[dcolkitt]

I guess what exactly do you define as scamming? In terms of outright fraud, I agree there's a lot. It shouldn't be super surprising that scammers tend to prefer decentralized permissionless financial rails, for the same reason that political extremists and pornographers were some of the biggest earliest users of the decentralized permissionless publishing rails of the early Internet.

But I wouldn't characterize all, or even most of crypto as scams. Gambling, maybe. Are memecoins a scam? I would say they're more like a massively multiplayer form of gambling. Which you might argue is a bad thing, and certainly is dubious from a social standpoint. But if the code is openly public and autonomous, and there's no outright deceit, I don't think gambling is really gambling.

Even beyond that, there's a lot happening in crypto that most certainly isn't scams. You have stablecoins and payment rails like USDC, stores of value like Bitcoin, smart contract chains like Ethereum, decentralized finance applications like permissionless exchanges and lending markets, social applications like farcaster, decentralized AI, and gaming.

Now you might argue that all of these things are stupid and pointless and wastes of money, but that's a separate debate. Of the large projects in these categories almost none are outright scams. They're teams experimenting with new ways to run financial markets or move payments or train models or hedge inflation. Like most technological experiments most will fail. But if that was the criteria for "scam" then the entire startup sector is also wall-to-wall scams.

[lmm]

> Are memecoins a scam? I would say they're more like a massively multiplayer form of gambling.

They're practically indistinguishable from penny-stock scams, and they almost always involve a bunch of outright lies in their promotional materials; the only reason you can argue that many buyers aren't deceived is because lying is so rampant and expected in that space that people take it as given that the claims are going to be lies, which is hardly an argument that it's a healthy activity.

> Even beyond that, there's a lot happening in crypto that most certainly isn't scams. You have stablecoins and payment rails like USDC, stores of value like Bitcoin, smart contract chains like Ethereum, decentralized finance applications like permissionless exchanges and lending markets, social applications like farcaster, decentralized AI, and gaming.

All of which still fails to add up to anything actually working and useful, 15 years in. The best cases people can come up with are sympathetic criminals like people evading capital controls. What minimal practical use of cryptocurrency there was is already in a clear decline; fewer and fewer stores are accepting it for payment, the few efforts at interesting crypto games have already collapsed...

> Like most technological experiments most will fail. But if that was the criteria for "scam" then the entire startup sector is also wall-to-wall scams.

There's a big difference between "most" and "all". The startup sector as a whole has enough successes to balance out the failures and end up as positive ROI (and even then, a lot of startups really are scams - just not all of them).

[dcolkitt]

> All of which still fails to add up to anything actually working and useful, 15 years in.

The first packet switched network came online in 1969. Fifteen years by 1984 almost all the use cases were hobby, and it'd be another ten years before the Internet really started changing life.

Decentralized consensus is a fundamentally new computing primitive, similar to packet switched networks. Developing applications on top of new primitives is hard and long, and there will be a lot of time required just to build out usable infrastructure.

Turing complete smart contracts are only 7 years old. Layer 2 scaling is only two years old. Decentralized exchanges and other on-chain financial contracts about four years old.

[ivancho]

I meet some people in crypto occasionally, and it's hilarious that most of them no longer talk about technologies, projects, applications - all they discuss is sentiment. "Oh, there's a wave of positive outlook", or "new patterns of participation are emerging". At least it's honest, I guess, instead of pretending that we are changing the world with DAOs or whatever, they are just sizing up the next bubble.

[AlexandrB]

> But if the code is openly public and autonomous, and there's no outright deceit, I don't think gambling is really gambling.

But there's plenty of outright deceit. Many (most?) memecoins are some form of pump & dump. It doesn't really matter whether the code is openly public if the winners are chosen ahead of time by pre-allocating tokens.

Edit: Also actual gambling meets your criteria here. While the source code of slot machines is not public, it is typically audited to ensure it offers the odds that are advertised.