memes

As someone who used to be (but no longer is) into crypto: These statements are all technically accurate to some degree, but are missing extremely important nuance.

The stablecoins part is accurate. Most purchases made in crypto are with stablecoins.

What's missing here is the fact that these stablecoins are issued and controlled by private companies, or would be influenced by them otherwise. For example, Circle issues USDC, one of the most popular dollar stablecoins. (as well as EURC for Euros)

Circle holds real dollars in real bank accounts to back USDC. Circle can also freeze your balance and blacklist addresses, because they don't want their banks to stop working with them. That's it. They can unilaterally stop you from using your USDC.

Other mechanisms for keeping a stablecoin at $1, such as algorithmic pegs, failed spectacularly many times, the most famous of which being the Terra disaster.

Some other stablecoins use centralized coins as backing to then issue new coins. (e.g. 1 STABLECOIN is backed by 1 USDC, and can be exchanged freely) These coins could then be in trouble if they're used enough for fraud, and Circle just blocks the coin itself from exchanging between itself and USDC to maintain the peg, making it worthless. This is an inherent risk. You either use a centralized platform less accountable than card companies, or you use a third party backed by that centralized asset that could face peg issues.

As for the inefficiency, it's actually true that PoW is being phased out by most chains other than Bitcoin for PoS, which is incredibly energy efficient by comparison. Truly, it's actually just pretty energy efficient. This isn't missing much nuance, though you could argue that the financial mechanisms used by the systems running on top of a PoS consensus mechanisms are still complex in their own right.

For the fraud part, this is only half accurate. Fraud in crypto has been on the rise, and while it's maintained itself at a level lower than credit card fraud, this is also because of the limited scope in which crypto operates. If crypto were to be used in more situations like credit cards are, then there would be more opportunities to be defrauded in the first place.

The majority of activity in crypto operates within speculative markets, protocols offering yield farming and staking, liquidity pooling, vote bribing, and an untold number of other mechanisms that exist. As such, scammers are mostly limited to tricking people in the field of investments.

If crypto was also used to pay your bills, for your purchases at the store, for every rideshare and food delivery app, and to pay friends back for dinner, then the scope of fraud becomes much larger.

Crypto does not have less fraud because it is fundamentally better at preventing it, crypto has less fraud because it's used in less circumstances.

(There is also an argument to be made that many investments in crypto that don't work out because of rugpulls, failed promises, unaccountable DAO leaders, etc, aren't counted in fraud statistics, and that the number should be much higher)

Now, finally, as for regulation, it's true that crypto has seen much more regulation than it used to have, but it's only getting a bit stronger, and is nowhere near the sheer quantity of regulations that financial corporations have to follow, though some are technically not necessary for crypto as most crypto is already transparent via the blockchain's very structure, and thus doesn't require some of the transparency regulations corporations often follow.

Crypto still lags far behind, and there's a degree to which it physically can't be regulated in the first place. For example, you can't regulate how the Uniswap exchange handles user funds, because the code for Uniswap has already been immutably deployed to its respective chains.

If a system is built on rejecting authority, there will always be a degree to which justifiable authority that could protect people becomes impossible by its very nature.

I'm not wholly against any possible use of crypto. If someone being, say, censored by payment processors is able to use crypto to send money home to their family, or pay for a thing the corporations currently deem to not be nice for their brand image, that's all well and fine.

But as a whole, crypto is nowhere near being more beneficial than harmful.