Well, if this was what cryptocurrency was created to prevent, then whether or not it's a scam, it's pretty well clear to me that it's useless.

>people on HN hate on cryptocurrencies for no good reason.

Traditional bankers have spent an incredible amount of time and taken huge political risks to gain hold over the US money supply. They and people in the wall street sphere have a very good reason to hate on crypto, they just dont have any convincing arguments for people like us who dont want them controlling the money supply.

Crypto doesn't need Wall Street types to give it a bad name. It does that just fine on its own...

> In the summer of 2013, Bankman-Fried began working at Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm,[2] trading international ETFs.

Somehow Satoshi and Andreessen managed to not start a ponzi scheme and this guy did.

Still waiting for your argument on why the big 7 wall street banks should be involved in the money supply instead of democratically elected leaders, which was my primary point.

> Still waiting for your argument on why the big 7 wall street banks should be involved in the money supply instead of democratically elected leaders, which was my primary point.

Are you replying to the right post? I don't see any mention of that

Satoshi didn’t start a literal Ponzi scheme. It’s known as a greater fool scam.

That’s kind of my point. The things being done with cryptocurrency are mostly scams and failed schemes. Cryptocurrency can be used in this peer to peer way like you describe but virtually nobody does that. It’s too technical for 99% of users and meanwhile you have all these scams that have advertising budgets. Decentralization will never have a Super Bowl ad.