[0wing]

Anytime you buy a crypto-asset, it's someone else cashing out.

Consider where and how these assets are created, as it's more than likely a system designed to extract wealth from greater fools.

If the system does not let you produce the asset for the same amount of work that someone else put in (cryptocoins generate the bulk of the supply very early, and then cut off produciton to new users forcing low liquidity markets to exploit new users), why would you want to contribute to that cryptosystem?

[justboxing]

> If the system does not let you produce the asset for the same amount of work that someone else put in

This. I also can't wrap my head around certain quirks, like for example Stellar Lumens ( XLM ) was/is giving away (for FREE), 16 BILLION of its coins to former Bitcoin Holders.

I just can't wrap my head around paying to buy a coin that the creators have themselves given out BILLIONs of, for FREE.. How do you justify buying into a coin like that?

That like Burger King saying that we'll give FREE Burgers for a YEAR to anyone who has been a former customer of McDonalds (receipt required), but all others have to pay.

Even though I believe in their ( Lumens' ) use case, and they currently have live rollouts of their payment system in partnership with IBM in Asia, I just can't bring myself to buy something knowing they have millions of the same thing to many people for free.

Source: https://www.stellar.org/blog/bitcoin-claim-lumens-2/

[mrtksn]

That depends on the asset.

I can argue that Facebook's incentive to help politicians manipulate my community has far greater impact on me. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter enabling algorithmic propaganda, I will lose my right to live and work in the UK.

I wonder how organic were all these uprisings that were organised on Facebook and Twitter. These things changed the middle east and Europe.

Check out Zeynep Tufekci, a scholar doing wonderful job in researching these issues. Recent article of hers: https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-n...

In my opinion, Facebook and Twitter will be harnessed by local governments to control the conversation OR countries will replace them with local alternatives like in China, effectively ending the democratic processes.

Decentralised networks with incentives of profiting directly from the users by providing services directly to the users have great potential to become the thing that internet was promised to be.

[hyprCoin]

Yes these systems where the wealth is unfairly distributed and then horded by whales do exist. They are not constrained to crypto and not all crypto follows this distribution mechanism.

Trades also do not have to be zero sum, winner and loser, games.

An easy example is this:

I sell my bitcoin to you for your eth. You sell your BTC to rent a vacation home for a weekend. I use the eth to generate a crypto kitty.

The crypto kitty has personal value for me, the vacation has value to you and the owner of the vacation home gets some BTC they can use to find value at a later time.