[__d]

Conceptually, there's nothing that makes cryptocurrencies a scam.

In practice, however, many cryptocurrency uses, and indeed many cryptocurrencies themselves, are scams. Given the difficulty of identifying actors in the market, the complexity of analyzing the risks, the limited regulatory oversight, the cross-jurisdictional nature of the market, and the general frothiness, hype and FOMO around cryptocurrencies, it's inevitable that it will attract scammers and the scammed.

A simple perusal of its history makes this clear, but the lure of high returns continues to provide a stream of greater fools.

[version_five]

What is the thing you're doing with it that you value? If you have a logically consistent, non-scam answer, cool, then explain that and ask why other people think it's a scam. Saying "how is it a scam" with no other assertions is meaningless. You could equally say "how is it not a scam"

(spoiler alert: it's a scam)

[gregjor]

Read David Gerard’s book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain and the articles on his web site. Do the research as the crypto boosters like to say.

[sarcasmatwork]

Read the Bitcoin white paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Compare everything else to it. Bitcoin is not a scam. There is nothing like it.

[jstx1]

> There is nothing like it.

There's hundreds of coins like it, many of them with significant improvements. Its only unique property is that it was first.

[smoldesu]

They aren't, it's the structures of power that organize around them that are. If you want to get paid in crypto, you have to find someone else to pay you; it's peer-to-peer. As such, any service that revolves around cryptocurrency is almost always engineered to extract a marginal profit from the transaction.