Everything is a "scam"

New dapp appears: "Seems too good to be true, is it a scam?"

Our ways of working out whether it is or not need to be updated. Our idea of what is or isn't a scam is derived from much simpler times. I am not a utopian, I know that there are bad people out there doing bad stuff. Thieves exist. Some of them know how to program smart contracts or are able to hold a gun to the head of someone who knows how to program smart contracts. Also identity in crypto isn't going away as a problem. Lots of people are working on it and progress is being made, but we're still at the stage of "on the blockchain, nobody knows you're a robot dog with nefarious intent".

And.

And most people, including me, still struggle with quickly understanding and reasoning about complex (or even simple!) decentralized applications. Our world has been deeply centralized for so long, and the people who benefit from centralization over the centuries have convinced themselves and everyone that decentralization is itself probably a bad thing not to be trusted (otherwise how would they themselves add/extract value) so we're more open to asking "is the person behind this site behaving honestly or not" rather than "how has this decentralized system failed to behave in the way I expected it to? Did I do something wrong, or is there something wrong with the contract?"

Also there usually is someone behind this site even if the application is decentralized and "does everything through the blockchain". Even in the best cases, someone has to keep an eye on its operation and make sure it has the resources it needs (gas, energy, bandwidth, whatever you call it) and make sure it isn't misbehaving or being misused (TheDAO).

I had an experience of this problem space today. I was trying to exchange a certain TRC-20 token for some TRX which I could turn into BTC which I could furthermore turn into food. I placed an order on a DEX (decentralized exchange). The token I was selling disappeared from my wallet, as expected, but the currency I was selling it for did not appear. No transaction appeared (as it should do however briefly) under "Current orders".

Because I have had a little education about this stuff I could use the block explorer and find the hash for the transaction on the blockchain that made the order. As I'm able to stay calm in these situations (it was a small amount and my use of it to purchase food was non-essential and non-urgent) I went to the DEX's telegram group and waded through the hundred other hysterical people who had "lost" their trade and found the form to fill in to notify the operators that I was one of those who had a problem and to point to the relevant transaction that had stalled. My funds were delivered within a few minutes. I'm not entirely sure how, but I suspect that they had to feed the beast some frozen TRX to give it sufficient juice. But I left the situation with an improved sense of how things can go wrong, how they can be put right and how important it is to not jump to the conclusion that "IT"S A SCAM!"