It's almost like all interest in cryptocurrency is driven by greed and speculation. I've been learning more about it, and I'm pretty convinced this is the case. Go into any crypto space, and all people are talking about is yield, price action, how much their tokens have grown etc. I think the only thing I've seen that isn't purely about speculation is NFTs, oddly enough, which seem to be basically a fad.
I can hate my job but at the end of the day I still created value for my employer. Companies on the stock market still create actual value for people, even if shareholders don't particularly care how they do it.
Unless we are working with a weird and strict definition of "tangible," I'd say it's tangible good that is, rightly, valued by many millions of people.
* Governments can and have confiscated bitcoin
* they can stop transactions by blocking access to wallets and exchanges etc
* They're a terrible medium for savings, unless you want your savings account to routinely swing wildly up and down in value
* 99.9% of people interested in Bitcoin do not care about these supposed benefits (which I'm skeptical even exist.) Yes there are the handful of goldbugs and libertarians, but most just want to see the number go up.
First, if you are concerned about things like confiscation, then you take the recommended security steps such as running your own node. At that point confiscation is indeed difficult (not impossible) and blocking access is essentially impossible. A government would have to prevent you and anyone who could act on your behalf from having any access to the Internet in order to stop the transaction being propagated on the network.
As for savings: I stand by my assertion. In its early years, yes, bitcoin is going to be volatile. But as anyone who has held bitcoin for 3+ years knows, it retains and grows value over the course of years exceptionally well. Savings implies a medium- and longer-term horizon — think years, not months — and on that horizon bitcoin has always been a winner.
I think there are more people in this world who care about the harms of inflation and capital controls than you are giving credit to. I care about preserving my wealth from debasement, as do all of the people I happen to know who hold bitcoin. And I suspect I might have a better feel for the "pulse" of bitcoin users than your 99.9% estimate, which (forgive me) strikes me as being detached from reality.
It's a real shame.
Name one crypto project making any sort of impact.
"almost"
If even useful services are being abused for speculation, it's time to realise the entire space is fundamentally broken. We've already seen massive fraud in the space, it's only a matter of time before people who fundamentally don't understand what they are "investing in" are left holding bags. It will necessarily collapse because of how it's being used. (imo)
I suggested everyone buy it when it was under $500, I said invest with caution up to $1000. Now I can't in good faith suggest to people that they buy it. And I am fortunate, everyone who did buy it on my suggestion made plenty of money.. probably because they had me in their ear saying "don't sell it" when they hit their first bitcoin drop. I get messages often thanking me for introducing them to cryptocurrency. However I and sure that there are many who didn't buy it and now regret it. Same as there are others who bought it, sold at a loss and regret it. It has been repeated as Infinitum, only invest what you can afford to lose and that is most definitely still the case. Bitcoin can still go to zero (or close enough not to matter) but It could also go to $100,000, and right now latter is more likely, but I feel as the price goes up so does the chance it goes to zero.
Buy/hodl has converted the concept for electronic currency, if there really ever was one, into a money making endeavor based on your current wealth and ability to risk a loss. That’s the antithesis of democratization, or 1 person 1 vote, but a I was here first so that makes me king now get on your knees and grovel at my supremacy.
The only real way to look at Bitcoin is as if there is an AI operating in the background with the sole intent of taking “investors” money through constant cycles of FOMO pump and dumps. It’s a stock without any assets or profits backing its value, at any point the shareholders could just start a new company and nothing would be lost by abandoning Bitcoin, because it’s just a shell company with nothing inside.
Not a crypto hater. I even invest for fun and because you cannot deny the opportunity to make money rn. But don't expect people to ride the train blindly. I do think that crypto isn't going anywhere. But the current valuation of these coins is just absurd rn.
What's utility to you? Is buying a in-game COD skin utility? Or how about roblox bucks? How about the trillion dollar derivatives market?
All those things easily disrupted by DeFi.
COD skins and Roblox bucks can only be produced and sold by one company, so I don't see why you would need a decentralized protocol for them. CS:GO doesn't use DeFi, and apparently the market was active enough to be used almost entirely for money laundering.
For other financial markets, I can definitely see more of a case to be made, but it remains to be seen whether that will actually take off. From what I've seen, the crypto markets right now are primarily dealing in crypto, as I said.
The use cases for CRYPTO and NFT are extremely small.
Its a solution that's been looking for a problem for over 10 years.
>Is buying a in-game COD skin utility? Or how about roblox bucks? How about the trillion dollar derivatives market?
No.
Maybe there are some forward thinking people there who want crypto to be the driving factor behind refactoring from COBOL, who knows.
I was excited then, when it was new to me, but then I learnt the truth about blockchain
Cryptocurrencies: Efforts to make useful tools are driven out, speculation and fraud are rife.
Cryptography: Used to secure billions of web transactions every day on the web with very little fraud.
I took web tech to mean the technology used to serve the web - the differences with cryptocurrencies are manifold, the principal one being that billions of people use the web every day to perform important functions, compared to cryptocurrencies where most users are simply speculating on prices.
1) You cannot have cryptocurrency without the web, so it is web tech.
2) Computational cryptography long predates the web. It would be more accurate to say "the web is cryptography tech", if anything.
2) Cryptographic libraries (many relatively recent, e.g. go or rust libraries) are definitely an important part of the web, they're integral to web tech if you define web tech as the tech that powers the web.
I know of a very similar company (might even be the same one) the telegram forum they have setup is just full of people speculating what will / might happen ...will it go to the moon... etc.. They have now moderated that out but still main reason people join the group to start with.
That's not a utility token. If you want to create a true utility token, make it stable and you won't have to worry about speculation.
Probably more realistic with exchanges ("authorized resellers") than individual traders.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
In much the same way, social networks almost always seem to become hookup platforms.
There's no reason to force customers to buy a brand new token invented out of thin air just to pay for a service that could be otherwise purchased with real money or Ethereum.
As much as they’re excited about the technology itself, very few people are actually interested in using it. Instead, their business seems to revolve around the value of the utility tokens for their project.
Few people are buying the utility tokens to pay for the service. They’re buying them to horde so they can resell to other speculators when the price goes up. They have a lot of tokens in circulation, but only a small number of them get used to pay for the service. Many of them are sitting in the wallets of exchanges where they get traded back and forth but never come near the blockchain.
Investors only care about getting more press releases out so they can pump up the price of their discounted tokens, which have a shortened lockup period relative to something like stocks. It’s almost like a pump-and-dump scheme for investors.
Maybe their underlying project will become popular in the future, but the volatility of the token price makes it increasingly unattractive for companies that want to actually use it.