The way I see it, it is a collusion of fraud. Some guy writes a line of code and calls it a currency. Some very rich people, who understand the art of fleecing the stupid, invest a lot of money into it to create hype. People buy into the hype, convinced it is the real thing. The original investors cash out and, as the hype dies, the currency crashes and billions of dollars are lost, but the shysters made billions.
My half brother does this. He has a degree in English, and this company trained him to code write. I find it odd; but he is make some good $$$$$.
>The way I see it, it is a collusion of fraud. Some guy writes a line of code and calls it a currency. Some very rich people, who understand the art of fleecing the stupid, invest a lot of money into it to create hype. People buy into the hype, convinced it is the real thing. The original investors cash out and, as the hype dies, the currency crashes and billions of dollars are lost, but the shysters made billions.
Bitcoin a way around government controls on currency through a distributed network. Allows black markets to work easier, no taxation, can’t be taken by the government since there’s no central authority controlling it, etc. Digital currency is going to be a thing, but it’s not going to be bitcoin. Transaction fees are insanely high(7% in some cases) and if you don’t pay the fee it can take many hours or even days for a transaction to complete. A bitcoin transaction I did the other day took 32 hours to complete.
Bitcoin is entirely legitimate, unlike most ICOs. However, bitcoin doesn’t scale, so it takes more and more processing power per transaction thus it gets more and more expensive to use it for transactions. In the last few years, bitcoin went from a currency system to a store of value system similar to gold, but with a much, much less stable value. Its survival is doubtful without a major tech breakthrough. But since it’s easier to buy and store than gold, it’s become widely used.
Ripple is a cons where most of the coins were pre-mined by the creators and someday they’ll cash out leaving the public with nothing. Ripple also has centralized control and thus isn’t very useful for under the book activities.
I agree. It’s perfect to appeal to greedy speculators. 21 million max, amount available to mine halves every four years. At 16 million now. Add the hype you mention - brilliant scam.