Fascinating! I thought this was cool as I clicked through, I'm glad to see that it's been a dramatic topic for 25 years, not just some new idea. Hyphanet seems more openly political, which makes sense but is kinda a hard sell for me after seeing the impact Bitcoin had on US citizens vis-a-vis scams, hacks, and misc. bad actors. But maybe that's a sacrifice worth making in the name of residents of less free nation states?

Either way, pretty funny when a software project has to tackle questions like "what is property in the modern era?" and "what is free speech?" in their FAQ. That's how you know you're really pushing against the status quo, I guess...

Those scams are not isolated to Bitcoin. You see them in many content creator industries. They are giveaway scams and templated to fit a niche. You can do them for gambling, gaming like cs-go skin giveaways, makeup giveaways and so on. They are really easy scams to do because you can just wait for the next trendy thing to happen and then target that trend with bot accounts. On youtube they will often just recycle what accounts don't get reported.

Platforms do their best to take care of this, but these scams are so easy to run that you can automate them and spin up new accounts very quickly. Even if there are financial barriers it can still be madly profitable to accept the costs.

There is no clear way to deal with the concerns you mentioned, but I think playing too safe and not exploring technology will quickly put you behind the curb. Most of it can be resolved with good financial regulation.

I mean, I was more referencing the big epidemic in the US recently, “pig butchering” — basically catfishing with more money involved. Certainly no system alone can make it impossible, but I think even the biggest crypto fans in the world should acknowledge that it makes it much easier, and thus much more common. “Go to this website” is a lot easier/more reasonable ask than “scratch off 20 gift cards and send me the codes”, or whatever western mutual is

Sure, crypto exposes you to potential bad actors in the form of scammers, criminals, etc. Fiat exposes you to potential bad actors in the form of banks, governments, police, etc.

So, whichever represents a bigger threat to you is largely a question of circumstance.

> after seeing the impact Bitcoin had on US citizens

That's an odd way of putting it, as if crypto scams were limited to the US.

Fiat currencies are also used for scams, hacks, etc. Does that make fiat currencies a hard sell for you as well?

It’s about rates, accessibility, incentives, and other society-level statistics. There are scams that have become much more common thanks to the affordances of untraceable, unmanaged online currencies, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone.