Haven't you watched "Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs" yet? It's about a whole lot more than just NFTs. Your question is thoroughly addressed and truthfully answered in that video. Also see his references and citations in "Sources and Further Reading" for more proof.
A friend asked me to watch that video back when it came out, but I couldn't get past all the technical inaccuracies about Bitcoin and Ethereum in the first half hour or so.
Most of those links are about artwork NFTs, not Bitcoin or Ethereum.
There are a lot of cryptocurrencies that are scams, and there are a lot of NFT projects that are scams. I've heard respectable arguments that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not actually all that useful (which is for the most part the point your remaining sources attempt to make), but that's a whole world of difference from them being scams.
And just what specifically were those "technical inaccuracies" that were so intolerable to you that you couldn't stomach watching the whole thing?
You should thank your friend for trying to deprogram you from the cult you've fallen for, and go back and watch the entire video. Because he makes excellent and "technically accurate" points about the cult-like behavior of that community, which explains why you're so quick to "ignore warning signs and dismiss criticism", and have a such a difficult time perceiving the pervasive fraud that's so stunningly obvious to everyone else:
>The shorthand WAGMI, We’re All Going To Make It, is aphoristically bandied about even in openly zero-sum competitions where, by definition, most participants explicitly won’t make it.
>But you can’t point that out, because that would be FUD.
>And if you’re spreading FUD then you’re NGMI, Not Going to Make It.
>And making it, getting rich, is all that matters.
>HFSP, have fun staying poor.
>These are synthesized into a No True Scotsman paradigm.
>The “we” in We’re All Going To Make It does not refer to we all, it refers to the select, the chosen, the Diamond Hands and the hodlers.
>Those who make it are clearly the We, and if you didn’t make it, then you weren’t.
>People who get angry about being scammed by a rug-pull or by malware or by social engineering are berated and belittled for not following the crowd.
>This incubates a community trained to ignore warning signs and dismiss criticism, a community with internal language and customs that are explicitly incompatible with outside communications.
>Skepticism is FUD from non-believers who are trying to undermine the value of your assets and manipulate a crash or trick you into being a paper hands.
>It all maps onto narratives of sin and deception, a chosen-few who are privileged with advance knowledge about the promised land, which they can achieve by holding strong to the rituals and expelling all doubt.
>The end product is a self-organizing high-control group.
But back to the main point: Do you earnestly believe that his extremely well-documented point that Bitcoin and Ethereum are riddled with fraud that's pervasively promoted by shills is "technically inaccurate"? Are you asking us to believe all those shills are actually correct and telling the truth, or do you deny the existence of shills and their get-rich-quick pyramid schemes?
Since you asked "why" "Bitcoin and Ethereum are scams", here is the transcript of Line Goes Up, which decidedly answers your question.
Which of the following quotes do you claim are "technically inaccurate"? And what do you claim are the "technically accurate" counter-arguments? Please refer to specific quotes.
>And as far as banking is concerned, Bitcoin was never designed to solve the actual problems created by the banking industry, only to be the new medium by which they operated.
>Peter Thiel, who also went from wealthy to ultra-wealthy off the Web2 boom via PayPal, loves crypto, and is friends with a bunch of eugenics advocates who promote cryptocurrency as a return to “sound money” for a whole bunch of extremely racist reasons because when they start talking about banks and bankers, they mean Jews.
>So just to head all this off at the pass, Bitcoin and proof-of-work cryptocurrency aren’t incentivizing a move to green energy sources, like solar and wind, they are offsetting it.
>Because electrical consumption, electrical waste, is the value that underpins Bitcoin.
>Miners spend X dollars in electricity to mine a Bitcoin, they expect to be able to sell that coin for at least X plus profit.
>When new power sources come online and the price of electricity goes down, they don’t let X go down, they build a bigger machine.
>[Drumming] In 2012 Vitalik Buterin, a crypto enthusiast and butthurt Warlock main set out to fix what he saw as the failings and inflexibilities of Bitcoin.
>Rather than becoming the new digital currency, a thing that people actually used to buy stuff, Bitcoin had become an unwieldy speculative financial instrument, too slow and expensive to use for anything other than stunt purchases of expensive cars.
>It was infested with money laundering and mired in bad press.
>After the FBI shut down Silk Road you couldn’t even buy drugs with it anymore.
>In practice you couldn’t do anything with your Bitcoin but bet on it, lock up money you already have in the hopes that Bitcoin goes up later, and pray you don’t lose it all in a scam, lose access to your wallet, or have it all stolen by an exchange.
>In terms of problems with Bitcoin, Ethereum solves none of them and introduces a whole new suite of problems driven by the technofetishistic egotism of assuming that programmers are uniquely suited to solve society’s problems.
>Bitcoin in particular, owing to its glacial transaction times, suffers from problems where the value of the coin can change dramatically between the start and end of a transaction.
>Ethereum is ultimately a central platform, and the fact that a few dozen people need to sign off on every major change before it can be implemented is largely meaningless and symbolic, with the validation network ultimately sitting somewhere between consortium and cartel.
>While the network of Ethereum miners and validators are not a formal corporation Yet There’s no mechanism in existence that compels them to act in the interest of users, particularly poor and disempowered users, where those interests conflict with their own.
>The movement of Ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake has been vapourware in no small part because the validators simply choose not to.
>The entire market is absolutely lousy with scams, and has been since Bitcoin first gained any traction.
>Every single scam structure imaginable has been dusted off and redeployed into this explicitly unregulated market where victims are largely without recourse.
>These range from institutional scams, like Ponzi schemes, pump and dumps, and insider trading, to middle-weight scams like gold brick and wash trading, to grittier scams like phishing and sending fake links.
>Pump and dumps, in particular, are conducted in broad daylight, since it’s not illegal, it’s just against the terms of service of the exchanges that you use to do it, so the worst case scenario is you burn your account.
>They’ll straight up walk you through the process of doing a pump and dump, no codewords, diagrams and everything.
>They’re notable as they’re actually a two-headed scam because, you see, you might get recruited onto the pump half of the scheme, or you might think you’re being recruited to pump, but you’re actually the dump.
>And as far as banking is concerned, Bitcoin was never designed to solve the actual problems created by the banking industry, only to be the new medium by which they operated.
Bitcoins original goal was to try and solve the trusted third-party issue. "A peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." So definitely not be the new medium through which banks operated.
> Peter Thiel, who also went from wealthy to ultra-wealthy off the Web2 boom via PayPal, loves crypto, and is friends with a bunch of eugenics advocates who promote cryptocurrency as a return to “sound money” for a whole bunch of extremely racist reasons because when they start talking about banks and bankers, they mean Jews.
Guilt by association isn't an argument. You tried to use the same trick on me by calling me a shill, so maybe that's why you don't recognize the logical fallacy. Either way, it's not valid. It's a staple in any propaganda handbook though. Web2.0 was coined in 2004, two years after Paypal IPOd by the way.
We're on quote number two and the "arguments" are already at rock bottom, I'll stop here.
None of that speaks to Bitcoin or Ethereum being scams.
You've posted a wall of text about how they enable scams and how the community is riddled with fraud and pyramid schemes. Guess what, I agree with you.
You accuse me of ignoring the cult-like behavior of the crypto community, when I am more familiar with it than anyone. But the behavior of a community has nothing to do with whether a network communications protocol is a scam.
You accuse me of "ignoring warning signs and dismissing criticism" when I am intimately familiar with the warning signs that many cryptos besides Bitcoin and Ethereum have, and I welcome criticism as long as it's not based on a foundation of misunderstandings of the technical workings of the protocol.
You accuse me of having a difficult time perceiving the pervasive fraud that's so stunningly obvious to everyone else. I am acutely aware of the pervasive fraud, but fraud being pervasive doesn't mean that the Bitcoin or Ethereum protocols themselves are frauds.
You know what else is riddled with fraud? The internet, the telephone, and originally the telegraph (leading to a whole new class of crimes called wire fraud).
But to pick at just one of the technical inaccuracies:
>Ethereum is ultimately a central platform, and the fact that a few dozen people need to sign off on every major change before it can be implemented is largely meaningless and symbolic, with the validation network ultimately sitting somewhere between consortium and cartel.
Ethereum has roughly 2,000 nodes, the operator of each of which must approve a change and manually upgrade, otherwise they continue to participate in the unchanged version of the network. In practice, this means that every customer-facing exchange, custodial wallet, and service provider needs to "sign off" on a change in order for the fork to be legitimized.
>The movement of Ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake has been vapourware
Ethereum's beacon chain proof of stake network has been running since November 2020 and has received its first hard fork upgrade, Altair. Currently, there is a public merge testnet named Kiln, the second testnet rehearsing the "merge" event where Proof Of Stake replaces Proof Of Work as the Ethereum execution chain's consensus model. The code is there, the network is there, and it's all running publicly. You can download the client software today from the public github repo and run it to join the network and help rehearse the merge, in a way that is very close to the final specifications. That's the opposite of vaporware.
> in no small part because the validators simply choose not to.
Moving consensus models is done by hard fork, it has absolutely nothing to do with "validators choosing not to." Think of it like the Ethereum development team, with the explicit permission of the exchanges and service providers, changing the direction of a firehose to point at the PoS validators instead of the PoW validators. The PoW validators can't grab on to the stream of water and wrestle the hose away, their income stream just vanishes.
Those are 2-3 examples of technical inaccuracies. More technical inaccuracies in that video surround the characteristics, economics, minimums, and protocol liveness guarantees for Proof Of Stake, the nature and maturity of protocol scaling, the nature of bounded historical data size, and the nature of network congestion (it does not in any circumstances lead to forks, that's complete bunk).
If I chose to indulge your shotgun approach, we'd both be here all day and I don't really want that. This comment is already getting long and took a lot of effort for me to write up. Most of your copypasta can be summed up as problems with the community, not problems with the network protocols themselves.
I'm not here to try to convince you to like cryptocurrency, you're free to hold whatever opinion about it you want. It just really annoys me when people spread misinformation about how the protocols are constructed, and try to characterize them as scams when they are nothing more than distributed database software.
