What will happen to those who don't have a scientific mindset? Your title makes me nervous that I may be in danger. I am working on various projects as a community mod so i have seen a lot of scam attempts and methods commonly used by scammers. What I think is most important is to have common sense and control over your greed to avoid scams. Most of the time it is our greed that leads us to a scam.
-Well, it takes a little bit of computer science knowledge to read the Bitcoin whitepaper, so if you have gone that far, then you probably have a good amount of knowledge to see what may or may not be a scam. But I mentioned a scientific mindset instead of scientific knowledge or scientific experience since one will need this mindset to test the claims being made.
-That is fair enough. Although there may be some confounding variable that explains why the educated are more likely to be scammed. On the other hand, academic institutions have taught me to distrust them very much because they are so unprofessional, so I would not be too surprised if the chlurmcks who have graduated from these institutions are too inept to avoid scams. Maybe this means that educated people should humble themselves and acknowledge that they are not immune to scams and they also need to apply a scientific mindset to determining what to invest in. Are the people with science degrees more or less likely to be scammed than those with liberal arts degrees? What about those with business and marketing degrees?
Everything you said can be summed up in one sentence: "Do your own research." If you don't, the chances of becoming a victim of a fraudster are extremely high. Why do we think about con artists? Are they ignorant or intelligent people? Of course, those people are intelligent; it's only that their intelligence was misapplied due to their wealth.
You will not be easily duped if you become an observant person and are sensitive to your surroundings, especially the stranger who will speak to you. People are vulnerable to scammers and exploiters since they don't know anything.
-Yes. People need to do their own research and be exceptionally skeptical of others and all claims that others make especially in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Unfortunately, the cryptocurrency ecosystem has attracted too many bad actors.
No need for science to come in. If you really understand the type of investment you are doing, then you wouldn't be susceptible into committing scams. Even regular people with less scientific knowledge will eventually know that the certain thing would likely to turn into scam or not just by assessing the trend that it follows, I mean by looking if its too good to be true to happen or not. And by being too greedy to expect for quick profits from your investment, most likely you will be easily lured from the traps of the scammers.
Scamming is not new anymore, and as long as there are people who let themselves being fool and lured, scammers will continue to exist. But if people will try to be more cautious in every investment that they try to take risk, then most probably the rate of scamming will be minimized.
-A scientific/security mindset of verifying and distrusting others is needed for anyone who wants to invest in cryptocurrency technologies. For example, I have been skeptical about my own cryptographic algorithms even after implementation that I have developed quite a few novel machine learning algorithms based on the spectral radius in order to evaluate the cryptographic security of these algorithms (but I am not done with this yet since I need more hardware). But it may be difficult to truly tell whether a project is worthwhile or not because most people have low levels of intelligence.
-Joseph Van Name Ph.D.