What if my grandmother had wheels?
More seriously, how many people do you know are seeing what you are talking about?
Everyone I know that invested in crypto did so hoping to trade it back later on for more fiat than they paid. Sure, maybe it's a biased sample, but it's a sizeable sample and I do not know even a single person that traded their fiat for crypto definitly.
I don't invest in a credit card for spending. I use a credit card, though.
When you own a share of Apple you literally own a fraction of their factories, IP, etc.
That's why I see crypto tokenization as an important step towards having another "financial material" to work with. It doesn't commandeer enforcement at a global level, so it doesn't compete with governments on their own terms, but it can help build trust at scale by being designed around the trustless scenario, which reduces reliance on enforcement and bureaucratic methodology in many applications. Crypto projects with a focus on achieving good governance are some of the most promising out there, even as they are hidden in the endless waves of scams.
One day, there will be a final generation left holding the bag.
When I started mining bitcoin no one was talking about it every have a USD value. It was just silly internet points that you could pass around to friends. I also know a lot of people who hold as a store of value believing that it will easily outlast the US dollar.
Just because all your friends are clowns doesn't mean that those are the only people that exist.
Could you share some numbers?
The author of this blog post's claim that 99.99% of people in crypto are only participating because of expectations of future profit is unsourced and a fiction that he has created based on preconceived notions.
Don't participate if you don't want - I like participating in a system that isn't being tracked by agencies especially with news of Treasury actively building out systematic functionality to investigate any bank accounts with transactions exceeding $600
You are exactly incorrect.
Cash represents the overwhelming supermajority of laundered funds and ongoing credit extended across criminal elements.
https://www.swift.com/sites/default/files/files/swift_bae_re...
Cash is the heart of the criminal economy, crypto is creating a transparency that doesn't exist in traditional peer to peer physical transaction systems like cash or IOUs.
I'm done with this, nothing productive is coming out of this conversation.
Your reply is also confused. Is the majority of money laundering denominated in USD and other real currencies? I'd believe it, because that's where the money is. But I'm saying the proportion of Bitcoin transactions that are fincrime-related is surely much higher than that of total USD transactions.
This seems pretty obvious to me given that Bitcoin is much less useful for quotidian transactions, but much more useful to people engaged in assorted financial crime. That's unsurprising given how much cryptocurrency advocates tout privacy/anonymity as features. But if you think otherwise, feel free to show the data that has convinced you otherwise.
Also, it's bad form to read something, go on a rant, and then declare the conversation over. Especially when the rant is incorrect.
> The estimated amount of money laundered globally in one year is 2 - 5% of global GDP, or $800 billion - $2 trillion in current US dollars. Due to the clandestine nature of money-laundering, it is however difficult to estimate the total amount of money that goes through the laundering cycle.
From Treasury via ABA Banking Journal (https://bankingjournal.aba.com/2015/06/treasury-u-s-money-la... and https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/2018NMLRA_12-18.p...):
> The United States continues to estimate that domestic financial crime, excluding tax evasion, generates approximately $300 billion of proceeds for potential laundering, based on the sources and analysis cited in the 2015 NMLRA. Criminal prosecutions and law enforcement investigations indicate that most of the money earned from crime in the United States stays in the United States, but also that the United States is an attractive destination for illicit funds generated abroad.
The news media did not create the gold rush mentality around crypto, it has been there almost from the beginning. Go and read the bitcointalk forums for evidence, if you want.
I like having spending power that isn't immediately based on CIA organized crime or boomers at the Fed/Treasury
The crypto financial news community was writing about this long before Fortune picked it up.
Edit: Not sure why the downvotes, but it's still true and still likely true for the forseeable future.
It's a new shift, but I think quite profound.
Edit: If you're referring to mainstream media, the dollar value is all that most would be able to put into context. For those deep in the space, we're thinking about dollar values less and less. My primary benchmark on overall portfolio value is the value denominated in ETH, not USD.
Although USD might be your preferred, many would happily sell a vehicle for compensation in BTC, ETH, silver, gold, euros, etc.
"Oh shit, the internet went out. Hope the value of my ETH doesn't crash through the floor while the internet is down...."
For people that look at it like that, sure. That's not how everyone looks at it though. I personally look at it with the aim of acquiring as much ETH as possible because I can see that the future economy will be built on it and eventually things will be priced in ETH.
Just because the transitions are slow and you don't see it happening, doesn't mean that there's not a transition happening.
IMO he comes off a grifter who needed to save his company and kept buying loads of BTC to start the "institutions are buying" FOMO.
He's probably referring to the lightning network, which is theoretically capable of handling millions or even someday billions of bitcoin transactions per second.
That would have been a plausible explanation, if not for the abundance of digital currencies. There are now many more times crypto assets than there are actual currencies in the world, and new ones seem to be created every day. There is absolutely nothing "finite" about crypto anymore.
Meanwhile, the total number of people who view bitcoin as a permanent allocation in their asset portfolio will have increased drastically, and they'll keep on stacking sats.
Each boom bust cycle operates this way. A minority of new investors become true believers, and the rest of the chaff wash away in the crash.
* Within margin of error
Money without an army is just paper. Or, in this case, imaginary numbers.
There will be no one to cry to when the machines start cracking all the hashes and wipe away the entire ecosystem.
I'd wager the NSA already has this capability, but they won't blow it on something so stupid.
JQI at UMD, NIST's Quantum Computing Group - these teams must be doing something with all the grant money
It uses XMSS, and does it fairly well.
But if quantum computers start breaking encryption, crypto currency is probably pretty low on the list of worries…
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Quantum_computing_and_Bitcoin#Mit...
And? Should we should look at it through a lens of a non-traditional Ponzi scheme? Ponzi 2.0 is better than Ponzi 1.0?
> What if people are seeing discussion of minting a trillion dollar coin, trillions in QE, 25% of all dollars created in the last 12 months…and concluding that fiat currency is in an endgame and they are permanently trading what fiat they have now for one of a finite number of digital assets that will ever be created.
If the Debt Bubble is nearing its end and fiat currency is in grave jeopardy, what is the mechanism by which the people holding these "digital assets" will save themselves from the economic hell that awaits the world?
What if people are seeing discussion of minting a trillion dollar coin, trillions in QE, 25% of all dollars created in the last 12 months…and concluding that fiat currency is in an endgame and they are permanently trading what fiat they have now for one of a finite number of digital assets that will ever be created.
As Michael Saylor once said in an interview: “It’s the superior asset, Laura”