I mean, language is descriptive, and while it's useful to be able to maintain a distinction between what the world called "cryptocurrencies" in 2015 and what we call "cryptocurrencies" today, that ship has sailed.

at the same time they are not really currencies, they are "stablecoins" on a many-times replicated digital machine playground where you can pay to add your own machine to interact with the others, and sometimes it turns into Robot Wars and the little coins get mercilessly cut up into bits of worthless parts that are then sold for scrap in the actual currency that runs the playground

Well, sure. But that ship has sailed as well.

    The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

While some people are really good at lying or dodging direct questions, many more are very good at lying to themselves. If you believe your own bullshit it's remarkably easy to look sincere while spewing it.

There are certainly many scammers out there, but also some people who believe their own marketing material. But the thing is that once you start picking apart one infinite growth pyramid, then you start seeing them everywhere, and eventually respectable people start trying to draw lines and claim that the bullshit on this side of the line is obvious and bad, but the bullshit on the other side is okay because reasons (reason #1: we can keep this running for at least another 100-200 years at which point I will be long dead)

> organically grow a cryptocurrency ... to usefulness

You might be right, but the only thing they were ever useful for, was money laundering.

So, I don't think that drawing a greater distinction between the first wave of money-laundering crypto, vs the current wave of Ponzi crypto, is really a defense of either.

Oh? Is that what I've been doing all these years paying my VPS bills and buying computer hardware? I was money laundering? Was it also money laundering when I donated to wikileaks after the US Dept. of Justice forced the credit card companies to blacklist them? All those donations to the internet archive: just money laundering.

And little did I know that others were laundering their money through me when they donated to my websites' bitcoin addresses.

I guess everything that isn't some incorporated third party transfering the money for you must be money laundering. Corporate persons transfer money. Human persons launder. Got it.

Your niche use of cryptocurrency isn't a valid counterpoint to the reality that cryptocurrency, in its general use, is for gambling and money laundering.

I can use a handgun for hunting, but that doesn't mean its primary use-case is hunting.

If you accept that premise then HSBC, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered and Bank of New York Mellon are also for money laundering primarily.

No, because they offer actual legitimate services that are used frequently by legitimate customers. They've also all happened to do large scale money laundering, but that isn't their primary focus and isn't how they're generally viewed.

Bitcoin is accepted as payment essentially nowhere, in the grand scheme of things. Yes, you've found some niche places that allow it, but it's rare. When I think ransomware, the first thing that comes to mind is cryptocurrency (specifically Bitcoin and ETH). When I think of money laundering, I think of NFTs, through ETH. If you talk to most normal people and ask them what they think of when you talk about bitcoin, it's probably buying illegal drugs.

>If you talk to most normal people and ask them what they think of when you talk about bitcoin, it's probably buying illegal drugs.

Ah yes. The "experts" that have only heard about Bitcoin from Fox/MSNBC/etc news. I'm sure they know what they're talking about.

Nice No True Scotsman fallacy.

No.

This is a stablecoin which has a centralized management team that can halt and control activity on the blockchain, which is fundamentally different from a bitcoin or monero which is a truly decentralized system with no controlling organization that can change anything without slow bulding, mass consent of all participants in the network, and is anyway naturally very stable because of its simplicity and extremely conservative and risk averse development process.

It's more like an Englishman yelling out that they're a Scotsman as they ransack the public square. It's not a fallacy to point out that they're simply not a Scotsman.

I hate this meme, "No True Scotsman" is not the same thing as language being descriptive and evolving over time. There are two concepts the parent is describing: the set of things described as crypto made before 2015 and the set of things described as crypto made after 2015. The two groups are well defined.

The fact that there isn't a formal name for the era of "pre-finance-bro crypto" or "first wave crypto" doesn't mean it's has anything to do with the scotts. The parent's language might be a little ambiguous but that's to be expected when trying to describe yet unnamed things and their meaning is clear enough.

Willfully misunderstanding someone's words to create a logical flaw that isn't there should be its own fallacy.

superkuh did not specify what exactly changed. Saying nothing created after 2015 is an "actual cryptocurrency" without justifying that somehow makes me think this might be a "no true Scotsman" argument.

What constitutes these eras? And why do you bring that up when it was about a class of products not being "an actual cryptocurrency". I would have thought there are properties to the product that make it belong to the class, not merely when it was created.To me these unnamed things and their meaning you talk about are absolutely not clear enough.

I believe you two have a point. But it doesn't come across...

PS: I would argue in 2015 "crypto" was mostly known as abbreviation for cryptography and had nothing to do with decentralized public ledgers.

I'm in no way trying to argue that the parent's classifications or conclusion make sense, just that it's not NTS because the parent isn't trying to make some universal assertions about crpyto in general and denying the exceptions but comment that the "scene" has changed drastically and the word cryptocurrency along with it.

NTS would be something like

* "All things people are calling cryptocurrencies made after 2015 are just finance-bro scams."

* "But what about TotallyLegitCoin, it's not a scam."

* "But that's not really a cryptocurrency."