Can any of you guys give me any more good reasons as to why crypto-currencies are absolute shit?
I'm not a boomer, I'm 20 years old and have been using it since Liberty Reserve shutdown. After Liberty Reserve shut down, I moved on to Bitcoin. I love crypto and I use it quite often to purchase stuff, so I'm not hating on it. I also have many wealthy friends who have hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in crypto. I am trying to convince them that holding on to all of their crypto for years will not make them rich.
Crypto will always be around due to it being P2P, but it could never be used for mainstream use and therefore not a currency. I've tried describing to my friends that BTC is a very large Ponzi and Pyramid scheme- there's no doubt in my mind that it is. People only hold crypto in hopes to make money and shill it so others buy it, therefore the price goes up.
Crypto also has no regulation. What do you do if somebody scams you and you have 100% proof of that scam? How would you get your money back? How would people without internet even use crypto? How would you trade fiat to the government to get the equivalent in crypto? Fiat has been around for a long time and it's hard to change things like that, especially in places where the Internet isn't relevant. There needs to be centralization in crypto and people do not seem to understand that. Yes, our current fiat system is fucked- I will agree. We cannot rise up and change that, there's too much control. Political leaders are the only ones who can change that.
Anyways, I'm tired of rambling. Could anyone else give supporting answers or maybe answers that do not support my views to cause a debate?
Blockchain as a technology was always a solution in search of a problem. BitCoin was really intended as a proof of concept prototype to demonstrate Blockchain had some sort of practical application. Then the anti-fiat crowd/ gold-bug and black market users got wind of it and later speculators and scammers and it's just turned into a ponzi scheme.
Cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic value. It's even worse than gold as a means of exchange or store of value or whatever other utility people might claim it has. It uses an extremely large amount of energy to mine and process transactions, which is wasteful and inefficient. It offers no real benefit over fiat as a token of exchange, besides some degree of anonymity.
So it possibly has some utility, but it's 100% sure no coin out today will dominate any future demand for it. It'd have to be a coin produced by a legitimate financial organization, not some random chink or poo scammer.
Jackson Bell
Thanks for the response, user. I do agree that Blockchain technology is great and can have uses in practical application, What was it's intention of Blockchain, though? I haven't read whitepaper.
I've tried explaining to my friends that cryptocurrencies have absolutely no intrinsic value whatsoever. Are there even any alt coins that are producing a profit besides their coin going up a few percentage? I haven't seen any coins, except maybe Ripple that make a very small amount in fiat. There is no utility as you said. 99% of altcoins are completely useless and pretty much a scam. Another lie that the masses seem to believe is that the total marketcap of all coins was purchased with fiat. I love Bitcoin for the anonymity, that's why I use it. Other than that, there's no real value in it.
Your last point is also extremely true. This also pushes the idea of Globalism, which I do not support. When fiat crashes, there will be a world currency. I'm not a bible-humper, but it even states that in the Bible.
Christian Baker
Regulation has nothing to do with somebody scamming you / getting your money back, the situation is no different to if you had used government approved paper fiat vouchers.
People without internet would not really be able to use the crypto, but more people have internet than bank accounts, banking without internet is on it's way out, physical cash is being phased out as well.
Ponzi is a good way to help normies understand they are going to lose all of their money, but bit coins are not literally a pyramid scheme
Anthony Baker
Do you really believe the intrinsic value of bit coins is literally zero? I have no idea how to price the fundamentals but zero seems like a pretty brazen call. It might be easier to think about it as some very low value, like a market cap of 21 cents, for the niche applications it has right now do you really believe it is worth less than 21 cents?
Yeah a cryptocurrency is intrinstically literally zero. Less than stock certificates in Blockbuster or fiat currency, since those are still worth the paper it's made of. It's not hard to imagine some meme scam coin, Titcoin or whatever, being worth zero if nobody mines it anymore and the joke is 20-30 years old.
You're right for niche purposes, that Titcoin will be bought and sold by nerd hobbist collectors in the future or whatever, but strictly speaking, as a financial instrument it's safe to say 'zero' is lowest it can realistically be traded for on the open market.
The best 'intrinsic' or book value you could say would be whatever costs in electricity it took to mine a single unit might be a good baseline, but you can't really assign value to something just because it destroyed value somewhere else.
Asher Thomas
But we are not talking about a titcoin that is not mined anymore because that would be retarded. We are talking bit coins or whatever other coin that has a functioning, operational system right now.
Cost to mine a unit I've never thought of as a useful method, it's more just for desperate shills to delude themselves with a high baseline and it's largely tied to market price anyway. There is some level of demand right now for an alternative currency, I am thinking that is where the only real value is
Caleb Taylor
bumping this. do you anons agree with all this shit?
Adam Adams
The legitimate use cases do exist, I mean who doesn't like buying drugs online?
Aside from drugs speculation is the next biggest use case, you're not wrong, majority are just in denial.
Henry Peterson
>Ponzi You have no idea what a ponzi is.
Christopher Nguyen
excellent blog post, downvoted and resteemed
Robert Clark
What in the fuck could you possibly have needed to use Liberty Reserve for when you were 10?
Eli Hill
Titcoin was functioning and operational at some point. It was a really early coin like BitCoin, you could buy porn with it. There is nothing that really prevents the value of BitCoin from being zero as well, it's just as arbitrary as anything else. if NASDAQ or someone creates a perfect cryptocurrency in a year and anyone can buy drugs with it without anyone knowing, BTC might go to zero at some point afterwards along with all the other early coins. It'd be like the stock of an irrelevant obsolete unpatroned business like Blockbuster that used to be a big deal and valuable but it's worthless. Securities can all become worthless, but usually not overnight and people will see the writing on the wall before then.
There is nothing special about BTC in particular other than it has brand name recognition.
James Powell
The coins they create will all be centralized ledgers.
Luis Jenkins
You're probably right, but it's a hypothetical they might make a decentralized coin just to sell maybe a multi-billion ICO. Thinking the first coin that reaches mainstream adaptation would be from a financial institution since normies would want the backing of some semi-reputable entity and not one made by some metrosexual Finnish guy that popped up with a GitHub and white paper one day.
Easton Wright
Personally I suspect the opposite. I suspect it will go mainstream by the fact of the lack of a custodian, ie trustless. No need to trust the banks, government, etc.. Sovereignless wealth is what will attract capital in huge amounts to Bitcoin. I do not suggest it could never be supplanted or that other coins could not succeed, but as I see it capital will flee to a wealth preservation vehicle that will be free of tampering re inflation, theft (traditional, legal theft), and etc.
Chase Howard
Something like Bitcoin gains value from the immutability of the asset. A crook in an office can't decide to lock your account due to suspicious activity, a government crony can't freeze your funds for any reason on this Earth. The age, immutability, and stability of the blockchain is itself the value.. We do not need to be able to purchase a coffee for something like Bitcoin to soar, rather other conditions merely need deteriorate.
Eli Walker
>People only hold crypto in hopes to make money and shill it so others buy it, therefore the price goes up.
People only hold stocks in hopes to make money and shill it so others buy it, therefore the price goes up.
Michael Taylor
This has nothing to do with intrinsic value though, yes the system, or some business can evaporate, but saying Bit Coins is worth zero because titcoin went under is literally the same as saying any business is worth zero because blockbuster went under.
If we want to uncover the fundamental value all we are doing is removing the speculation component from price. When we say gold has intrinsic value it is usually along the lines of that even if everyone stopped speculating on it overnight there would still be some people buying it to make the electronics or whatever. If people stopped speculating on bitcoin there are still goys out there who need / want to use it for their exchanges.
Brand name recognition is all there really is, but acceptance is also the only thing that really matters for a currency
Christopher Barnes
I don't think you understand what intrinsic value is. Bitcoin, Fiat, and have zero intrinsic value. This is a fact. 100% of their value is derived from what people are willing to pay for it. There are no cash flows behind a currency.
Do you really think anyone with a brain would keep 100% of their money in USD, Yuan, or even Rupees?
By comparison, putting all of your money in Bitcoin is essentially the same thing. Even though there is no central bank, that hasn't stopped any currency in the past from essentially becoming worthless.
All it takes for Bitcoin to become worthless is one entity creating a cryptocurrency that is a giant leap ahead of Bitcoin in terms of functionality and security. Bitcoin could easily be the next Yahoo.
Samuel James
We already know that it takes a lot more than merely creating a better specced currency to kill the bit coin, but it's still not relevant, just because it could hypothetically become worthless at some point in time does not make it worthless at this point in time, that is mere speculation on future value
Jaxon Anderson
>Regulation has nothing to do with somebody scamming you / getting your money back, the situation is no different to if you had used government approved paper fiat vouchers.
The point of crypto is to be a good alternative to fiat, which means not replicating its flaws. What's the point of using crypto if it's worst than fiat?
Regulation can help reduce such scams by, for example, requiring each address to be tied to a real identity. That way, criminals can be more easily identified. Credit cards already have consumer protections to prevent victims from being held accountable for payments with stolen credit cards.
Ryder Torres
There are no real consumer protections built into fiat cash, credit cards are businesses built around fiat that offer protections paid for by customers, but the currency doesn't matter for these services. I don't buy into the future of everyone being their own bank, more likely the same traditional banks we have now would securing customers coins and offering them all the same services as now.
Jace Gray
This imo, is the most valuable function cryptocurrency has as a financial instrument because nothing else in the world does it as well, but nobody has come up with a perfect system that is scalable and practical and widely adopted.
Thing is, most people are not in the market for that kind of thing. The biggest demand for that would be from China and other places that have restrictive banking/ financial laws and middle-class type individuals need a sort of grey market method of avoiding taxes or placing money away from the government. Those kinds of people don't have that much money compared to banks, institutions or governments that are under too much scrutiny and auditing to hide their money in crypto. This is more for individuals.
The biggest cryptocurrency would be a sort of 'virtual gold' like alot of boomers like to think of BTC. A sort of international virtual commodity that can be freely traded. It practically, could not be trustless.
Anyways, the problems with cryptocurrencies now are numerous. Mainly because it's full of speculation and scams and retards, just like any innovative or disruptive industry when it first appeared. So you have 10,000+ shitcoins and maybe 0-2 of them will ever sustain into mass adaption. BTC, ETH, it's forks will be obsolete relics since they will never be able to do the things people will expect a cryptocurrency with universal adaption to do.
