This is the sort of story I've heard. What are you even referring to?

I think he was talking about Robert Nelson leaving eleven 'patients' out in the open to rot.

The implication being that the folks running cryonics organization are frauds just out to make money and don't give a damn about the patient? Another baseless and insulting accusation.

Well, there's Robert Nelson, among other things. Trans Time once threatened to have two patients, Ray and Katherine Mills, thawed and cremated, because to them they were nothing more than paying customers, certainly not patients. They were later, thankfully, neuroconverted and transported to Alcor, which is not completely innocent either, if you read Darwin's A Visit to Alcor. Specifically, this part made me reconsider the plausibility of cryonics, not from a scientific standpoint, but from a social/organizational one:

[...] Saul Kent invited me over to his home in Woodcrest, California to view videotapes of two Alcor cases which troubled him – but he couldn’t quite put his finger on why this was so.[...] Patients were being stabilized at a nearby hospice, transported to Alcor (~20 min away) and then CPS was discontinued, the patients were placed on the OR table and, without any ice on their heads, they were allowed to sit there at temperatures a little below normal body temperature for 1 to 1.5 hours, while burr holes were drilled, [...] smoke could be seen coming from the burr wound! Since the patient had no circulation to provide blood to carry away the enormous heat generated by the action of the burr on the bone, the temperature of the underlying bone (and brain) must have been high enough to literally cook an egg. In one case, a patient’s head was removed in the field and, because they had failed to use a rectal plug, the patient had defecated in the PIB. The result was that feces had contaminated the neck wound, and Alcor personnel were seen pouring saline over the stump of the neck whilst holding the patient’s severed head over a bucket trying to wash the fecal matter off the stump. These are just a few of the grotesque problems I observed.[...]

I've listened to some of the founders talk about what it was like when they first started. They were a small group of people who righteously believed in their cause

Chatsworth Scandal

How much damage does burial or cremation cause?

For reanimation purposes? Probably pretty much the same of cryopreservation. Once a bit has been deleted you can't delete it twice.

The implication being that the folks running cryonics organization are frauds just out to make money and don't give a damn about the patient?

Or they are incompetent, or they try to cut the costs to avoid bankruptcy, or they avoid reporting problems in order not to alienate current and potential new members, or because they delude themselves in order not to hurt their own perception of their effectiveness.

Why should you trust them? When someone offers to sell you the afterlife, skepticism should be the default position.

There is nothing magical about the prospects of nanotechnology. There are no assumptions that we will discover free energy, cold fusion, or need anything that we know violates the laws of physics.

Flying pigs might not necessarily violate the laws of physics either. That's not a good argument in favour of the claim that it will be eventually possible to create flying pigs.

If you make the claim that technology X is physically possible, the burden is on you to support that claim with a compelling argument. Attempting to reverse the burden of proof by saying "You can't prove X is impossible" doesn't qualify as a compelling argument. Note how close this comes to the classical religious argument "You can't prove there is no God".

If you're not going to point out exactly what is magical about widely held beliefs about the prospects of future technology then it's safe to assume this is yet another opinion pulled out of your ass.

• There is no widely held belief that nanotechnology capable of restoring cryopreserved people will be developed.
• "Nanotechnology" is kind of a buzzword. If by "nanotechnology" you mean artificial biochemistry, or something closely resembling that, then it is something feasible, and to some extent it already exists, but it will be subject to physical constraints probably similar to those that apply to natural biochemistry. If you mean an unspecified process that will allow us to arbitrarily control matter at atomic level, then that's pretty much the definition of magic.

The continued existence of cryonics organizations with their current policies provides for reanimation.

Why should they care about people frozen a long time in their past, particularly given limited resources?

Finally, what exactly does this say about your view of humanity?

That is realistic, I suppose. We currently let people die of starvation, curable diseases and violent conflict. If we found frozen corpses of 1000 years ago and it was technologically possible to reanimate them, how many would we care to restore?

Do you even know what a pyramid or Ponzi scheme is? A cryonics organization charges people the money required to perform the services they offer.

They fail to cover all the per-member expenses with just the fees paid by that member, hence they rely on the continuous recruitment of new members to pay the expenses for old ones. That makes them essentially a Ponzi scheme (or pyramid, if the members actively try to recruit new members themselves, as various people on this very thead appear to be doing). Possibly that wasn't done with fraudolent intent, but the result on the financial viability of the business model will be the same.

Just going to add to this, there are lot of complete made up stories defaming cryonics organizations which have been found fraudulent in court. I don't know what the hell is wrong with people that would make them want to do this, I'm guessing maybe religious nuts who want to scare people away.

And yeah, the long-term viability of anything is questionable, but personally I don't believe the long-term viability of everything is certainly doomed.

For a cryonics organization to have reasonable odds of long-term survival (hundreds, possibly thousands of years), it has to be in the reference class of such organizations. Other than a handful of successful religions, and maybe a handful of financial organizations out of thousands, I cannot think of any. And the latter survived more by serendipity than due to exceptionally good management. Nearly all long-term entities significantly changed their mandate during that time. It is universally agreed that making cryonics into religion is a terrible idea, so what's left is hoping for luck and for the mandate to not deviate too far from what the founders intended.

That was the first organization to ever freeze somebody, IIUC.