Then, you are saying "but I don't know you or your company, so I have no way of knowing.". Well, that is not my job, do your work if you want to change your mind. If you need help I can present you to good people but I assume you can do it by yourself.
Also, again logically, saying that there is no good people in the space, we should first define good people in general. Not trying to sound pedantic but trying to show you that your assertion is about a lot of people, probably in the order or millions.
The point is that scammers are so prevalent it's not worth "doing your work." The ROI on vetting every player in a given transaction just isn't high enough to make it worth engaging. We don't have to do all this shit in the actual financial industry because of regulation and insurance. Nobody's presented a compelling reason to re-evolve those protections because blockchain.
And yes, the assertion is about a lot of people. That's why we put locks on our cars and houses instead of vetting everyone in town. You keep arguing about symptoms without addressing causes.
Let's just cherry pick on DeFi. DeFi had something around 10% of its entire TVL lost last year to hacks and scams. I guarantee you that 10% of the entire 'TVL' of PayPal wasn't lost to hacks and scams.
PayPal has almost 79B in assets. Pretty sure they didn't lose 8B to hacks last year.
The fundamental character of crypto - a market where police and regulators look the other way, but money moves freely - whose biggest rocket ride to fame came from Silk Road - is perfectly suited to attract crime and criminality. Without crypto nobody would even remember ransomware because you can't send millions of dollars in Starbucks gift cards.
This is its niche, like it or not. Because if you're not trying to do crime, classical finance is faster, cheaper and safer.
When you talk about hacks we are shifting the discussion to computer security. Computer security intersects with scamming but they are two different things, you are comparing apples to oranges, it is also a field that nowadays is weaponized and the money invested and gained in the field itself exceed the money in DeFi hacks. Do you know the price in the market of bugs and exploits for Google Chrome, WhatsApp, iOS, etc? The ones exploiting them could be scammers, state actors, etc. The specialthing about DeFi is that hackers are attracted because code is literally money.
There is one more thing that complement and give answer for posts above in this thread: big scams and hacks in the cryptocurrency space are difficult to cash out: significant exchanges use transaction tracing tools (KYT: know your transaction) to freeze assets connected to illegal activities.
No, that's not at all what I was saying. I actually said the opposite: I assume that there are good people in this space despite the lack of evidence for it.
> do your work if you want to change your mind
I don't think that my mind needs to be changed here. We're in fundamental agreement here anyway, so I'm not sure what you think should be different in my thinking.
I just have no way of being able to tell who the good people are. And, ultimately, it doesn't actually matter because I don't deal with cryptocurrency in my own affairs.
I could say the exact same about the finance, defence, and health insurance sectors.
For over 40 years, I've only ever heard bad news about those industries. Still, it would be wrong to assume every single individual actor in those spaces is a bad actor; I know that bad news is widely reported in the media, and good news rarely is.
So much better that I take it purely on faith that there are decent people in that space. I have to take it on faith, because I haven't actually seen or heard from any of them and so have no evidence that they exist.