The Republicans and Donald Trump seem set on establishing a strategic crypto reserve. They are claiming this will somehow be an important source of economic security for the country. It’s clear that establishing the reserve will be an important way to give tens of billions of dollars to Donald Trump’s campaign contributors, but it is much harder to see how it will provide any economic security to the country.
He has done the rug pull successfully with his own coins, which are now burned. Now he thinks amassing other coins will enable them to rug pull even more.
I don’t get crypto… is there any coin that’s actually usable as, you know, currency?
From what I can gather, none of them scale so each transaction is slooooow and expensive.
The coins themselves carry no value and is backed by jack-shit. Comparing them to baseball cards seems very apt. Baseball cards, bubbles and FOMO.
Crypto is more worthless than the fiat currency we all currently use.
Cool story. But try comparing the historical value of the dollar versus bitcoin:
many ponzi schemes appear to be wildly profitable in their early phases.
I’d give your crypto graph a lot more interest if it covered the same timeline as the first one, but these are measuring essentially different things - a century vs. almost 15 years.
I have yet to see a cryptocurrency that doesn’t smell like a scam. and all the efforts converting electricity water and time into pollution really dulls the luster further.
You are comparing the purchasing power of the dollar and, what is essentially, a graph of the value of a bitcoin in dollars. Each dollar of value a bitcoin has doesn’t have more purchasing power than a dollar.
Edit: Just to be clear. Bitcoin is only valuable as long as the dollar, or whatever currency, used to purchase it has value. Hence, bitcoin is less valuable than the money it is bought with.
Ah, on this point I think you are incorrect. Since there are exchanges all over the world actively trading between crypto and their local currencies, crypto provides an interesting route around the currency exchanges.
If the Dollar (and only the dollar) tanks with respect to other conventional currencies, it’s very likely to tank vs. Crypto as well, because those Crypto holders can easily choose to buy Euros or Yen or whatever with their crypto instead.
I actually think this is the end goal with Trump’s Strategic Shitcoin Reserve: sell dollars for crypto, tank the dollar, buy back dollars with crypto…
You are forgetting that USD is the world reserve currency.
… for now. If a President wanted to destroy the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, he would do all the things Trump is doing right now.
Or tried to do, like when he tried to collapse Treasury bonds.
The original promise of crypto was as a distributed, peer-to-peer way to transact, without the permission of any third party. Think Paypal or Venmo, but without having to trust Paypal and Venmo with your bank details. And when the price of BTC was a few hundred dollars, people were slowly using it to transact. But then, the price started to climb. And that was the worst possible thing to happen to Crypto, because now people started considering it to be an “investment” and too precious to spend. (BTC developers even deliberately kept their on-chain transactions expensive, to push their off-chain solution for small transactions, but That’s a whole different post).
There are coins that are still good as currency, they’re just not a good “investment” so they don’t get attention. (Some Monero shill will be along shortly to tell us how awesome XMR is.)
I spent a lot of time in the crypto space, not as a “true believer”, but rather as someone who wanted to know how it all worked. And I’ve concluded that crypto really does enable trustless transactions. However, I’ve convinced myself that nobody (outside of the extreme libertarians) actually wants that. Your average Joe doesn’t care that PayPal, Google, or their credit card company is spying on (and perhaps taking a piece of) all their transactions. They want something that is easy to use, and whose value doesn’t fluctuate with Elon Musk’s tweets.
But then, the price started to climb. And that was the worst possible thing to happen to Crypto
Yes, the crypto scene is constantly crying about their massive gains. \s
There’s no real problem with people not wanting to spend a solid investment. It’s called “savings”. People used to do it back when the dollar was almost worth something, but they constantly devalue the money to prevent it. The petrol-dollar needs people spending and consuming exponentially more to prop up their pyramid scheme. This system is literally impoverishing humanity and destroying the planet. That’s a much bigger problem than cryptos going up.
The coins themselves carry no value and is backed by jack-shit.
How is state currency any different? You need to consider the alternative instead of blithely championing it.
State currencies are ideally based off of the economy as a whole, failing that then ya use strategic resources such as oil, metals, or even farmland if you produce enough agricultural output. While state currencies and their modern backings are esoteric due to the sheer fucking scale of it all cryptocurrency is esoteric in the same way stocks are, the average person doesn’t understand it and there’s a solid chance most folks when they do gain a vague understanding realize it’s stupid esoteric bullshit with undue influence.
The coins themselves carry no value and is backed by jack-shit. Comparing them to baseball cards seems very apt. Baseball cards, bubbles and FOMO.
This is true of every currency. Even precious metals are only precious because we think they are.
Not arguing pro crypto here, more like, anti capitalism, with crypto only being the next generation of a thing that only has a value because some ppl have decided that it does.
Well with other currencies you sort of have a nation state behind it, backing its value. Failing that, that nations armed services :-)
What does that mean? What service do you get from the “armed services”? If someone doesn’t pay you, then the army will attack them?
TBH it’s somewhat amazing how people cite violence as a feature. International imperialism is a primary reason why state currencies are terrible for humanity and the planet.
