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i think it's important not to confuse the two things. Bernie madoff was a scammer and he used USD, but the USD is not a scam. Speculators who are purposely get
by buboard 8y ago
i think it's important not to confuse the two things. Bernie madoff was a scammer and he used USD, but the USD is not a scam. Speculators who are purposely getting people to invest in bitcoin are scammers, but the tech itself exists, it's not a scam.
- mikepurvis 8y agoIs that really a helpful or meaningful distinction? There are precious few "legitimate" purchases you can make using BTC, and basically all of them have the vendor just turning around and buying a fiat currency with your BTC. So there's no "bitcoin economy", there's just people buying it for extremely short periods for the purposes of purchasing drugs online or paying hacker ransoms, and people receiving it and then immediately disposing of it in favour of state-backed currencies. The only players holding BTC are speculating. Given this usage pattern, are we really going to argue that all this walking and quacking doesn't make it a duck?
- buboard 8y agoyes. you can't call bitcoin, the technology, a scam. it works. if you have an urgency to transfer a specific amount of money today reliably, you can do it. maybe you want to call bitcoin, the investment a scam? possibly, especially if someone overpromised you. But do you think we could do a class action lawsuit against the bitcoin core devs for that reason?
- belltaco 8y agoThat'd be like suing tulip growers in the Tulip mania. Atleast tulips had some intrinsic worth.