My response to a friend asking about Bitcoin.
I read hacker news quite a bit, and the general consensus among tech people is that crypto as it exists in most current forms is just a scam. There are crypto supporters, who generally are bordering on religious fanaticism, but they are a small minority.
The core issue is that crypto, like it’s retarded brother NFTs, has absolutely no underlying value. There is no real estate, no income producing assets of any kind. Crypto was initially intended to be a currency, but has basically zero usage. That means any value it has is merely with the last sucker was willing to pay.
Once the suckers start going broke as will happen when the economy turns as it always does, no one will be willing to pay for it anymore and the value will go to zero.
The same thing happened with bank issued currencies and paper back in the 1880s through the 1930s. After tons of people lost all their money, governments worldwide regulated those out of existence. China has already banned Bitcoin. Other countries will likely follow suit as their citizens get burned. Bitcoin is especially ugly as it uses a proof of work algorithm that uses titanic amounts of energy to handle a miniscule currency transaction volume in a time when people are trying to conserve more.
Bankers and investment professionals mostly see crypto is a scam, but lots of them are jumping in to make money on fees and things for the suckers who are in it.
The way people get in and out of cash to Bitcoin currently is separate currency called tether that’s supposedly has one US dollar for every coin, but has been found to be lying and defrauding people. People are still using it today even though they know it’s a fraud because it’s the only option. It blows my mind that anyone is willing to continue to use it at this point.
Eventually all transactions will take place online, we are almost there already. The problem with crypto is that you have no recourse if someone defrauds you. That means the only people willing to use it are those who do not have access to the traditional financial system, IE criminals. People want one central authority that can roll back transactions that are fraudulent and provide some sort of backing.
Governments derive their primary power from the ability to tax citizens and if they fear that there is a risk of them losing that because of crypto, they will completely shut it down. Crypto enthusiasts often believe that Bitcoin and others can resist government shutdowns, but that is false. The government has direct control over the networks and if your coins can’t go over the network then they are worthless. Further, none of the cryptocurrencies are actually anonymous at this point. All of them can be traced and tracked. The decentralized log of transactions already has been reverse engineered to track specific people and criminals down.
I know that crypto enthusiast and phonetics are extremely persuasive, but if I was you I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 ft pole.
NFTs and crypto are using the same trick that MLMs do… Yes the underlying service or product COULD provide a real value… But are those steak knives really worth $25 each? Or does Costco sell even better steak knives for $5 each?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28850326
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27959127
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27214342