>No thank you, it should be a huge red flag to you that the only way for someone to get involved is to become a bag holder.

When have I ever said that you should invest in cryptocurrency? I have made it pretty clear that I am skeptical of cryptocurrency as an investment.

Creating a fork of a cryptocurrency does not necessarily involve forking the existing transactions or balances, you can just start a new genesis block if you don't believe in the validity of the existing owners (For example the Bytecoin-BitMonero fork). "Forking" in this context just means copying and modifying the code in a new source tree.

>An extralegal system is one where the other party can just run off with whatever money is in the system and not give any of it back. I'm sorry but I don't want that, I don't think anyone who doesn't like being scammed wants that. The issuer legally needs to do this if they want to avoid being fraudulent.

That is a narrow and inaccurate portrayal of how the extralegal markets operate.

>I'm sorry I don't understand this at all. You can observe from the extreme price volatility in every cryptocurrency, and resulting uselessness as a medium of exchange, that there is a need for additional assurances. You can't use something as a medium of exchange when its value can change 50% in a day.

"Volatility" and "Liquidity" are not some sort of magical property that conventional currencies have by merit of being controlled by a central entity. The volatility is a result of it being used for speculative investment rather than a medium of exchange. The more that vendors/customers use a cryptocurrency as an actual medium of exchange, the less volatility there will be because vendors/customers will be forced to stomach the change in price over the course of a transaction (for better or for worse). Conventional currencies are stable because there are lots of vendors/customers that don't want to constantly change their prices every nanosecond. Why are there lots of vendors? because it is stable. So it is circular logic in either case.

I use cryptocurrency as a payment network all the time, and I accept the risks. It is good for my use case. I am not saying that it will take over the global economy, but I do think it would be a major boon for the internet economy because it will make many transactions feasible that aren't otherwise. You cannot trust banks to implement proper security and privacy when they benefit from obscurity and surveillance. If you could, then we would all be using DigiCash and Bitcoin would have never existed in the first place.

>Less of the snark, please. It's extremely tiring to keep hearing people make false comparisons to the crypto wars.

Here's your argument with an extra-small side of diet snark: regulation of cryptocurrencies may not seem ethically the same as regulation of strong encryption, but it is effectively just as difficult if not impossible. You are trying to regulate a computer program, and every time world governments have tried to stomp out the network it has only adapted to become more resistant to censorship.

>These systems are intentionally built to have no fraud protection whatsoever. In fact some of them are designed to purposely make it difficult to add fraud prevention in.

The fraud protection is designed to prevent double spending. If "fraud prevention" involves a third party who puts their thumb on the scale and gets to determine what is or isn't fraud, then it's not desirable for a trust-less network. Shame that cash does not have a built in fraud detection mechanism that allows authorities to remotely destroy it. The privacy guarantees of cryptocurrencies are only comparable to those of cash.

With cryptocurrency users can expose themselves to as many third parties as they voluntarily choose (e.g. a Bisq-like trading system).

>This isn't a technical advancement that helps anyone

Well it helps me. It is not good for every use-case, but it works for my use-case and it is decent at what it does.

>but it is destroying the planet

The environmental impact of cryptocurrency is a problem, but has perhaps it has been misrepresented in the common discourse.

>the main problem is that it takes too long for a bureaucracy to crack down on such a large fraud.

I guess we'll see about that.