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The frustrating bit is that these scams paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole. There's a lot of value to cryptocurrencies, and as a technology it'

by Taek 9y ago

The frustrating bit is that these scams paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole. There's a lot of value to cryptocurrencies, and as a technology it's poised to change the world in some very serious ways. People latch onto it because it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it. People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole space as a scam. The scams are crowding out the innovation, drawing potentially disastrous regulatory scrutiny, and as a whole setting back a legitimate budding industry substantially. I hope that when regulators finally do step in, they are able to take actions that stop the scams without destroying the underlying technology.

oreo81 9y ago
How could they destroy the underlying technology, even if they wanted to?
wolfgke 9y ago
> The frustrating bit is that these scams paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole. There's a lot of value to cryptocurrencies, and as a technology it's poised to change the world in some very serious ways. People latch onto it because it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it. > People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole space as a scam. The scams are crowding out the innovation, drawing potentially disastrous regulatory scrutiny, and as a whole setting back a legitimate budding industry substantially. I accept your reasoning. But cryptography was all the time about how one can "scam" another person or prevent being scammed (where "scammed" in this case means e.g. that the cipher is broken). To give a concrete example: MITM attacks on, say, Diffie-Hellman key exchange (just the standard textbook MITM attack if DH is used without any certificate) is in this wording just scamming the user that he has a secure connection while in reality someone can eavesdrop it or even modify sent messages. Of course the standard solution for this exact problem is to use X.509 certificates. But the "scamming" does not stop here: Of course a malicious person immediately thinks about more sophisticated attacks such as replay attacks to scam the user and again of course the protocols use methods to prevent this. In this sense my counterclaim is that this does not "paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole", but just presents the "ordinary man" with what cryptography has been about for decades in a completely realistic (though in this case perhaps somewhar painful) way.
- mulmen 9y ago
  You can't just redefine words to try and connect unrelated concepts.
jonknee 9y ago
> People latch onto it because it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it. A few, but the vast majority have latched onto it because they think it will make them rich. Almost no one buying into cryptocurrencies could explain a blockchain if their life depended on it.
- dmix 9y ago
  > A few, but the vast majority have latched onto it because they think it will make them rich Self-interested value creation has generated the vast majority of great achievements in the world. I don't see what wrong with that being a primary motivation to invest time and resources into something? Why else should people do it? Only for fun or altruistic reasons? If that was the case then cryptocurrencies would still be novelty on the internet only known to nerds. That may be safer and harmless and idealistic but it would be entirely insignificant. Nearly all big developments requires risk, experimentation, and early failures until it matures into a stable and well understood technology. Every time I hear about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies on mainstream radio/media they always mention it's volatility and risk. Google results are full of stories about it. The association between risk and cryptocurrencies are essentially common-sense these days, as it rightfully should be. I'm not sure why everyone's acting like it's some big secret we need to protect people from. If it's an explicit scam or ponzi scheme then yes that's a problem worth worrying about, and we already have plenty of laws, regulations, and agencies to deal with that already. But I don't quite agree with automatically lumping all paid mentions of cryptocurrencies and blockchains into that category.
  - jonknee 9y ago
    > Why else should people do it? Only for fun or altruistic reasons? Well the OP I was responding to suggested that people were doing it because "it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it".
  - Frondo 9y ago
    "Self-interested value creation has generated the vast majority of great achievements in the world." The hell it has. Polio vaccine? Symphonies? Cathedrals? The Sistine Chapel? Representative democracy? The works of the great philosophers? The moon landings? The Mars rovers? I'd say, make a list of the top 100 "great achievements in the world" and strong odds are, they're either done by some poor but intensely driven person, or a government that represents a lot more than one self-interested value creating person.
Sangermaine 9y ago
>The frustrating bit is that these scams paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole. There's a lot of value to cryptocurrencies, and as a technology it's poised to change the world in some very serious ways. This gets repeated ad nauseam. Maybe it might be time to consider that this tidal wave of scams IS the way the technology is changing the world?

by Taek 9y ago

oreo81 9y ago

How could they destroy the underlying technology, even if they wanted to?

wolfgke 9y ago

> The frustrating bit is that these scams paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole. There's a lot of value to cryptocurrencies, and as a technology it's poised to change the world in some very serious ways. People latch onto it because it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it. > People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole space as a scam. The scams are crowding out the innovation, drawing potentially disastrous regulatory scrutiny, and as a whole setting back a legitimate budding industry substantially. I accept your reasoning. But cryptography was all the time about how one can "scam" another person or prevent being scammed (where "scammed" in this case means e.g. that the cipher is broken). To give a concrete example: MITM attacks on, say, Diffie-Hellman key exchange (just the standard textbook MITM attack if DH is used without any certificate) is in this wording just scamming the user that he has a secure connection while in reality someone can eavesdrop it or even modify sent messages. Of course the standard solution for this exact problem is to use X.509 certificates. But the "scamming" does not stop here: Of course a malicious person immediately thinks about more sophisticated attacks such as replay attacks to scam the user and again of course the protocols use methods to prevent this. In this sense my counterclaim is that this does not "paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole", but just presents the "ordinary man" with what cryptography has been about for decades in a completely realistic (though in this case perhaps somewhar painful) way.

mulmen 9y ago
You can't just redefine words to try and connect unrelated concepts.

jonknee 9y ago

> People latch onto it because it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it. A few, but the vast majority have latched onto it because they think it will make them rich. Almost no one buying into cryptocurrencies could explain a blockchain if their life depended on it.

dmix 9y ago
> A few, but the vast majority have latched onto it because they think it will make them rich Self-interested value creation has generated the vast majority of great achievements in the world. I don't see what wrong with that being a primary motivation to invest time and resources into something? Why else should people do it? Only for fun or altruistic reasons? If that was the case then cryptocurrencies would still be novelty on the internet only known to nerds. That may be safer and harmless and idealistic but it would be entirely insignificant. Nearly all big developments requires risk, experimentation, and early failures until it matures into a stable and well understood technology. Every time I hear about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies on mainstream radio/media they always mention it's volatility and risk. Google results are full of stories about it. The association between risk and cryptocurrencies are essentially common-sense these days, as it rightfully should be. I'm not sure why everyone's acting like it's some big secret we need to protect people from. If it's an explicit scam or ponzi scheme then yes that's a problem worth worrying about, and we already have plenty of laws, regulations, and agencies to deal with that already. But I don't quite agree with automatically lumping all paid mentions of cryptocurrencies and blockchains into that category.
- jonknee 9y ago
  > Why else should people do it? Only for fun or altruistic reasons? Well the OP I was responding to suggested that people were doing it because "it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it".
- Frondo 9y ago
  "Self-interested value creation has generated the vast majority of great achievements in the world." The hell it has. Polio vaccine? Symphonies? Cathedrals? The Sistine Chapel? Representative democracy? The works of the great philosophers? The moon landings? The Mars rovers? I'd say, make a list of the top 100 "great achievements in the world" and strong odds are, they're either done by some poor but intensely driven person, or a government that represents a lot more than one self-interested value creating person.

Sangermaine 9y ago

>The frustrating bit is that these scams paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole. There's a lot of value to cryptocurrencies, and as a technology it's poised to change the world in some very serious ways. This gets repeated ad nauseam. Maybe it might be time to consider that this tidal wave of scams IS the way the technology is changing the world?