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This seems to be one of the better responses to my comment. Thanks. Some thoughts in reply: 1) People should be more hesitant to speak in absolutes. Unfortunat

This seems to be one of the better responses to my comment. Thanks. Some thoughts in reply: 1) People should be more hesitant to speak in absolutes. Unfortunately it’s possible that having a nuanced take is inversely correlated with the tendency to post noisy comments online. Maybe, regardless of the underlying stance of “most” skeptics, some more honest dialogue is warranted. Point conceded. 2. Hm. If that’s the case, the author’s assertion that most people who have been scammed are the kinds of people who fall for scams is fair, but not going to change many minds. 3. This is discussed ad nauseam below, so I’ll just add a reminder that we’re debating the author’s statement that “big crypto projects are very rarely scams” as evidenced by his google search. He goes on to say that “Crypto is a few hundred interesting projects, plus a long tail of thousands of scams.” So, most crypto projects are safe if you just ignore most crypto projects and only consider the most dominant. Realized losses vs unrealized market cap aside, the dynamics that incentivize that long tail of scams are worth worrying about in my view.

darawk 4y ago
Thanks, agree with 1 and 2. For 3, I think his statement as written "big crypto projects are very rarely scams" is clearly not literally true in a meaningful sense, and it's right to criticize him for that. However, I think a weaker statement like "The people that complain that crypto projects are scams are overstating how dense the space is with scams" is probably more accurate. It's sort of hard to determine how to weight an analysis of the density of scams in a space. Certainly if you weight by project count, it'll be quite high. If you weight by market cap, it'll be considerably lower. But to your actual point, I agree worrying about scams in crypto is very important, and I read the OP as (admittedly, somewhat carelessly) trying to argue against the view that "all" or "nearly all" crypto projects are scams. I think a better way to state it might be something like: Post dotcom bubble pop a lot of people were saying "those internet companies were all scams", and they were right in some kind of media-attention-weighted sense, and maybe even some other senses. But there were certainly a lot of real and important companies there, and even a lot of near-real-and-important companies that were just a little ahead of their time and didn't make it, and I don't think it's fair to dismiss most of them as scams. I'd definitely say crypto is still in the pre-making-it stage of its lifecycle, and it remains to be seen whether any of these projects will end up being say, the Google or Amazon of this space, that survives the winter and goes on to do meaningful things. However, even if they all die, I think it's fair to say that e.g. Ethereum and Bitcoin were sincere attempts at building novel technology.
stickfigure 4y ago
> the dynamics that incentivize that long tail of scams are worth worrying about in my view. Is this any different from the stock market? There are about 6000 companies listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ. According to [1] there are about 10,000 penny stocks traded OTC. Not every NYSE/NASDAQ company is legit and not every penny stock is a scam, but we're still looking at an awful lot of fraud out there. Seems like the incentives for financial fraud are obvious and eternal. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/penny-stocks-trading.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/penny-stocks-tra...

darawk 4y ago

Thanks, agree with 1 and 2. For 3, I think his statement as written "big crypto projects are very rarely scams" is clearly not literally true in a meaningful sense, and it's right to criticize him for that. However, I think a weaker statement like "The people that complain that crypto projects are scams are overstating how dense the space is with scams" is probably more accurate. It's sort of hard to determine how to weight an analysis of the density of scams in a space. Certainly if you weight by project count, it'll be quite high. If you weight by market cap, it'll be considerably lower. But to your actual point, I agree worrying about scams in crypto is very important, and I read the OP as (admittedly, somewhat carelessly) trying to argue against the view that "all" or "nearly all" crypto projects are scams. I think a better way to state it might be something like: Post dotcom bubble pop a lot of people were saying "those internet companies were all scams", and they were right in some kind of media-attention-weighted sense, and maybe even some other senses. But there were certainly a lot of real and important companies there, and even a lot of near-real-and-important companies that were just a little ahead of their time and didn't make it, and I don't think it's fair to dismiss most of them as scams. I'd definitely say crypto is still in the pre-making-it stage of its lifecycle, and it remains to be seen whether any of these projects will end up being say, the Google or Amazon of this space, that survives the winter and goes on to do meaningful things. However, even if they all die, I think it's fair to say that e.g. Ethereum and Bitcoin were sincere attempts at building novel technology.

stickfigure 4y ago

> the dynamics that incentivize that long tail of scams are worth worrying about in my view. Is this any different from the stock market? There are about 6000 companies listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ. According to [1] there are about 10,000 penny stocks traded OTC. Not every NYSE/NASDAQ company is legit and not every penny stock is a scam, but we're still looking at an awful lot of fraud out there. Seems like the incentives for financial fraud are obvious and eternal. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/penny-stocks-trading.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/penny-stocks-tra...