>We had one of the bar works locations here in miami suddenly shut down last week. Few tenants ever signed up, and the staff weren't even informed the place was shutting down.
This is the number one reason I want nothing to do with Bitcoin. The technology is new and amazing and incredibly exciting, but people are awful as ever. The industry is full of shady characters looking to make a buck any way possible. And anything that touches it tends to fall into the same category.
I'm certain it will be successful in the long run though. There will always be those willing to take the risk.
That's true because the barrier of entry is 0 and Bitcoin is basically money but there are other kind of community members that are pushing all these blockchain/cryptocurrency/smart-contracts stuff forward. An ICO can be an scam but also push interesting projects forward in places without good access to capital. We are just living the prehistoric times of the technology.
I think exchanges are one of the weakest points of the cryptoeconomy. If they are banned or overly regulated Bitcoin will convert into PayPal in some places. That was my experience with Coinbase and I understand that they are overly regulated. In a way the cryptoeconomy is a good thing for the intelligence community since it transparents what is happening in black markets, even in the Monero and Z.cash shielded cases where at least you can measure some level of activity.
The fact that cryptocurrency keeps showing up alongside scams certainly does not bode well for the legitimacy of cryptocurrency, and by extension it does not bode well for the stability or overall value.
One of the biggest flaws with cryptocurrency is that for all its mathematical and structural elegance, it rolls back almost all of the features that mitigate fraudulent human behaviors.
> One of the biggest flaws with cryptocurrency is that for all its mathematical and structural elegance, it rolls back almost all of the features that mitigate fraudulent human behaviors.
Those aren't flaws; those are features.
Bitcoin was meant to serve a very small number of people attempting to evade the laws surrounding currency exchange.
The fact that it could be propagated as a pyramid scheme (mining gets vastly more expensive the later you "buy in") was marketing genius.
It sounds like this has nothing to do with Bitcoin. The scammer used the word Bitcoin to attract victims but didn't actually have anything to do with Bitcoin.
This is the number one reason I want nothing to do with Bitcoin. The technology is new and amazing and incredibly exciting, but people are awful as ever. The industry is full of shady characters looking to make a buck any way possible. And anything that touches it tends to fall into the same category.
I'm certain it will be successful in the long run though. There will always be those willing to take the risk.