming the people that walked in here is unequivocally wrong"?

Seems like your lede is “why not victim blame, honestly? Should we really ignore what she was wearing when she walked down that back alley?”

This isn’t an argument that I think is particularly worth entertaining. People should exercise due caution at all times appropriate to their surroundings. However if a criminal robs them it’s the criminals fault.

It's always the criminal's fault. But we aren't trying to blame the criminal in here, we are trying to blame the infrastructure the criminal used. It's a false dichotomy.

If the main thing an infrastructure enables is crime, then it’s ok to blame that infrastructure. For instance if there’s a network of tunnels under the border used exclusively for smuggling, that’s bad infrastructure.

Our reaction wouldn’t be, well, let’s arrest the criminals but leave those tunnels, the tunnels did nothing wrong!!

Doing so would simply give the next criminal a head start.

This is a great analogy for crypto. Sure once in a while an asymlum seeker may get through too, but overwhelmingly it’s narcos and Bolivian marching powder. So we blow up the tunnels.

It's not that great an analogy actually.

It's not about the main thing an infrastructure enables, it's about what the infrastructure is designed for. Tunnels under the border are specifically there to smuggle. Highways are there to do move anything you want, including illegal activity, which is policed separately.

And the asylum seekers and Bolivian marching powder examples are good to address the main point here as well. Does the cokehead share any blame in using coke? Is that victim blaming? Should asylum seeking be illegal?

Was bitcoin created to break the law? In some ways. But it was designed to facilitate commerce without regard for legality. It's not like a smuggling tunnel, it's like a highway. And it's like that because sometimes you want to smuggle something, like asylum seekers, but you want it to serve legitimate purposes also. So not a very good analogy at all.

This is a tortured reading.

> It's not about the main thing an infrastructure enables, it's about what the infrastructure is designed for.

It's not at all, what it was originally designed for is irrelevant, the question is what it's being used for.

> Does the cokehead share any blame in using coke? Is that victim blaming? Should asylum seeking be illegal?

These are all utterly aside the point. These are matters of law. Law governs. Infrastructure which facilitates that is better than infrastructure which does not. Infrastructure that makes breaking the law easy is worse than one that does not.

> Was bitcoin created to break the law? In some ways.

Again intent is completely irrelevant except for the prosecution of those doing the creation.

Because cryptocurrency is slower, less efficient, more volatile, and incorporates dramatically more counter-party risk than classic payment methods it self-selects primarily for the criminal activity. It's useful as a payments system of last resort in certain cases but that's dwarfed by the illicit use which is in turn dwarfed by speculative use. It actually creates roughly zero value.

> It's not at all, what it was originally designed for is irrelevant, the question is what it's being used for.

Then surely you should be able to demonstrate your point with some analogy other than "a smuggling tunnel."

> These are all utterly aside the point.

No, they are the point. This thread was about victim blaming. And you brought up asylum seekers, broadening the discussion to include whether legality should apply at all, or whether we should consider ethical use of a tool regardless of legality. I'm not bringing anything new up in this discussion, I'm only replying directly to points made.

> Infrastructure that makes breaking the law easy is worse than one that does not.

Even if that infrastructure primarily serves (or was created to serve, you choose) the purpose of smuggling, for example, asylum seekers?

Your entire point in this comment seems to be "everything you bring up is irrelevant" which begs the question, why are we even having this discussion at all?

> Then surely you should be able to demonstrate your point with some analogy other than "a smuggling tunnel."

I don't feel I need to. I think it's pretty apt.

> ...broadening the discussion to include whether legality should apply at all...

I didn't do that, you did. I maintain legality is society's decision to make, and that infrastructure should serve society's goals. Infrastructure that makes it dead easy to undermine societies goals is not something I want to encourage.

> Even if that infrastructure primarily serves (or was created to serve, you choose) the purpose of smuggling, for example, asylum seekers?

This is why I suggested it was a tortured reading.

Again, it only really matters what it's actually used for. Asylum seekers need not be smuggled through tunnels because it is lawful to apply for asylum at a port of entry. You show up and ask for it.

Slot machines are heavily regulated to ensure some level of fairness.

Yes, you will "fairly" lose all your money to games designed to be as addictive as possible. Sure the odds are regulated and posted but they are always against you and the advertising around them makes it seem like you can't lose.

They're actually regulated to be completely unfair. Any regulation ensures no randomness in results. You're guaranteed a percentage loss due to regulation. When you walk into a casino you're wittingly consenting to being scammed.

We could say the same thing about phishing attacks. “Any company that hires idiots so dumb they’ll type their password into a random site without confirming the certificate deserves what’s coming to them”.

Except we know that at scale very large organizations, i.e. Google, cannot 100% stop phishing attacks just by user training. Humans are always fallible in a large enough group. The solution for phishing protection is to take the human out of the equation and rely on something like U2F to perform the authenticity check for you.

To elaborate the parent's point, Google switched away from employee training as the primary means to prevent phishing attacks to WebAuthn security keys.

Their phishing incidents dropped to zero.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/07/google-security-keys-neu...

Yes, but it's not actually a solution. It maintains the status quo and only prevents its consequences.

The problem, simplified: People are dumb.

The solution: Making people smarter.

Not a solution: Keeping people dumb and preventing them from making stupid mistakes.

Thank you! I recalled that story but wasn't sure on the details.

> Humans are always fallible in a large enough group

To make sure that everyone, who will eventually read this, understand what this line actually means, is:

There's always an idiot falling through the cracks.

Yes. It's inevitable. It happens. Doesn't change the fact that if people were more rational and less driven by their feelings, less people would be falling for scams and thus less scams would exist.

Anyone who doesn't understand that scams solely exist because they work, is excused. Anyone who disagrees with the idea that people need to act in a rational, self responsible manner is a part of the problem.

The cause of scams is people, who aren't thinking things through, falling for them. If schools nowadays didn't raise people into mostly being thoughtless robots, the world would be a better place as a whole, scams included.

Of course there's always going to be one guy. Doesn't change the rest at all. You're making good the enemy of perfect and your solution in no way or form actually improves us, as humans, and instead removes even more responsibility away from us.

I've seen intelligent people, who are experts in their domain, fall from grace through age or illness.

Once critical thinkers, now vulnerable and gullible.

I wouldn't be so harsh.

You're right, of course. I was excluding people who really aren't at fault. When someone's brain turns into a vegetable he's not capable of thinking things through, so he can not be responsible for the stupid things he's doing.

Doesn't change the rest, though.

The internet also created things of value. Connecting people all over the world instantly. Businesses built on leveraging newly created efficiencies.

Crypto is intentionally the opposite. Imposing artificial scarcity on a world without, leveraging inefficiency and complexity at every level to obscure what’s actually happening. It’s an ideology not a technology. It’s just a linked list but much slower. Anything that can be built on the blockchain can be built faster, cheaper and more efficient without.

Ask yourself why in 14 years no industries have been revolutionized, no businesses built (except for trading) and no value created. If there’s so many industries ripe and begging for the tech why hasn’t a single one of them gained any value from even one blockchain implementation?

The internet had existed in some iteration for 3 decades before the business world started using it, and was publicly accessible for one entire decade before that. The first businesses to really adopt it were pornographers.

Why exactly do you think the valuation of cryptocurrencies are so high? Certainly it's not an indicator that the business case for it is nil. Maybe not revolutionary, but it is disingenuous or delusional to suggest that there's no business use for this thing while staring point blank at a world getting eaten by it in real time.

The internet connected people on day one. That’s all it did.

> Why exactly do you think the valuation of cryptocurrencies are so high? Certainly it's not an indicator that the business case for it is nil.

Completely irrelevant. Prices are determined at the margin, its most recent price times supply. It’s got nothing to do with how much money is in the system or how useful any of it is. They’re all priced in USDT which has at numerous times been totally unbacked and issued on loans to institutions who use it to control the marginal price.

As for shared delusions, the entire economy of Albania collapsed into a civil war because 66% of the GDP got locked into MLM schemes in 1997. [1]

You must evaluate this from first principles not based on what the other lemmings are up to.

14 years in can you name a single business built on crypto that’s even remotely successful?

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.ht...

It is very relevant, it wouldn't be if I was arguing that this will revolutionize everything, but you specifically said it has no real world business utility whatsoever, and the fact that people are using it, in business, right now, so much so that they pay outrageous prices to do so, that is very relevant.

Built on crypto? By definition you can't name a single business that isn't an exchange built on it. That's like naming a business built on stock trading that isn't a stock exchange or investment fund. But ones that use crypto in some way? I can name a few, not counting black market businesses, overstock.com is one.

Please name one business that is successful thanks to the value created by cryptocurrency that is not a crypto exchange or related MSB.

Overstock doesn’t use crypto, they use Coinbase who gives overstock good old American greenbacks. Like most of the world accepting crypto they don’t actually - it would be impossible due to the massive forex risk. They rely on third party MSBs like Coinbase and Bitpay to liquidate incoming crypto.

I’m thinking of the crowd with a list as long as their arm of ideas including replacing Ticketmaster, supply chain management, voting, all the other broad ideas.

"Nobody uses credit cards except for payment processors." If I accept British Pounds at my online store but only receive dollars to my business account by way of a processor, does that mean I did not use British Pounds in the transaction?

I've never once claimed cryptocurrency would be useful for anything other than money, so I'd be the wrong person to argue with about that. I'm not a web3 evangelist.

Oh ok, well, there's tons of reasons its bad money. Hard money is no longer the law of the land because it was bad at being money. A fixed supply cannot respond to population changes, cannot respond to shocks, external stimuli. A low, predictable rate of inflation is broadly regarded as a good thing - it incentivizes investment and productive allocation of capital. All of the worst periods in history have been characterized as deflationary.

Of course, the sheer inefficiency of the system makes it practically useless as money due to the transaction times, costs and volume capacity.

It's bad at being money too.

The philosophy behind it is a widely debunked model (Austrian economics) which isn't taken serious by ... anyone outside a fringe group of libertarians.

Also it's critical to note: it's market cap is not the quantity of value 'stored.' It's simply most recent price times supply. You couldn't get a fraction of a fraction of that back out without zeroing out the entire thing. Proof of work relies on wasting as much of the world's limited resources as you can within the budget allotted, and proof of stake is simply a perpetual wealth machine for the already wealthy.

Then of course the ability to reverse transactions is huge value-add for customers, the ability to block transactions to sanctioned countries is a huge value-add for the world.

We can talk about the utility of a tool and decide whether it should exist or not, or we can just let people use the tools that work for them and not use them if they don't work for us. I'd prefer the latter. If it sucks so bad then people won't use it. If it sucks at it's stated purpose but is good for something else, people can use it for that instead. If people are using it for something then it's good for something and not really my business if they use it or not.

The philosophy behind "it" is a pretty complex thing. You can design a currency using the tools used to make bitcoin and have any sort of economic philosophy as your guide. It isn't limited to Austrian economics. You can have a linear, predictable supply increase, a finite supply, a logarithmic debasement rate (percentage of supply increase rate), a complex algorithm to determine it, a democratic process, or even just some guy calling the shots if you want. It's a general purpose tool.

I'm aware of the huge flaw in the "market cap" metric and it's relative uselessness.

If reversible transactions are a value add, people will use currencies with that option, and where it's not, people won't.

I don't think bitcoin makes good money. But I do think you can make good money with the technology, I think it is good that this thing is driving people to make technology with which you can make potentially better money, I think we are finding the utility of this stuff by just letting people do what they want with it, and I personally find it useful in my life.

> We can talk about the utility of a tool and decide whether it should exist or not, or we can just let people use the tools that work for them and not use them if they don't work for us. I'd prefer the latter. If it sucks so bad then people won't use it.

Disagree. You should do whatever you want so long as it doesn't negatively impact society more broadly. As I demonstrated in the Albanian example there is a real chance that allowing people to do as they please can lead to a complete implosion of the economy - and even war. Everything we do as a group is about balancing individual freedoms against their impacts on others. This is the "your right to swing your arms around wildly ends where my face begins" argument.

> You can design a currency using the tools used to make bitcoin and have any sort of economic philosophy as your guide. It isn't limited to Austrian economics. You can have a linear, predictable supply increase, a finite supply, a logarithmic debasement rate (percentage of supply increase rate), a complex algorithm to determine it, a democratic process, or even just some guy calling the shots if you want. It's a general purpose tool.

None of that is useful without the ability to step in and actively manage it during situations that weren't baked into the original design. Think the DAO.

> I'm aware of the huge flaw in the "market cap" metric and it's relative uselessness.

The argument I was responding to initially was your assertion that "surely there's something there because the number is so up! Check out that market cap!"

> If reversible transactions are a value add, people will use currencies with that option, and where it's not, people won't.

They do, everyone uses dollars.

> But I do think you can make good money with the technology.

I disagree fundamentally because it cannot handle edge cases and the edge cases are the only thing that really matters in the end.

The internet connected mainly CS researchers for the first 5 to 10 years of its existence.

The internet however had to overcome and deploy worldwide physical infrastructure to succeed. Crypto does not. Roll-out isn’t even remotely comparable due to relative barriers to entry.

Everyone who wants crypto can have it, now. And could have had it on day one.

> The first businesses to really adopt it were pornographers.

This is obviously not true, given that there was a wealth of text-based internet applications well before image-based options were widely available.

No one uses cryptocurrency for non cryptocurrency purposes. It is like an ouroboros, consuming itself in real time.

"Nobody uses money for non money purposes."

I strongly suspect the parent to which you are replying was saying that there are no uses for blockchain outside of "money."

check out helium.com

I think the critical distinction is that the Internet also gave us online banking, shopping, streaming, real-time communication, &c.

It's not clear what cryptocurrencies have given us, apart from a (not very secure) way to buy drugs on the Internet and the occasional slower, power guzzling alternative to a service that already exists.

It gave us an uncensorable, global, and decentralized payments system. To some people this is extremely valuable.

How so many people overlook this, I'm surprised by. Everyone at every level has been distracted by cryptocurrency being either a way to make money or an investment scheme. It'd be nice if it could be those things, but there are already other systems of actual investment. On the other hand, cryptocurrency, whether or not you hate them for their energy consumption, provide a means of independent economies being created outside of whatever regimes are in control. But that's boring.

Then again, hopefully we'll never need to see a future where everyone values the decentralized nature of crypto more than its monetary value at any given moment. If that happens, it might be under a regime where sneezing in public or looking in the wrong direction would lose you enough social credit that your bank account gets terminated.

Er all your transactions are tracked. They want to get rid of cash and they need people to want the technology that enables that. A couple of mining operators control the network and they just need to operate as one to do whatever they want with it. The lizards in charge of fiat probably own those mining companies. All transactions are tracked did I Mention. So everything you do is tracked. Read that again and think about how cash == freedom ... and crypto == total enslavement

Monero, Dash, Zcash, Beam Grin, are all completely private and anonymous. Nobody can see you using those blockchains.

Each of these comes with a large asterisk:

Uncensorable, except for all of the times that providers have refused service because of (very reasonable!) KYC laws.

Global, except for all of the countries that will throw you in prison for using cryptocurrencies.

Decentralized, except for the structured oligarchy of miners who prevent protocol evolution on any decentralized currency of sufficient value.

Hully gee.

Not really:

- You cannot censor a Bitcoin transaction. You are talking about a completely unrelated issue and pretending this is an issue with Bitcoin.

- People in China are still mining Bitcoin and using crypto even with the ban. So it truly is global. Just like how drugs are global even though most countries have banned them: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/18/chinas-underground-bitcoin-m....

- Miners have tried to prevent changes to the Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol more than once and failed due to community consensus of the users. Miners don't get to decide which protocol is run, the users ultimately do. If the miners choose to mine an unpopular protocol, people can and will simply fork the chain to a more favorable protocol. This has happened plenty of times.

"Some people" being mainly criminals and money launderers.

A lot more people than just criminals and money launders. But yes, criminals ironically tend to be some of the first adopters of new technology. So the fact that it's so popular with criminals should be the signal that it actually is really powerful technology.

Or do you think criminals are using crypto because they're uninformed reddit HODLRS hoping to moon?

Plenty of non-criminals adopted bitcoin. Then they un-adopted it once they found out it was actually not useful at all.

The criminals stayed though.

I've legally bought and sold quite a few things on craigslist using cryptocurrencies. I'm personally finding it easier and easier to use cryptocurrency as a payments system as time goes on. You really don't know what you're talking about.

You could have done that just as easily, or easier, using other payment methods that are not boiling the planet.

Could have but did not want to? I want to use crypto and so do plenty of other people. That's why the option to use crypto on craigslist even exists.

First, it was criminals, now it's the planet. You are all over the place my guy. I'm doing what's best for me economically speaking; the planet is just gonna have to figure out a way to survive because I'm for sure doing fine.

All right, so you're a sociopath.

Not a sociopath, just someone whose priorities are in the following order:

- my family

- my friends

- my country

- the rest of the world

I'm not going to restrict my own economic goals to save the planet at the expense of the things above.

I don't know how to tell the difference between that statement, and what a sociopath would say in the same situation.

Then you don't know what the definition of a sociopath is at all.

Does the definition of a sociopath say what they would say in that situation?

Would you go vegan to reduce your CO2 output, and does it make you a sociopath if you dont?

Already did.

Thanks for your sacrifice, now I know what kind of tree hugging hippie Im talking to. The unfortunate reality of the world is that sacrificers like you have to live with resource gatherers like me. And your opinion about me, unfortunately for you, doesn't really impact my day to day life in any meaningful way.

And Argentinians, and Venezuelans, and Nigerians, and the Salvadorian government...

There's flyover country, there's flyover countries, and ignoring the masses that make that up is equal parts condescending and ignorant.

No significant number of people in any of those use it.

El Salvador's wannabe dictator is pretty keen on it, though.

Define "no significant number."

And we aren't going to get anywhere in this discussion if your only rebuttal is "the leader of a country using it voluntarily is a dictator so that settles it." Do you have a rebuttal to my point at all?

I think the "power guzzling" claim is kind of ridiculous, considering that crypto currency consumes a tiny fraction of power compared to that of fiat currency. Disliking the hype and speculative aspects makes sense, but consideration for comparison shows energy use isn't a concern

Censor proof, private, transactions.

How are they private when they're viewable by everyone in the world? All it takes is one slip up or security breach to connect your IRL identity to your wallet hash and every transaction is public for all to see.

Plenty of cryptocurrencies are private: Monero, Dash, Zcash, Beam, Grin, etc...

I actually prefer using the public ones when I want a paper trail. But I've got a stash of the private ones in case I ever need to relocate to a different country one day in my life.

There's no such thing as a wallet hash. A wallet consists of any number of individual keys that cannot be linked together except through using them together in a single transaction. Yes, careless use can link your identity to one or more keys, but software can help prevent that. But if you use a P2P wallet, there is no equivalent of your bank that can see or censor all of your transactions.

Completely agree. I used to have sympathy for these victims. Not anymore. Not after actually interacting with them and getting literally banned from a group for trying to warn about risks. One guy literally sold his car in order to buy scammy shitcoins.

> The problem isn't the medium/platform, but the idiots falling for them.

That's victim blaming

You won’t find much support for individual responsibility here.

By "here" I assume you mean "Earth"… Responsibility is not a thing humans are good at.