It's not necessarily that the technology inherently lends itself to scams, but the culture around it absolutely does. A startlingly large percentage of the biggest players in crypto have turned out to be scams, this isn't a one-off thing.

Still, "It's all scams" strikes me as overly simplistic, partly because there is observably a great deal of effort in crypto that appears to be quite genuine..

..but perhaps more to the point, the difference between amount of activity in crypto that is scammy v. amount of activity in literally all things money related that is scammy is not particularly huge.

You've posted a wall of text about how they enable scams and how the community is riddled with fraud and pyramid schemes. Guess what, I agree with you.

You accuse me of ignoring the cult-like behavior of the crypto community, when I am more familiar with it than anyone. But the behavior of a community has nothing to do with whether a network communications protocol is a scam.

You accuse me of "ignoring warning signs and dismissing criticism" when I am intimately familiar with the warning signs that many cryptos besides Bitcoin and Ethereum have, and I welcome criticism as long as it's not based on a foundation of misunderstandings of the technical workings of the protocol.

You accuse me of having a difficult time perceiving the pervasive fraud that's so stunningly obvious to everyone else. I am acutely aware of the pervasive fraud, but fraud being pervasive doesn't mean that the Bitcoin or Ethereum protocols themselves are frauds.

You know what else is riddled with fraud? The internet, the telephone, and originally the telegraph (leading to a whole new class of crimes called wire fraud).

But to pick at just one of the technical inaccuracies:

>Ethereum is ultimately a central platform, and the fact that a few dozen people need to sign off on every major change before it can be implemented is largely meaningless and symbolic, with the validation network ultimately sitting somewhere between consortium and cartel.

Ethereum has roughly 2,000 nodes, the operator of each of which must approve a change and manually upgrade, otherwise they continue to participate in the unchanged version of the network. In practice, this means that every customer-facing exchange, custodial wallet, and service provider needs to "sign off" on a change in order for the fork to be legitimized.

>The movement of Ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake has been vapourware

Ethereum's beacon chain proof of stake network has been running since November 2020 and has received its first hard fork upgrade, Altair. Currently, there is a public merge testnet named Kiln, the second testnet rehearsing the "merge" event where Proof Of Stake replaces Proof Of Work as the Ethereum execution chain's consensus model. The code is there, the network is there, and it's all running publicly. You can download the client software today from the public github repo and run it to join the network and help rehearse the merge, in a way that is very close to the final specifications. That's the opposite of vaporware.

> in no small part because the validators simply choose not to.

Moving consensus models is done by hard fork, it has absolutely nothing to do with "validators choosing not to." Think of it like the Ethereum development team, with the explicit permission of the exchanges and service providers, changing the direction of a firehose to point at the PoS validators instead of the PoW validators. The PoW validators can't grab on to the stream of water and wrestle the hose away, their income stream just vanishes.

Those are 2-3 examples of technical inaccuracies. More technical inaccuracies in that video surround the characteristics, economics, minimums, and protocol liveness guarantees for Proof Of Stake, the nature and maturity of protocol scaling, the nature of bounded historical data size, and the nature of network congestion (it does not in any circumstances lead to forks, that's complete bunk).

If I chose to indulge your shotgun approach, we'd both be here all day and I don't really want that. This comment is already getting long and took a lot of effort for me to write up. Most of your copypasta can be summed up as problems with the community, not problems with the network protocols themselves.

I'm not here to try to convince you to like cryptocurrency, you're free to hold whatever opinion about it you want. It just really annoys me when people spread misinformation about how the protocols are constructed, and try to characterize them as scams when they are nothing more than distributed database software.

There are only two killer use cases for crypto: speculation and prohibited transactions.

That's not snarky those are actually pretty great use cases that have massive demand and centuries of success behind them as a product category.

A large part of crypto is scams, but it's clear not all of it is. You couldn't really argue that bitcoin, in general, is just a scam for example.

But beyond that it's basically all gambling. People put money into crypto hoping to get more money out. Period.

That's a really fucking desirable product it should be pointed out. It's so desired by people that you can build an entire city in a desert on the concept, it's common to all societies in all eras of history. People just absolutely fucking love to gamble.

Every argument against this seems to be a variation on "Well sure, but one day they might..." and so on.

Which is cool. You're absolutely right to say that. One day it might not just be gambling.

But today, it is. That's why there's money in it.

stay away from all of it.

Yes, people pouring their savings in tulips, fake railroad companies, and beanie babies is absurd. Does it follow that tulips, railroad companies, and baby plushies are scams and criminal in nature? The grifters and their victims moved on, and the underlying objects of speculation seem to exist and do their respective jobs just fine now.

Crypto is doing its job just fine of being a trustless and permissionless way of transferring value. It doesn't care if grifters hype, pump, and dump its tokens. The few actual decentralized networks in existence just keep running and securing their immutable ledgers. The few actual peer-to-peer researchers and developers keep improving them.