Crypto as currency = good.
Crypto as investment = bad.
First one is technological progress, the other is a Ponzi scheme.
Problem is, for the smart contracts to run, someone needs to profit. If crypto was stable (stablecoins) no one would have any incentive to mine or run a stake pool. Investment/greed is literally the oil that this machine runs on. It’s just a new way of paying for computation. Our current system also runs on greed. It’s just that only one party benefits from running one server.
We already pay for server time. Now, we can pay for server time and the payment goes to many small actors rather than one rich server farm operator.
The truly decentralized projects (non scam projects) have already achieved this and then some…it’s just that our media has a tendency to zoom in on projects that did violate trust while others hum along without a single blip, truly decentralized. They like to highlight the scam projects because our media is owned by banksters and people that benefit from the dollar. They seek to edge out their competition and love to conflate scam projects with all crypto projects. However, the reality is that there are currencies other than the dollar that I’d rather have my money stored in because I live in a country that may not exist in 20 years and I want my belongings not to be within reach of the banksters that fuck me at every opportunity.
Scams: Funny thing is, I’ve never been scammed in the crypto world. You know how I did it? I could tell which projects were a scam from a mile away.
There are four questions you have to ask yourself: 1.) is this project TRULY decentralized? 2.) is this project open source? 3.) were the initial tokens allocated only to insiders? 4.) are they promising a return on investment?
FTX wasn’t even decentralized. Two seconds of vetting/research caused me to stay miles away. Terra Luna as well. They weren’t even remotely decentralized and the protocol was closed source. Whoever looked at the insane, promised 30% ROI/Y from Terra Luna and believed it wasnt too good to be true deserved to be scammed.
Problem is that barely anyone use crypto as currency. Almost everybody treat it as a stupid get rich quick scheme.