Posted on 12/20/2022 7:13:39 AM PST by catnipman
crypto trading looks a lot like the forms of finance we’re all familiar with. It’s made up of things called “exchanges,” “brokers,” “lenders,” “deposits” and “hedge funds.” Crypto also carries the special mystique of the blockchain, which has let traders treat critics as anti-innovation Luddites.
[however] the purposelessness of the crypto trading system emulates finance the same way the board games Risk and Monopoly emulate war and real-estate investing.
Crypto trading is also gambling. It performs no intermediation function to help expand the economy or improve society. Crypto trading is, as “Seinfeld’s” George Costanza might have said, finance about nothing.
Crypto trading should be regulated for what it is—a form of gambling that emulates finance—and not what its advocates tell you it is.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
crypto serves no useful function for society. ... none ... so far, crypto's primary use (aside from fleecing the rubes out of billions of hard-earned ACTUAL dollars) has been to launder money and facilitate criminal and terrorist funding ...
crypto doesn't finance new factories or new inventions, ... crypto is never loaned to start new farms or orchards or new houses or to buy a house or an automobile ... you can't pay taxes or utility bills with it ... in fact, you can't even use it to buy a car wash or a soda pop from a vending machine ...
crypto wealth-creation is a complete illusion ...crypto is NOT a store of value and it's NOT a hedge against inflation and it's NOT a hedge against traditional investment markets ... crypto is literally nothing ...
crypto inherently has zero future yield, which means that ALL schemes that pretend to offer yield are total frauds and Ponzi schemes of one flavor or another, and every one of them has either already crashed or will soon crash ... every last one ...
blockchain is a ridiculous "solution" looking for some problem to solve ... bitcoin blockchain transactions are limited to 6-7 transactions/second with a 10 minute delay, and it takes millions of worldwide "miner" CPUs consuming enough electricity to power Belgium each year to maintain the blockchain ledger files for bitcoin ... blockchain ledgers grow infinitely long without the possibility of trimming and blockchain transaction are not reversible ...
blockchain is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist, and after 14 years, no killer application has been found for blockchain, and 14 years in the world of technology is like a millennium in dog years, so the chances that blockchain will find a killer application is slim to none and slim left town ... blockchain being touted as some kind of fantastic and revolutionary technology is itself as big a scam as crypto itself ...
crypto is a Ponzi plague on mankind ... and the sooner it disappears from the face of the planet,the better ... probably the same can be said of blockchain as well ...
I have zero investments in any crypto, but you could say the same thing about paper ‘currency’, or reserve notes, or whatever the hell they are. There is no value in them aside from what people believe or ascribe to them. Same with crypto ‘currencies’. Maybe when there was a gold standard, at least money was backed by something with value.
Now that it has served its purpose, cryptocurrency is now evil.
In my opinion crypto is nothing but a supposed “asset” without any backing. Indeed the analogy that I come up with is a circle of 15 or 20 junior high students, where one of them has a dream in which a magic pile of dog poop appears and when anybody waves a wand money miraculously emerges from the pile of dog poop. Then the circle starts talking about it as they convince themselves that they ought to invest in it. That’s even though the only backing is a pile of magic dog poop that only existed in one child’s mind.
I put my retirement money into tulip bulbs. Seems a lot safer.
Where is our contemporary Charles Mackay?
You are wrong 100%. There is HUGE fifference between crypto and US dollar.
Why?
Because NOTHING backs crypto.
US dollar is backed by power of government to tax everyone who makes money. Yes, the dollar is continuously being devalued by excessive spending. But it has a backing.
Crypto has NONE.
Wrong, Crypto is a money laundering fraud operation, from top to bottom...
Even if a player in the space has honest intentions, at the end of the day all he is doing is facilitating money laundering and profiting from it.
The entire industry is a fraud, period.
The Federal Government cannot spend money not raised by taxation or loans. Millions, actually billions, of contracts and deposits, valued in the trillions of dollars, are denominated in dollars. You can go to a Cadillac dealer and buy a new car with a wad of Benjamins. Try that with bitcoin. By convention, currency represents a claim on goods and services, some of which goods and services have not been produced yet. So long as government does not spend money by “just printing” it, government spending is not necessarily inflationary. (Quantitative easing is inflationary in practice, agreed.)
There is no agency or body regulating the supply of bitcoin. It is a chimera. You would have to be a fool to “invest” in it.
Cryptocurrency is common stock in a company which has no assets, produces no products, and issues no dividends. Its value depends solely on the ability to sell more stock. It’s a ponzi scheme.
Your odds are far more favorable on a roulette wheel than with crypto. The “expected value” of one dollar bet on roulette is almost 95 cents. The “expected value” of a dollar bet on crypto, long term, is less than nothing, counting opportunity and transaction costs.
The author of the article is uneducated on the tenets of money, or seeking to mislead their audience. I will speak of bitcoin specifically, not cryptocurrency in general because they are not necessarily the same thing and some writers seek to play on that confusion. Bitcoin serves as a medium of exchange, for the same reasons that US dollars can and do. The advantage bitcoin has over a fiat currency like US dollars is that the government cannot seize your balance in bitcoin, or prevent you from transferring that balance to someone else. The government also cannot abrogate for itself the purchasing power of anyone’s bitcoin by ‘printing’ some extra bitcoin for itself. The block chain secures bitcoin against the inflation tactic preferred by the elite to fleece the public. This is why they hate bitcoin.
Notice the author says cryptocurrency is only useful to terrorists, and then remember what they call their political opponents.
EXCEPT: AT least you do NOT have to convince people to take your paper currency or coin....
I WILL NEVER DO CRYPTO
With the FTX debacle, it went from being a Ponzi scheme to a Fonzie scheme as it has now jumped the shark.
EXCEPT: AT least you do NOT have to convince people to take your paper currency or coin....
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You make a really good point.
It doesn’t mean I am strictly wrong when I say the value of our paper currency is in people’s perception of it’s worth, but you make a really good distinction between it and crypto.
It seems like bitcoin almost became ‘the one’.
But then all these other ones came out, and they got hyped, and it muddied the water of cryptocurrencies too much.
At one point, there were government bodies and corporations accepting bitcoin, but that seemed to fall out of favor several years ago.
unlike ALL crypto, USD is an accepted and functional currency, possessing the three main criteria of a currency, namely store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange; in fact, USD functions as the world’s reserve currency ...
furthermore, i’d be happy to exchange any of that worthless USD ya’ll might possess for my newly created crypto, CatNipManBux (CNMB) that i created a few days ago on the etherum blockchain via https://www.studentcoin.org/ ... the exchange rate is 2:1 CatNipManBux per worthless USD ... that’s a really good deal, because you’ll receive TWO, i repeat TWO,CatNipManBux per worthless USD ...
The blockchain, the structure on which crypto lies, is the power of crypto currency. The blockchain will ultimately change the way transactions are done in the future.
In order to use the blockchain, there needs to be a “token.” Those are are two facts that should be kept in mind.
“Crypto” in the sense of FTX and other tokens such at Ethereum based “coins” can be sketchy as hell. Those things are like Penny stocks and exist only to make their founders wealthy.
That said, the foundational digital coins (Bitcoin and Etherium) have significant use potential. But educating the masses on that is difficult when there are so many voices screaming in the noise chamber.
I would suggest anyone with a serious interest or concern in these things look into where the investment in crypto infrastructure is happening. It is important to understand the differences between the major forms: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP—along with the Central Bank Digital Currencies that are being planned.
There is a lot of talk about tulips and Ponzi schemes. A more accurate description would be the very early days of the internet.
Time will tell. No one should spend a penny on this stuff without some deep research. But, to dismiss it out of hand indicates as complete misunderstanding of its use, its intent, and its function.
Crypto has NONE.
A cryptocurrency like bitcoin is actually ‘backed’ by the inviolable nature of mathematics. Trust in the ‘full faith and credit’ of politicians, or faith that 2+2=4 today, tomorrow, and forevermore?
To stick with a monetary instrument that you know politicians will continue to debase, or use a monetary instrument that the politicians have no power to debase or steal?
Which would you prefer? And why?
I am a crypto advocate. I do not want to see any regulation of it and mostly because I do not want to see any trading on any sort of exchange of it. All storage should be decentralized. If you don’t have the key sequence, then you don’t have the bitcoin. Do not entrust it to anyone else at all.
This would eliminate trading and increases in “price”.
The value of crypto is very singular. It opposes government. Period. About 10 years ago the EU forcibly stole money from people on Cyprus, as part of the debacle they forced onto Greece. People on Cyprus were told on a Friday “your money in banks will be confiscated on Monday, and no bank transfers or withdraw will be allowed this weekend.”
If people had money in crypto, they could have fled the country with total portability. Government tyrants would be evaded. Similar realities were faced by Jewish businessmen in 1930s Germany. They were desperate to get assets out of the country, but the government was preventing it.
Does this translate into “laundering”? Yes. And that’s a good thing. Criminals can do this? Those Jews in Germany were declared criminals. Many of them could not get out and faced the concentration camps because there was no way to fund life for their families escape. If they had crypto, those families could have accessed money at a new locale.
Is crypto complicating anti drug efforts? Probably. So have law enforcement work on that, without denying bitcoin to decent people escaping government horrors, which do happen.
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