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Right. I'm going to challenge you to: - prevent or reverse any of my transactions - confiscate my bitcoin, or even find out how much I have You can't, and ne

Right. I'm going to challenge you to: - prevent or reverse any of my transactions - confiscate my bitcoin, or even find out how much I have You can't, and never will. Some cryptocurrencies are scams. But if you're saying all cryptocurrencies are scams, you're simply saying math and economics are a scam.

quaquaqua1 7y ago
Agreed. Certain banks are scams. Certain coins are scams. The technical layer is entirely separated from the business layer.
untog 7y ago
"Scam" is a broad term. The technical basis of bitcoin can be 100% solid and it can still be a "scam" in the sense that it's been sold as a get rich quick scheme for speculative investors rather than an actual, day-to-day use currency (given transaction times it'll struggle to ever be that, but I digress)
- jackcodes 7y ago
  Saying cryptocurrencies are a scam is kind of like saying leggings are a scam because of LuLaRoe.
  - untog 7y ago
    I'd say it depends on percentages. The vast, almost entire majority of leggings are not scams. A notable number of cryptocurrencies are scams.
    - jackcodes 7y ago
      Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP take up around 80% of total market cap and I’ll class those as legitimate enough to fall in the non-scam category. I’ll also ballpark half of the remaining 20% as not being scams (I know that’s a little debatable too, is a poor business premise a scam for example?), and I’d say that’s not too bad on the whole. If we’re talking about number of projects then I can’t disagree, there’d be no argument.
      - Nursie 7y ago
        Most of the activity taking place on them appears to be scams or scam related though, especially as many of the large exchanges appear to either be scams or at least be in on the scams. It's scams all the way down.
      - chx 7y ago
        What makes you think Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP are not scams? That's the entire point of this argument: Bitcoin is a scam. I showed you an article about how there are no legit usages (aside from those that include it out of hype but could be implemented just as well without) and another which shows you it is a digital version of the chain distributor scheme.
        coralreef 7y ago
        Its strange that you say there are no legit uses, when people keep telling you how they use it.
        jackcodes 7y ago
        > What makes you think Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP are not scams? Because they deliver what they promise, and I get from them exactly what they say they’re going to give me. Bitcoin doesn’t advertise itself as getting rich. It says it’s a digital ledger and wallet. I can use it like that. Ethereum, a platform for creating tokens and contracts. I can use it to do that. XRP, well that’s one for the banks so I’m taking a punt, but they’re doing real settlement. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP aren’t scamming me. The guy asking for Bitcoin on telegram, yes.
unityByFreedom 7y ago
Irreversibility of transactions is not a feature I want. If someone wants to rob you of all your bitcoin, they can hold a gun to your head until you give it to them. A bank, on the other hand, has transaction limits. If I buy something online with a credit card and soon after discover it's fraudulent (which has happened to me on multiple occasions), I can reverse that too.
- commoner 7y ago
  That criticism also applies to cash.
  - tempestn 7y ago
    True, although most people wouldn't hold nearly as much cash as is commonly held in bitcoin.
    - leni536 7y ago
      I guess wallets are called wallets for a reason.
- mlyle 7y ago
  Note that the property we're talking about isn't really irreversibility of individual transactions. We can come up with whatever policy about what can show up in a ledger, including "undo" transactions. But what we want is that once transactions are recorded to a ledger, that it's not possible to remove that record. This durability is a highly valuable property for financial transactions and other things where non-repudiation is desired. However, it's a possibly scary property, too (what if something copyrighted or illegal ends up in the forever-durable and public ledger?)
- Lucadg 7y ago
  You'd keep in yourself a small amount of Bitcoin. You'd keep at home a bigger amount. You'd keep in a safe place the rest. Exactly as with cash.
linkregister 7y ago
- confiscate my bitcoin, or even find out how much I have Bitcoin's public ledger is especially vulnerable to FBI "follow the money" investigation. Only one end is required to be known, and the entire trail is easily followed. The federal agent who stole a portion of Dread Pirate Roberts' Bitcoin was quickly tracked and prosecuted.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  Properly implemented "Laundering" services for crypto currency can make follow-the-money effectively useless. The funds are transferred to a wallet, they are mixed with many other coins, and then they are paid out in different sized transactions to the recipient. Assuming you have a busy enough pool, it should be technically untraceable.
  - dingdongding 7y ago
    Just like giant corporate balance sheets?
  - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
    Sounds like something where if you offered that as a service you would probably be legally required to Know Your Customer and to keep records...
    - Kuinox 7y ago
      These services does not require manipulating real money. To run the service, it requires a device connected to the internet, that all. You can find a lot of way to host it in a country that don't have these requirements, or to host it anonymously.
      - Nursie 7y ago
        Mixers are now a target for law enforcement though, just so you know.
hudon 7y ago
transactions are “reversed” every time a chain is abandoned. It happened in 2010 when Satoshi himself called to abandon a chain, again 2013 when Luke and Pieter called miners to abandon a chain, and probably many times since then to fix various bugs. It’s impossible to count how many of those abandoned transactions were successfully replayed on the new chain versus how many were spent elsewhere (ie reversed)
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Forks aren't abandonment. And at this point, the market determines which chains are abandoned, it's not a single actor that has any sort of control.
  - mosselman 7y ago
    That is like saying that there are no back doors in open source software because anyone can have a look at the source. 'The market' is a handful of powerful miners anyway. As if your 1 vote could do anything about some fork abandonment or whatever. Also, do you monitor the whole network constantly? You have to sleep at some point. You know who does constantly monitor the flow of currency to a somewhat trustworthy degree? Banks and governments do.
    - feanaro 7y ago
      You don't have to monitor constantly, just some time after you make a transaction. Long chain reversals grow exponentially unlikely the longer the chain gets. In practice, this does not seem like a large problem.
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      First of all, you seem to be addressing bitcoin in isolation and not crypto in general. What forces do you think make Bitcoin worth more than ETH or more than Bitcoin Cash? Market forces. Supply and demand. Just like all commodities. These are invisible hand forces that no single person controls at this point. Even if there are varying levels of centralization in the chains themselves, the market decides whether to back ETH or ETC or some mix of both. So, like any decentralized system, the network is monitored in a decentralized manner. The chains themselves have solved for consensus problems. That's the whole thing keeping blockchains going. No, banks don't constantly monitor everything (although admittedly, it's more than ever thanks to technology). Large amounts of cash still flow around the globe. And whether your government is trustworthy depends largely on which of the 195 nations you live in.
WA 7y ago
Calling them currrency is already a scam. They are not a currency. They are hardly money (look up the difference yourself), because you mostly can’t buy stuff with it. And for sure, you can’t pay taxes with them. I read a great question here on HN a while back to enthusiasts: If you were the last person in earth to receive coins, would you still like them and endorse them? So many comments can be traced to the idea of becoming richer. Compare this to the Euro: When the Euro was introduced as a currency in the EU in 2001, people gave zero fucks whether they were first to exchange their old currency for the new one or the last.
- michwill 7y ago
  > you mostly can’t buy stuff with it Sometimes I cannot buy legitimate stuff without them. Just today, I bought some books for which US credit/debit cards refused to work. And I see that every week. > you can’t pay taxes with them https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/25/ohio-becomes-the-first-state-to-accept-bitcoin-for-tax-payments/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/25/ohio-becomes-the-first-sta...
  - qnr 7y ago
    I usually don't go out of my way to pay with bitcoin, but recently needed to buy a PSN prepaid card and every website I tried either declined my 2 credit cards and paypal outright or requested some ridiculous verification (record myself on camera holding a passport to my face? To buy a $10 prepaid card? No thanks) In the end I stumbled upon a shop that accepted bitcoin and got my PSN card in the time it took to get one network confirmation.
- malux85 7y ago
  I buy heaps of stuff with bitcoin. Not drugs or anything illegal, but computer equipment, membership fees, server hosting, domains and 2nd hand goods from friends. And you can pay your taxes with crypto: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/07/16/canadian-town-pay-taxes-cryptocurrency/ https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/07/16/canadian-town-pay... Nothing is going to replace fiat overnight, but crypto is far from "not a currency"
pjc50 7y ago
<shrug> If you leave the keys in a safe and never use them? Yes, they're going to stay there. But as soon as you make a transaction, in or out, the transaction history of those coins is exposed. And as soon as you make an infosec mistake, you're at risk of loss.

quaquaqua1 7y ago

Agreed. Certain banks are scams. Certain coins are scams. The technical layer is entirely separated from the business layer.

untog 7y ago

"Scam" is a broad term. The technical basis of bitcoin can be 100% solid and it can still be a "scam" in the sense that it's been sold as a get rich quick scheme for speculative investors rather than an actual, day-to-day use currency (given transaction times it'll struggle to ever be that, but I digress)

jackcodes 7y ago
Saying cryptocurrencies are a scam is kind of like saying leggings are a scam because of LuLaRoe.
- untog 7y ago
  I'd say it depends on percentages. The vast, almost entire majority of leggings are not scams. A notable number of cryptocurrencies are scams.
  - jackcodes 7y ago
    Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP take up around 80% of total market cap and I’ll class those as legitimate enough to fall in the non-scam category. I’ll also ballpark half of the remaining 20% as not being scams (I know that’s a little debatable too, is a poor business premise a scam for example?), and I’d say that’s not too bad on the whole. If we’re talking about number of projects then I can’t disagree, there’d be no argument.
    - Nursie 7y ago
      Most of the activity taking place on them appears to be scams or scam related though, especially as many of the large exchanges appear to either be scams or at least be in on the scams. It's scams all the way down.
    - chx 7y ago
      What makes you think Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP are not scams? That's the entire point of this argument: Bitcoin is a scam. I showed you an article about how there are no legit usages (aside from those that include it out of hype but could be implemented just as well without) and another which shows you it is a digital version of the chain distributor scheme.
      - coralreef 7y ago
        Its strange that you say there are no legit uses, when people keep telling you how they use it.
      - jackcodes 7y ago
        > What makes you think Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP are not scams? Because they deliver what they promise, and I get from them exactly what they say they’re going to give me. Bitcoin doesn’t advertise itself as getting rich. It says it’s a digital ledger and wallet. I can use it like that. Ethereum, a platform for creating tokens and contracts. I can use it to do that. XRP, well that’s one for the banks so I’m taking a punt, but they’re doing real settlement. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP aren’t scamming me. The guy asking for Bitcoin on telegram, yes.

unityByFreedom 7y ago

Irreversibility of transactions is not a feature I want. If someone wants to rob you of all your bitcoin, they can hold a gun to your head until you give it to them. A bank, on the other hand, has transaction limits. If I buy something online with a credit card and soon after discover it's fraudulent (which has happened to me on multiple occasions), I can reverse that too.

commoner 7y ago
That criticism also applies to cash.
- tempestn 7y ago
  True, although most people wouldn't hold nearly as much cash as is commonly held in bitcoin.
  - leni536 7y ago
    I guess wallets are called wallets for a reason.
mlyle 7y ago
Note that the property we're talking about isn't really irreversibility of individual transactions. We can come up with whatever policy about what can show up in a ledger, including "undo" transactions. But what we want is that once transactions are recorded to a ledger, that it's not possible to remove that record. This durability is a highly valuable property for financial transactions and other things where non-repudiation is desired. However, it's a possibly scary property, too (what if something copyrighted or illegal ends up in the forever-durable and public ledger?)
Lucadg 7y ago
You'd keep in yourself a small amount of Bitcoin. You'd keep at home a bigger amount. You'd keep in a safe place the rest. Exactly as with cash.

linkregister 7y ago

- confiscate my bitcoin, or even find out how much I have Bitcoin's public ledger is especially vulnerable to FBI "follow the money" investigation. Only one end is required to be known, and the entire trail is easily followed. The federal agent who stole a portion of Dread Pirate Roberts' Bitcoin was quickly tracked and prosecuted.

jjeaff 7y ago
Properly implemented "Laundering" services for crypto currency can make follow-the-money effectively useless. The funds are transferred to a wallet, they are mixed with many other coins, and then they are paid out in different sized transactions to the recipient. Assuming you have a busy enough pool, it should be technically untraceable.
- dingdongding 7y ago
  Just like giant corporate balance sheets?
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
  Sounds like something where if you offered that as a service you would probably be legally required to Know Your Customer and to keep records...
  - Kuinox 7y ago
    These services does not require manipulating real money. To run the service, it requires a device connected to the internet, that all. You can find a lot of way to host it in a country that don't have these requirements, or to host it anonymously.
    - Nursie 7y ago
      Mixers are now a target for law enforcement though, just so you know.

hudon 7y ago

transactions are “reversed” every time a chain is abandoned. It happened in 2010 when Satoshi himself called to abandon a chain, again 2013 when Luke and Pieter called miners to abandon a chain, and probably many times since then to fix various bugs. It’s impossible to count how many of those abandoned transactions were successfully replayed on the new chain versus how many were spent elsewhere (ie reversed)

chrisco255 7y ago
Forks aren't abandonment. And at this point, the market determines which chains are abandoned, it's not a single actor that has any sort of control.
- mosselman 7y ago
  That is like saying that there are no back doors in open source software because anyone can have a look at the source. 'The market' is a handful of powerful miners anyway. As if your 1 vote could do anything about some fork abandonment or whatever. Also, do you monitor the whole network constantly? You have to sleep at some point. You know who does constantly monitor the flow of currency to a somewhat trustworthy degree? Banks and governments do.
  - feanaro 7y ago
    You don't have to monitor constantly, just some time after you make a transaction. Long chain reversals grow exponentially unlikely the longer the chain gets. In practice, this does not seem like a large problem.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    First of all, you seem to be addressing bitcoin in isolation and not crypto in general. What forces do you think make Bitcoin worth more than ETH or more than Bitcoin Cash? Market forces. Supply and demand. Just like all commodities. These are invisible hand forces that no single person controls at this point. Even if there are varying levels of centralization in the chains themselves, the market decides whether to back ETH or ETC or some mix of both. So, like any decentralized system, the network is monitored in a decentralized manner. The chains themselves have solved for consensus problems. That's the whole thing keeping blockchains going. No, banks don't constantly monitor everything (although admittedly, it's more than ever thanks to technology). Large amounts of cash still flow around the globe. And whether your government is trustworthy depends largely on which of the 195 nations you live in.

WA 7y ago

Calling them currrency is already a scam. They are not a currency. They are hardly money (look up the difference yourself), because you mostly can’t buy stuff with it. And for sure, you can’t pay taxes with them. I read a great question here on HN a while back to enthusiasts: If you were the last person in earth to receive coins, would you still like them and endorse them? So many comments can be traced to the idea of becoming richer. Compare this to the Euro: When the Euro was introduced as a currency in the EU in 2001, people gave zero fucks whether they were first to exchange their old currency for the new one or the last.

michwill 7y ago
> you mostly can’t buy stuff with it Sometimes I cannot buy legitimate stuff without them. Just today, I bought some books for which US credit/debit cards refused to work. And I see that every week. > you can’t pay taxes with them https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/25/ohio-becomes-the-first-state-to-accept-bitcoin-for-tax-payments/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/25/ohio-becomes-the-first-sta...
- qnr 7y ago
  I usually don't go out of my way to pay with bitcoin, but recently needed to buy a PSN prepaid card and every website I tried either declined my 2 credit cards and paypal outright or requested some ridiculous verification (record myself on camera holding a passport to my face? To buy a $10 prepaid card? No thanks) In the end I stumbled upon a shop that accepted bitcoin and got my PSN card in the time it took to get one network confirmation.
malux85 7y ago
I buy heaps of stuff with bitcoin. Not drugs or anything illegal, but computer equipment, membership fees, server hosting, domains and 2nd hand goods from friends. And you can pay your taxes with crypto: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/07/16/canadian-town-pay-taxes-cryptocurrency/ https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/07/16/canadian-town-pay... Nothing is going to replace fiat overnight, but crypto is far from "not a currency"

pjc50 7y ago

<shrug> If you leave the keys in a safe and never use them? Yes, they're going to stay there. But as soon as you make a transaction, in or out, the transaction history of those coins is exposed. And as soon as you make an infosec mistake, you're at risk of loss.