Originally published at: Crypto crashes | Boing Boing
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I’ll just leave this here.
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Oh please no, not today!
I have to go over to my sister’s for dinner. Brother in Law is a total Crypto bore.
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When make believe and reality meet up it isn’t pretty.
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While cryptocurrency is indeed a scam, it’s one perpetrated by Libertarians. That means that there’s a very good chance this may be foisted on us as an inescapable aspect of our lives for decades, despite our consciously or subconsciously knowing there’s something very wrong or shady about it. The process has already started: every time you hear proclamations about “the metaverse” or “Web3” being the future, understand that both are underpinned by the cryptocurrency scam.
For anyone who needs further evidence of Libertarians’ inherent skill in pulling off a grift of this magnitude, I’ll direct your attention to supply side/“trickle down” economics, which formed the basis of 40+ years of neoliberalism as the default ideology in the West and which is being de-bunked by mainstream economists only now.
So, yes, it’s a con game, but it’s one that some very powerful players (the financial services industry, big tech, some nation-states) have already bought into. It’s here and we have to figure out how to deal with it now rather than giving it two generations to undermine society.
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From that article:
Investors can only cash out by selling their coins to other investors
That’s it in a nutshell.
You can only profitably sell it when everyone else wants to buy. But the only way you know it’s time to sell is if everyone else is selling. And it’s not like corn futures where you could theoretically have informed foresight; the only way to win is by random chance, which by definition will only work for a random minority of players (mainly, those who happened to buy bitcoins for $10 back in the day). It’s essentially a lottery where all the winning tickets have already been sold.
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Is this why I now see Crypto ads from Tom Brady and Matt Damon whenever I open YouTube? “Stocks are tanking, let’s pay some A-listers to get more of the common folk to buy into our ponzi scheme!”
BTW, the beanie baby documentary on Netflix was really good.
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Yes. The time when one could realise a windfall from investing in or mining non-memecoin cryptocurrencies is over. Now it’s all about roping suckers into the speculation market churn that retains the fiat value of the cryptocurrency held by the grifters at the top of the pyramid.
Damon and Brady are no better than the celebrities who push unneeded insurance products and reverse mortgages on unsophisticated old people.
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“Investors can only cash out by selling their coins to other investors”
“You can only profitably sell it when everyone else wants to buy.”
I’m no crypto booster, but this just describes capitalism.
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I hope its not a scam. Id hate to think of all those kind Russian ransomware hackers, Somali pirates, doomsday preppers, and Reddit crypto bros finding that their life’s work has gone up in smoke, and they must return to the squalid fen that is fiat currency.
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I feel bad for the doomsday preppers when they realize what “digital” and “decentralized” mean
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Well, completely unregulated capitalism with deflation built into the reserve currencies. Which is exactly why the “free”-market ideologues at the top of the pyramid invented this digital version of the old gold standard (AKA the “barbarous relic”) and then pre-emptively cornered its market.
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wow! another example of the “invisible hand of the free market” working overtime.
that’s the second time i’ve used that bit of snark in the last five minutes.
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It’s a casino, but the odds have been better than a lottery. If you get lucky you can hit a real dip and sell at a profit even if you entered late. As long as you treat it as a lottery for fun and not an investment it’s fine.(Except for burning the planet with all the energy spent). It’s rigged, of course, so the whales and other insiders have a better chance of winning, but so is a lottery to a higher degree.
For El Salvador to keep buying bitcoin is sick. You want to play, play with your own money.
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Speaking of feeling sorry for people, there are the Libertarians who get the sads when they find out what Adam Smith really meant when he was talking about a free market (short version: free of rentiers and no-value-added parasites like themselves).
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not really much of a surprise there. there are numerous philosophers and political economists whose works are more often misquoted or taken out of context than they are accurately described, marx and smith very much included.
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It’s either that or sports betting. Your choice.
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Well, yes, Adam Smith was one of those evidence-based scientific types.
See also: Smith’s immortal quote about cartels:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
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At least sports betting is honest that it’s a gamble
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