>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.
It might not be as independent as you think.
The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for Crypto-Currencies
But, the thrust of this report language is clear. The IMF favors “permissioned” systems over “open schemes.” The IMF also favors control by a “pre-selected group of participants” or “one organization,” rather than allowing “anyone” to participate. This paper should be viewed as the first step in the IMF’s plan to migrate its existing form of world money, the special drawing right or SDR, onto a DLT platform controlled by the IMF. In time, all other forms of money would be banned. These and other developments all point toward an elite group including the IMF, JPMorgan, the Davos crowd, the IRS, SEC, and other agencies converging to shut down the existing free-wheeling blockchain ecosphere, and replace it with a “permissioned” system under “consortium” control. Big Brother is coming to the blockchain.