I wish it was as easy as just saying “nah, not interested”.
But every social media platform is flooded with shills trying to pump the price of whatever they’re holding (and there’s no regulation to say they can’t, or that they have to declare how much they own and would profit from prices rising).
And just ignoring them doesn’t stop them from burning energy like there’s no tomorrow.
Digital currency is here to stay in one form or another so the best thing to do is actually have an open-minded look into it w/o all this black and white thinking. Our current U.S. banking industry has been rife with all out fraud since 1913, and has lost most of it’s original value. However, w/ digital the stakes are even much higher than they’ve ever been. This is going to determine who will be allowed to ‘participate’ in society, so it’s best to talk about solutions rather than focus on all the charlatans and speculators that arrive early on in a nascent industry.
and for the record I have never lost money in a buying/selling crypto trade - I dollar cost averaged all my trades early on and I was able to get out on during several All Time Highs before they crashed. However, I am a holder of BTC and ADA as part of my portfolio. And even if it crashes, I still break even considering what I’ve made - it’s called calculated risk. The only thing we ALL have in common is we can predict everything but the future.
I’d buy an elektron coin on the assumption that they’d move to a proof of stake model in the future, even though they never promised to, and I’d moan like fuck when they didn’t.
Private, secure, decentralized currency is itself a great idea.
Crypto is just kind of a shitty technology for achieving it. Among other things, it’s ridiculously inefficient computationally, and it’s also prone to exploitation. In its current form, both of these problems will persist. A “digital wallet” is structurally similar to burying your cash in a jar in a field, and then relying on the map you made to find it. It’s stupid and prone to error. How many Bitcoin millionaires can’t access their wealth because they lost their keys? It’s absurd.
Worse is the embedded pyramid scam in the deflationary nature of crypto. It is INTENDED to run out. The scarcity component means that if you don’t get in early, you’re already screwed. How does this work for people entering a mature crypto economy? Saying that there will be new coins of another nature minted is similarly crazy. How many different types of currency are people expected to negotiate in their daily lives?
There are plenty of reasons to criticize fiat currency and aim to transform how we capture value in work and assets… crypto just really is pretty terrible at it in fundamental ways.
For all those gains you’ve made in crypto… someone took a loss, buying your crypto that is now worth less. They probably aren’t feeling so hot about its future.
Nor have your crypto trading activities created anything real in the world. It’s a simple redistribution of wealth to you. So it makes sense that you’d like it, but it’s logically impossible for all of us to benefit from it in the same way. Someone is always holding the bag in the end.
The political control of money leads to corruption; but having no political control of money is even worse, because it is the nature of money to accumulate remorselessly. Decentralised money is not democratic, it is oligarchic and winner-take-all.
Agreed. I don’t think the current state of what we call the crypto market is the answer, but neither is fiat based on a fractional reserve Central Bank. I’m probably a naive idealist but I would like to see an end to the later, with a better solution than the former. I really want to touch on the more political aspects of it, but I will refrain.
I don’t like crypto because I made some good plays/gains on it - I merely just traded on people’s reactions and it was a good bet. I just like the IDEA of an alternative form of currency to our current one. And all I see is either hate for crypto with no solutions offered or ‘magical thinking’ that speculation in crypto equals investing.
I don’t have to offer an alternative to hate it.
“This Ponzi scheme is not controlled by the federal reserve” does not persuade me to get on board. Even if it wasn’t riddled with scams and computationally expensive and laughably insufficient for processing transactions at any kind of scale, “it’s not that thing” is not good enough motivation.
I just like the IDEA of an alternative form of currency to our current one.
Sure, it would be a nice idea. Not like this though.
There are things I don’t like about the political system in my country (the UK). That doesn’t mean I’d support the worst possible form of govt just because it’s something different. Similarly, I’m not going to get on board with bitcoin and ignore all the problems with it, just because it’s not our current system.
I honestly have no beef with anyone who bought into it 10-15 years ago and got lucky without really knowing what they’re doing.
I’m not even all that sure where you stand, given the dichotomy of your statement I’ve quoted, so don’t take this necessarily as a personal response aimed at you. I agree with the latter half of your comment re speculation. But I have an issue with the first premise.
Well, I mean, if something is environmentally destructive, basically gambling with no relationship to anything of actual value, prone to scams and crime and knowingly profiting off people who don’t know any better, then I’m sorry but there’s no justification for expecting an alternative solution to be offered by anyone who is critical of it. I’d say the proof is in the pudding for cryptocurrency. It’s not like it’s legitimately and necessarily solving something in the world but with some unfortunate side effects along the way. It’s not like cryptocurrency is preventing some great evil befalling us. I don’t need to offer an alternative for what is an awful solution that’s still hoping to find its problem to solve in the first place.
As for liking the idea of an alternative currency, sure why not. But I would suggest considering that the system we have has been iterated over hundreds (probably thousands) of years. It’s not something that can be overlayed or replaced over night or in a decade without, I would guess, throwing most of the world that isn’t already in abject poverty, back into it.
And if cryptocurrency is so useful, why can’t it stand on its own? Why is it only interesting when its ‘value’ is explained relative to real money? And really, even if it did become the de facto standard currency, for wages, goods and services etc, wouldn’t it then naturally have to stabilise? And doesn’t it then basically become not very interesting? Governments (one hopes) would move to regulate it (or if not the currency itself, then regulate how people interact with it) to protect their populations from suffering from its vagaries.
The solution is never going to be some new shiny tech. The root cause of the unfairness of the financial system, banking, world economy etcetera is capitalism. Crypto cannot fix anything. That said, digital currencies have many benefits(sending money should be much easier, and much cheaper than it currently is) and thankfully they can be implemented without any crypto/blockchain tech.
The amount of things you got wrong in this post is actually astonishing. Unfortunately, you are not alone - I would actually say its a majority view, and because of it I’m quite sure that we will have another run of bank bailouts in near future, with tax payers money paying for oligarchs gambling and failing to see what the interest rate hikes will do, even though hunderds of crypto degens saw it from a mile away a year ago.
You my friend are holding a bag since you were born, exchanging your services, sweat and efforts for a piece of paper thats being printed without barely any control in last 4 decades by a fat government oligarch.
God forbid people take custody of funds in their own hands and get access to financial instruments currently only available to oligarchs.
Problem is that a lot of people have superficial understanding of the financial system and trust the mainstream media on these subjects and therefore come to wrong conclusions.
The system we have now hasnt been iterated for “hunderds of years”. The system is barely alive for 50 years after USA decided to print money without gold as collaterall, and Europe doing the same with invention of Euro.
You cant be serious. I would advise other readers to just try and google what you wrote here, and decide for themselves how credible are your statements throughout the topic.
The level of fraud in the realm of crypto is far beyond what anyone gets away with in conventional finance.
And as many have already said here, you can and should be outraged at the corruption and mismanagement of the existing financial system - that doesn’t make crypto the answer. I believe that it would be much worse for concentrating wealth than fiat. If you have an argument against that, please present it.
The problem is you arent perceiving the way traditional finance works correctly. Its not my purpose to offend you, just to alert you that you are giving away wrong information here. Ita not your fault you, I guess you arent working in finance and thusfar dont critically think about the information media is feeding you.
Mate Credit Suisse was just bailed out by Switzerland with over 50B CHF, with 250B CHF from Swiss tax payers are being used to guarantee deposits of regular people are untouched.
Thats just one bank. SVB bailed for 35B USD. Deutsche has over 1 Trillion AUM and its on brink of collapse - do you understand that level of fraud in conventional finance is far above anything you can imagine? Crypto cant come close. Google what HSBC was doing with Mexican drug cartels - that alone is bigger then all scams in crypto combined!
Now unlike in crypto where everyone is resposible for their own actions, goverments cover the fraud by printing money, bailing out these banks, therefore causing inflation or hyperinflation, depending on the rate of their printing. And that at the end of the day bites back the “little people” that pay all that through taxes and inflated price of goods.
One other thing you and others here are constantly getting wrong is looking at crypto as “trading” which misses the point of it completely.
If it means anything I have a 9 year experience in traditional finance (commodities trader) and 3 year experience in decentralised finance or DeFi. I truly and honestly believe its uncomparable.
Dont trust the media thats mostly financed by the current oligarchs!
paid for all my elekron devices with profit from staking ohm. This next bull run will pay my house off. =]
Crypto has whole-heartedly embraced obvious frauds like SBF. He was ‘the bank’ for a massive chunk of crypto, to an extent that dwarfs any large player in conventional finance. It was obvious fraud, and the ‘transparency’ of the blockchain did nothing to stop it, because anyone who owned crypto was incentivised to ignore the fraud. He was also engaging in bail-outs of other exchanges, until his own operation collapsed. The same garbage as you’re complaining about in conventional finance, except even more criminal and less transparent. All of it whole-heartedly embraced by the crypto community. Anyone who questioned it (as I was at the time) accused of being shills for central bankers.
It’s a terrible thing that central banks have the ability to destroy a nation’s currency. But in doing so, they are usually responding to a political imperative. If you remove the politics from money, you can strengthen the currency. But I believe the cost of that is worse - you weaken democracy, and you guarantee that the holders of deflationary capital can extort everyone else, basically indefinitely. It’s feudal.
Again, and I have to repeat this - completely wrong. SBF and FTX were “crypto for bankers” . We are talking about a centralised exchange that didnt ran on blockchain at all - nothing transparent about it. He wasnt endorsed by crypto community but by Forbes, Fortune500 and all the banking mechanisms. Just look who went down with FTX - Genesis, 3AC, BlockFi , all centralised US entities. Lets not forget SBF was the biggest single donator of the Biden campaign - nothing decentralised or crypto about him. Its a little centralised bank that was trading crypto - basically going agsinst every premise of crypto.
I cant actually name no one that was more hated in crypto/ decentralised finance than SBF, Alameda and FTX.
Again if you are going to name me a CEX as a sign why crypto is fraudelent, we are not talking about same things. That is pure traditional finance , with only difference that the underlying asset was crypto.
I cant agree that democracy is weakened by giving more power to the individual, then to the governement. I mean the premise you are taking cant stand. Its because your understanding of “crypto” is not correct.
Well thats what decentralised, trustless and permissionless means. It means anyone doesnt matter is it government, gangster, banker, bus driver, doctor, american, croatian, vietnamese, black, white , men or women can join in and have the same chance.
Well as you well described centralised entities only allow governements, bankers and gangsters and the list ends there.
Please… beautiful dream.