No one says cash is a scam because the finance bros on wall street use it to scam people in far worse ways.
But for some reason it’s functionally impossible to separate crypto from the scamers who use it.
Well, the crypto bros only seem to come up with scammy uses for crypto, whereas cash can be exchanged for goods and services.
It actually isn’t, because the blockchain is a multiple ledger system you can trace a coin back to every wallet who ever owned it and therefor it’s functionally impossible to launder.
Instead, you can get anonymized credit cards via online services or route money through certain foreign banks and then you’re basically a ghost.
Doesn’t mean there are no uses for crypto. Protesters and activists use it to fund their campaigns, for example. Or sanctions often have collateral damage that can be circumvented using crypto; for example, cutting Russia off the traditional financial system means, among other things, inability to financially support Ukrainians or the army, and on top of that, inside the country you’ll be jailed if the police knows.
I personally use crypto from within Russia to rent a VPN server, and to support projects that do accept it.
Now, the other point is that proof-of-work consensus mechanism behind many of the crypto projects relies on ever-heavier computing, and while it remains unrivaled in terms of decentralization, it is not eco-friendly, which is very bad. Luckily, proof-of-stake cryptos exist, and their footprint is minimal.
Since you missed the point of the comment above, scams exist for every currency. What crypto brings to the table is secure, as in cryptographically secured wallets keeping your digital access to funds yours alone, and decentralized, as in no government can rapidly devalue it or shut it down, multiple ledger finances.
But yes, don’t buy the hip new coins because of any influencers, and don’t fall for “it’s never going back down” pump and dumps.
Both things can be true: cash is a scam and so is crypto. The reason I despise crypto is because they just reinvented capitalism, when the old one was working just fine (in the sense that capitalism is not a broken system: it is functioning just as designed, benefiting the ruling class). So now we’ve got two ways they’re scamming us.
Money is not capitalism. You can have money without capitalism, as the whole world did for most of recorded history.
