Because Crypto is this generations MLM. Too many suckers are falling for this dream of easy wealth. It’s a distraction from doing the community building work that is needed to fix things.
Cryto as a class of assets needs to be shut down. All too often it is some sort of fraud.
Since the top 10 holders of shiba inu coin hold over 70% of the coins in existence and the top 100 holders collectively hold 80% of the coins in existence, I find these numbers rather suspect. It sounds to me like people are moving coins around whale accounts to give the impression of high trading volume. Even if that is not the case, I doubt that transactions between shiba inu coin and hard currencies come anywhere near a billion, or even 10 million.
It’s like the old adage about poker. If you look around the table and you can’t immediately tell who the mark is, you’re the mark.
Off topic, but – even if it wasn’t a word, it would still be a word!
I was gonna do the same, but I clutched them for too long, and now they’re worthless. Ah well. Time to invest in belt-onions.
There’s important nuance here, so I’m glad you mentioned this.
People often make the argument that crypto is no different than fiat currencies because those are also “fake”. They try to set up a false dichotomy between “all fake currencies” and the gold standard, to legitimize crypto.
However fiat currencies are not fake. Their value derives from earned trust that the government backing them pays its debts. It’s a bet against the stability of institutions and the strength of its economy. It’s not fake at all. This is the “basket of goods”, basically. The price of a basket of goods remains stable within a given economy because of the stability of the currency, derived from the trust in the institutions backing that currency.
Crypto has none of that, which is why it is so unstable. It isn’t representative of any larger source of reliable financial interest, nor is it backing a debt that will be paid with interest, or similar things that give fiat currencies intrinsic value storage.
Yep, this is the fundamental difference. Memecoins are literally just a pump and dump scheme. All the fierce support for them is literally just people culting others up so they can get out before it deflates, because the coin has no inherent value. It does nothing. Nobody has any real delusions that memecoin #86,258 is going to be used as a currency when all the others haven’t. The only reason exchangers carry them is because they are actually getting paid with every overpriced transaction.
You can sort of squint and hope that Monero or Ethereum or Bitcoin are going to be real currency, even if I believe they’re terrible ideas for it, but all the memecoins are openly, objectively scams. You have to know this. Everyone hyping everyone up for the next memecoin is just hoping to get theirs, but you’re only robbing other humans, there’s no rage against the machine here.
It’s a gigantic, distributed scam. The people making tons of money off crypto like dogecoin or shibacoin right now are doing it by lying and stealing from others, full stop. It’s the opposite of Robin Hood, it’s a bunch of the poors all brawling in the streets while the rich pick their pockets.
From a pure economic perspective, Bitcoin taken in a vacuum is alright as a currency. If you want something highly distributed, and you want something purely electronic, and you ignore all the side effects, Bitcoin is absolutely as effective as the gigantic stone currency you reference.
but those side effects tho
The environmental impact: The way bitcoin allows itself to be decentralized is by having there be a lot of complicated mathematics to validate transactions. If more than 50% of the network agree on something, it’s true. This is a pretty interesting setup! However, if you compare it to just having a centralized, trusted authority (or a set number of trusted authorities, such as multiple national banks, etc), it’s a huge electrical waste. Bitcoin Uses More Electricity Than Many Countries. How Is That Possible? - The New York Times for an example. It uses more electricity than Finland, for a currency that nobody is really using. (Yes, you can get more efficient with other processes, but you’ll never hit zero because of the distributed validation concept of blockchain). If Bitcoin were to scale up it’d be absolutely terrible.
The lack of regulation - There’s a ton of regulation around the financial markets, and those protections are not to keep the ‘little man’ from getting his due, it’s to keep powerful rich people from just flagrantly exploiting their power to get EVEN more powerful and rich. Bitcoin has zero protections against any of it.
Transaction fees: I’m not super familiar with this, but just be aware that currency exchanges charge you per-transaction to move Bitcoin around, and it’s not cheap. Currency exchanges do this because they gotta get paid no matter what.
Now, take all those explanations and then realize that memecoins like Shibacoin/etc all fail at even the basic ‘can be used as a currency’ option, because of the exchange rates making everything so much harder to use.
Can you diamond-hand pearls?
I understand side effects 1. and 3. As for 2., if there was strong regulation, would that make cryptocurrencies more acceptable? But then these rules would likely defeat the purpose of cryptocurrencies.
I was thinking there’s no “regulation” in the stone money system, but that’s wrong. The folks using huge stones as money probably didn’t have formal regulations like we have now. There must have been “assumed” rules, or norms. Failing to follow these rules would result in being banned from using the stones as money.
Like I said, I have no dog in this fight. Just an interested peanut gallery observer.
I can almost hear the musical chairs music playing in the background, except instead of removing one chair at a time, a completely random number of chairs is removed without notice.
This is not quite the case. There are two issues at work:
Any bitcoin transaction between wallets must include a fee that is paid to miners as an incentive to do the work to confirm transactions. The larger the fee, the quicker the transaction is processed. Too small a fee, and the transaction never gets confirmed. This is the work per transaction that costs so much energy (your point #1).
Exchanges charge an additional fee to convert between different kinds of currency, whether crypto or fiat. This is just like exchanging USD for EUR – the middleman takes a cut.
The fee for Bitcoin seems completely divorced from the size of the transaction, though. It makes it impractical as a currency if you want to buy a pizza, and the transaction fee costs more than the pizza itself.
Certainly strong regulation would make Crypto a lot better as a currency, but then it’s just ‘Normal Money, but incredibly inefficient and decentralized and generated via arbitrary mining operations.’
Now, there is the idea of ‘Proof of Stake’ vs ‘Proof of Work’ mechanisms, where instead of incentivizing miners to do essentially wasted effort, you do complex social or economic control mechanisms. However, despite Ethereum going PoS any day now (for a while), I don’t think any of the major ones are, and frankly I don’t have enough context to really comment on this because I’m more familiar with Proof of Work.
I would be very surprised if they didn’t suffer all of the other major issues of cryptocurrency though - decentralization and deregulation leads to essentially massive ongoing pump and dump schemes, and when there are situations like this, the rich will inevitably get richer and the poor will suffer, and we have seen throughout time. Additionally, and I realize this is a strong statement to make: I trust massive national economic banks a lot more than I trust the next Satoshi fanboy to make and operate how I want to pay my rent.
There’s also PoA (Authority), some use that model, it’s still all a shitshow for now.
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