A trillion dollars goes into Sovereign Debt. The government can issue endless sovereign debt to dilute that.
A trillion dollars goes into the stock market. The companies on the stock market can issue tons and tons of new shares to dilute that.
A trillion dollars goes into paper gold. The commodities markets can naked short paper gold for however long they want to since there's cash settlement allowed of futures contracts.
A trillion dollars goes into bitcoin, the price just goes up and there's no dilution. This is what makes it a symbol of resistance against those assets and the way corporations, sovereigns and commodity market makers use their particular rules to extract wealth from their investors.
Also, Bitcoin is open source. So you can download the Bitcoin code and fork it and call it THE SUPER NEW IMPROVED BITCOIN, and set the "super new improved bitcoin" generation to a trillion bitcoin an hour, but the original bitcoin nodes are still around and doing their thing. However, there's nothing stopping people who want to do it your way from using your chain.
Bitcoin is thoroughly manipulated. Tether is minting a billion dollars a day now, with zero oversight and close ties to the major exchanges. Exchanges themselves have been found front running customers, running wash trades on their own coins etc etc. Fraud is rampant in this space and there is zero oversight from the normal regulatory bodies.
A trillion dollars goes into bitcoin, the price just goes up and there's no dilution.
But there is significant manipulation and absolutely no clarity about whether a trillion dollars has in fact gone into cryptocurrencies or whether things like the trillions of dollars that tether has minted affect the price more than real money flowing in. The numbers you can quote from exchanges are unaudited and highly suspect. At least those other assets have some sort of auditing in place to prevent fraud and market manipulation (which still happens, but would of course be rampant and largely hidden without regulation).
Also, Bitcoin is open source. So you can download the Bitcoin code and fork it and call it THE SUPER NEW IMPROVED BITCOIN
Ah, so the supply of this new money is in fact unlimited, since you can add new coins at any time. The supply of bitcoin may be limited (for now, by fiat), but the supply of cryptocurrencies and now nfts is constantly growing, there is no scarcity, and any we have is invented.
If you think Bitcoin is a symbol of resistance you're a mark making the likes of the Winklevoss twins and JL Van der Velde even richer. Get out now if you can.
Tether has "only" minted $78 billion, not trillions
Does anyone really believe 78,423,306,967 USD are currently invested in Tether?
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency)
Edit: I see elsewhere somebody saying "nobody in the commercial paper markets have heard of them"
So basically, like most other things they say, it's simply not credible.
https://www.ft.com/content/342966af-98dc-4b48-b997-38c008042...
That "commercial paper" could very well be IOUs from themselves to themselves
2. The rules can also be changed with a simple fork if enough users are persuaded to move (Bitcoin Cash) - and somehow the price of both is preserved (how? why? who benefits?).
3. The price is provided by unaudited exchanges and can be manipulated by manipulating linked assets and collusion with exchanges, as Tether has shown.
This is a house of cards waiting to collapse.
2) Again there is a reason why Bitcoin Cash is a fraction of BTCs value it's not the same.
3) Everything can be manipulated. You go and see how Soros did that in the 90es. But again that's not the measurement here. It can't be changed.
It's been a house waiting to collapse for 12 years now. Maybe you should ask yourself what it would take for you to admit to yourself that you were wrong. How long does this have to be a thing?
What would stop it being changed?
It's been a house waiting to collapse for 12 years now.
Tether has only been trading since 2015 and only prominent the last few years. Other cryptocurrencies have seen multiple bubbles and collapses. The thing that would convince me personally is that all the get-rich-quick marks and scammers leave the space and people start using it for actually useful things like payments.
Unfortunately distributed consensus with a global public ledger is particularly badly suited to payments or a currency, though it seems well structured for a ponzi scheme.
Your gold example is also very contrived because the futures market doesn't literally dilute away physical gold.
As for Bitcoin: You're missing the fact that while Bitcoin can't be manipulated away from 21 million, the Bitcoin markets can definitely be heavily manipulated by sufficiently large players and insiders. And there does seem to be ample evidence that this is happening.
If gold doubles, supply dramatically ramps up. Same with most commodities.
So what will the argument be when this market is regulated? Gary Gensler is obviously a fan of Bitcoin. He considers other digital assets in a different light, and seems to consider many of them to be securities. What happens when crypto exchanges are regulated and the level of manipulation is much harder, similar to traditional financial markets? The 21 million cap on Bitcoin is going to look more attractive then, I think, at least to those who aren't considering that now. Plenty of folks already consider the 21 million cap on Bitcoin very attractive, and I think this will only increase over time.
Also the other comments that I see arguing how Bitcoin could be changed tells me that those people have not followed the history of Bitcoin very closely. It seems one of Bitcoin's main goals over the past 10 years is ossification and hardening of the system, i.e. being very strict and careful about changes. This seems built into the ethos of the system. The Bitcoin Cash fork is an example of this. Bitcoin Core refused to change the block size and that led to a fork which has not done well in terms of price in comparison to Bitcoin. One could say that so far the Bitcoin Cash fork has failed in comparison.
Sure; however governments do dilute their share... err citizens away ;)
Bitcoin can be just as much manipulated, if not more, because there's barely any regulatory oversight. Remember the two bots that traded Bitcoins with each other on Mt Gox to drive the price up (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/29/bitcoin-b...)? What makes you think something like this doesn't exist anymore? Especially with the Tether guys at the helm, who have been proven to lie in the past (https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-...), Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency investors should be worried.
indeed. decentralization of mechanical infrastructure =/= decentralization of human control over said infrastructure.
if anything, the former serves mainly to obfuscate the latter, rather than eliminate it.
Bitcoin has negative cashflow, the only way it goes up is by more people putting money into it. I'm not saying that is a bad thing. Picasso paintings also have negative cashflow when you account for storage and security of the art. The only way a Picasso goes up in value is if more people with more money want to buy one. It is unfair to call Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme because no one calls a Picasso a Ponzi scheme.
Both are immoral but only one is illegal. One can do a double-Irish-Dutch sandwich and rat fuck both employees and suppliers all in the name of creating value for the shareholders. While employees piss into bottles the forward thinking CEO engages in union busting methods to prevent them from organizing. Legal or not, why not, if you can get away by stalling until a court decides and you settle (or purge the board from the toxic elements and restart what you do with a new CEO).
¹ Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands
The way I understand it, the kind art that is most often used in money laundry schemes is the more controversial kind. When some people think that a painting is a waste of perfectly good canvas while some rick collectors think it is the expression of god himself, how can you assign a value? This extreme subjectivity is what makes it ideal for money laundering.
Bitcoin prints money ( eg tether)
Bitcoin just doesn't work. It's centralized now to fix it's issues.
Best of all, none is regulated and the whales hold the power. Even more in the future with proof of stake.
There is more dilution and misunderstanding with crypto in general then I've ever seen.
I'm not sure what your actual gripe is, but you certainly have no idea what you're talking about.
Simple example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency)
> Research by John M. Griffin and Amin Shams in 2018 suggests that trading associated with increases in the amount of tether and associated trading at the Bitfinex exchange account for about half of the price increase in bitcoin in late 2017.
In practice they basically use their trusted position within an exchange (as the 1-to-1 representation of a US dollar) and simply create new Tethers from thin air, move them to an exchange, buy BTC, pump the price, and essentially act as a stabilizer whenever the price starts tanking. For instance they've printed over $2 Billion worth of Tether since Saturday, with absolutely no evidence that real people actually put $2B into exchanges to buy crypto.
It's an amazing scam since anytime it looks like the floor is about to fall out, they print billions more and keep their position alive by pumping crypto back up.
Anyways the reason it's important is because Tether and other stablecoins are supposed to be the fiat offramp in the event that you want to withdraw money from an exchange. After all, to buy BTC you really first bought Tether (or USDC) and then traded your tether for BTC a minute later. So all of the hard cash in the exchange is supposed to be represented by Tether... guess what happens when people realize their cash isn't actually there 1-to-1 like it was promised? Massive liquidity crises and all cryptocurrency falls 90%+.
Be careful my friend.
- Both are not really audited
- Both have retracted claims of being fully USD backed ( only tether had to do it after court and USDC changed it a bit later)
You've spoken to Evergrande and friends?
> to buy BTC you really first bought Tether (or USDC) and then traded your tether for BTC a minute later
Nnnnno, not everyone uses sketchy and/or first-gen CEXs...
Anyway, I agree with you, and hope Tether goes away soon.
But they are the exchange, even if they claimed for long they were not.
Tether keeps printing billions of dollars with no oversight or regulation. They lied about it being backed by cash reserves, and now make a much softer claim that its backed by "some cash" and other assets (other assets include more crypto IIRC).
Basically, it feels like tether is inflating the price of BTC, and the exchanges all have a vested interested in continuing to pretend tether is worth something. If there was a run on tether (i.e. everyone tries to exchange for fiat) it could be catastrophic for all of crypto.
(Disclaimer: I am not a financial expert, and have just picked this up from reading about tether over the last few months).
They don't claim that any more. They only claim a tiny percentage is held in cash now, the rest is in 'commercial paper' apparently.
Isn't someone just going to create a Bitcoin-denominated derivative or fractional reserve bank, assuming that hasn't already happened?
The China crackdown was this year. The US agencies mentioned all started examining bitcoin in 2012 at the very latest, and had a decent grip by the next year. Left off the list is the agency with the most impactful jurisdiction- the DHS- who essentially "signed off" on the "legality" of Bitcoin in 2013, specifically citing the ease of tracing bitcoin transactions. The IRS gave its guidance on bitcoin (and classed it as property for taxation purposes) in 2014. FinCen was not particularly concerned at this time, according to someone at FinCen at the time.
Cooperation between compliance specialists (like Promontory) and major investors and the federal government (for KYC and AML) hit full steam by end 2013, by necessity. The FBI seizes assets suspected of being used in the commission of federal crimes, and bitcoin is simply another asset for them to seize, which the Justice Department has done successfully for a decade now.
One could argue that bitcoin was able to go to the moon because of these decisions, actions, and verdicts.
Sources: people who worked in these agencies or organizations at the time and the publicly available information at the time that it was disseminated.
The IRS has been gradually upping the pressure. Form 1040 for 2020 included, for the first time on the main form, the question "At any time during 2020, did you sell, receive, send, exchange or otherwise acquire any financial interest in any virtual currency?" The IRS has access to Know Your Customer data from many crypto exchanges, so, anyone who checks "No" and has a crypto exchange account will get attention. Here's a history of the IRS slowly tightening its grip on cryptocurrencies.[3]
[1] https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-53
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sec-brings-ico-crackdown-open...
[3] https://hub.accointing.com/our-crypto-platform/report-taxes/...
American crypto exchanges were actually reporting predating that announcement; they had to in order to not get shut down. Thoughtful people knew that certain regulation would have to be met from the beginning, but that memo wasn't universal and there's no one who goes door to door with the facts for hungry home speculators. There's likely to be a continual wave of retroactive enforcement for some time. That's why most sincere people in the space have been paying any required taxes generated by their activity starting for the year 2015 at the latest.
Incidentally, bitcoin hasn't been considered a security by the IRS yet, but the infrastructure bill that just passed has a whole sea change of new regulation for the space. I don't feel I've been informed well enough yet to comment much regarding macro implications. But there is something in there that could effect the latest buzzwords to go media viral: NFTs. Securities-related Know Your Counterparty and Anti-Money Laundering regulations that will be in effect starting in 2023 may apply to NFT sales, for any seller. That could have a real impact. You would need the EIN or social security number of your buyer.
We could call this tightening or a crackdown, but I think it also might be fair to call it reigning things in to prevailing standards. I don't really know. All this revolves around interesting questions about how the standards continue to be established for what constitutes a digital security vs digital property/currency.
As to the ICOs crackdown, it was nice to see regulators actually take real action on straightforward and often inept securities fraud. They were enabled by capability advances that weren't as feasible with bitcoin alone. They were old grifts cycled around again for a round of digital "innovation," so they were nipped in the bud pretty quickly. These kinds of fraud will probably spring up at every stage of the digital asset technology development cycle. The noise can be a bit maddening, and I can understand your general sentiment.
If IRS only started tightening their grip in 2020... Their statements prior to 2020 didn't have any effect, yet.
I'm not saying "it's doom and gloom for crypto". I'm saying it's fair to claim things didn't fully play out yet.
The SEC is basically reactive. They wait until people complain about losing money in a scam. Then they bring the hammer down. This avoids complaints about over-regulation.
(A "forward looking NFT" is something like land in a virtual world that doesn't exist yet. You're funding an enterprise run by others to build the thing. That's an investment contract, which the SEC regulates. An NFT that represents "art" that exists at the moment of sale is probably just a collectable.)
By the way, none of this is new. See "Swampland in Florida" on Wikipedia for the 1950s version of the same concept.
It's just like everything else, literally, and tax evasions only get media coverage under pretty limited circumstances.
Taxation in the space has always had a foregone conclusion that some have chosen to handwave or rationalize away. Not a bright strategy IMO.
And so what if criminals are using it? It's just like cryptography: you can't choose who it protects. If anything, the fact criminals are using it strengthens its value proposition because it means it works. KYC/AML are just the financial version of global warrantless surveillance and should be opposed on principle just as strongly as we fight for our privacy on every other front. If that makes life a little harder for authorities then so be it.
Early Bitcoiners have known this and predicted it several times. See this post from a decade ago for reference:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c5j46/you_people_...
Did Finney ever explain how he came to be the recipient of the first ever Bitcoin transaction if he wasn't Satoshi?
Who do you think is Satoshi, if not Finney?
Investing against the popular opinions of Hacker News is an easy way to get rich.
We don't need another nation level energy guzzler for a spy/disinformation network.
> Climate researchers say two Google searches emit 7g of CO2 – the same as boiling an electric kettle.
> ...
> If Wissner-Gross is correct then 3,500 tonnes of CO2 (500m x 0.000007 tonnes) are emitted every day through all of us performing Google searches. Or put another way, 1.28m tonnes a year. That's about the same as Laos emits each year, the 151st biggest emitting country in the world.
Compare: https://fortune.com/2021/11/06/offsetting-bitcoins-carbon-fo...
> All told, Bitcoin emits—by Forex Suggest’s estimate—some 57 million tons of CO2 annually, more than double Ethereum’s footprint. It’s noteworthy that for Bitcoin, all that energy generates a relatively low number of transactions. Because its distributed network is so slow, its users post only around 12,000 purchases, sales, and transfers on the blockchain each hour. That’s approximately 115 million transactions a year. By contrast, Ethereum handles over four times those volumes—devouring, once again, far less than half the juice. The result: Bitcoin deploys an incredible 707 kWh of electricity per transaction, 11 times as much as Ethereum, and emits 1,061 pounds, or half a ton, of CO2 every time you tap the app to buy a latte or zap a fraction to a buddy who beat you on a golf bet. Ethereum sends less than one-tenth of that carbon skyward for each purchase or transfer it processes.
----
So, roughly, bitcoin has a footprint that is ~45x larger than Google search.
Facebook is probably lighter than that, though that's only a "its probably lighter than that" guess.
I wonder if there is any mapping of “gas” to electricity. I guess it would have to be approximate but still, it’d be interesting to estimate how much electricity a particular smart contract consumed per execution.
We don’t know much about how its energy is being created. If 90% of Bitcoin’s energy use would be from renewables its CO2 footprint wouldn’t be 45x as large as that of Google.
There was a study a couple of years ago suggesting Bitcoin’s global footprint is comparable to that of a medium sized city. But its assumptions are probably outdated.
Edit: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
Why does BTC increase demand for green energy but not other kinds of energy? Or does it increase demand for all types of energy available in the grids in which it's generated?
I would much rather that the demand for green energy increase due to a desire to transition away from other energy sources.
If the demand for energy is increasing and being met with green energy without removing the other sources of energy, that's not entirely a win in my book.
Both Google (and Bitcoin) are optimizing for lower electrical costs - wherever that may be. Often this is associated with grids with hydroelectric power. Places like https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/the-dalle...
The point isn't "this is how much CO2 google and bitcoin produce" but rather using the metric of CO2 footprint as a proxy for energy consumption to compare Bitcoin to Google to Facebook.
Whatever Bitcoin's CO2 footprint is, overall Bitcoin is consuming about 45x more power than Google over the course of a year.
I mean, I'm not sure you're wrong here, it just seems like a step was missed. Your comment is about bitcoin, but your conclusion is about a bunch of stuff that does not run on the bitcoin blockchain. What's the missing piece here?
s/scammers//
also, not anonymous without huge effort and deep expertise.
exactly what money of the future is supposed to be.
want reversibility - build a company that offers it by taking on risk. want any other service that modern financial system provides - build it. doesn't have to be baked into the currency especially with all the destabilizing levers that come with those features.
That's not how it works.
Suppose Bitcoin comes into existence and people mine a billion dollars worth of it. They now have a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. Nobody else has lost anything.
If they sell the Bitcoin and someone else buys it, the buyer hasn't lost anything. They had $100 worth of cash and now they have $100 worth of Bitcoin. Provided the price is stable, their net worth doesn't change. If the price goes up, they make money. If the price goes down, they lose money. That part is zero sum, but the initial mining still created the value that it created.
It would only be zero-sum if Bitcoin goes to zero. Not just 5% of where it is now, actually zero. Because otherwise it would still have created whatever non-zero asset value people still ascribe to it.
Everything else is positive sum. Trading, moving money, storing wealth...
This really depends on what you think is going to happen going forward. Surely the current value is propped up by speculation, but are the speculators right? Is future-Bitcoin going to be very useful and thus valuable for something, so that the speculators will eventually have someone to sell their Bitcoins to other than just more speculators?
It's not impossible for that to happen just because it hasn't already happened. It's also not impossible that it doesn't, in which case the speculators themselves will be the ones left holding the bag. But that's how it goes, isn't it? High reward, high risk.
If Bitcoin goes to $0.01 or even $5, I bet that makes most mined Bitcoins underwater like how pennies and nickels cost more than their face value.
If you mine $100 worth of Bitcoin, there is $100 worth of Bitcoin created, whether the electricity cost you $20 or $120.
If Bitcoin goes to zero I still made my $20.
Imagine you and your friends collect and trade rocks you find on the beach. The more rocks you pick up and put in your personal baskets, the scarcer they become (just like mining bitcoins), so the work of finding more rocks becomes harder. This makes all the rocks you've already found "worth" more. Let's say for this thought experiment that there are 1000 rocks on this beach total.
The value of the rocks is only realized when someone decides they want to pay you dollars for your rocks in your pile instead of going out to pick up rocks themselves. This transaction (say $1 per rock for 100 rocks) now suddenly makes everyone's pile of rocks valuable, because there's someone out there who was willing to pay $1 per rock. If the next person pays $2 per rock for 100 rocks, then everyone's rock piles double in value. This means that the "market cap" for rocks on your beach is $2000 ($2 x 1000 rocks), but that doesn't mean that there is suddenly $2000 of USD in you and your friends' pockets. There's only the $300 that the two buyers paid into the system, but it wasn't generated by collecting rocks.
Let's say that the last 100 rocks are super hard to find - they might be buried deep in the beach and not worth digging with your hands. After a few hours the supply of rocks has essentially capped. The only way to get more rocks for yourself is to trade dollars for rocks. You open your wallet and buy 100 rocks from your friend for $500 dollars.
Now everyone knows that 1 rock = $5. Market cap = $5000.
Someone else wants to buy but it's hard to get anyone to sell. They spend $100 to buy just 10 rocks. Now 1 rock = $10, Market cap = $10,000.
Now that each rock is worth $10, people get shovels and try to find more rocks buried. Finally they've all been found. Let's say that 100 people total are now holding at least 1 rock.
Let's freeze it here and look at who has won and who has lost. Assume that finding the rocks didn't cost anything. From the perspective of everyone who simply picked up rocks, they hold rocks worth $10 each, but haven't paid anything to acquire them. Great right? Well not necessarily - nobody actually paid them anything yet, so they have realized exactly $0 in gains.
Let's look at the four transactions that occurred which gave the rocks value. The first saw $100 go from person A to person B, for a net of $0. The second saw $200 from one person to another, for a net of $0. Third, etc - fourth and final, also net of $0.
Within this example, trading dollars for rocks is clearly a zero-sum game. The only reason that crypto "looks" different is that it's a much larger beach with millions of rocks and millions of people trying to trade them and pick them up. But it's the same thing.
Except that they still have a rock that the market currently values at $10. The value of that clearly isn't zero, because it's $10.
The argument that not everybody could sell their rocks all at once and still get the same price is only relevant if that's what happens. It's like saying your shares in an S&P 500 index aren't worth the market price because of what would happen if everyone sold at once.
Dividends mean that the "rocks" you hold spit out a few pennies magically every so often. While fewer stocks today pay a dividend, many still do.
For holding bonds you get the coupon payment, which again is like your rocks spitting out pennies every so often.
In the real world, companies and governments are paying you to hold their rocks.
That's why the stock market/bond market isn't zero-sum.
By analogy, it would be the value of the currency as a currency, i.e. to facilitate productive financial transactions that would not otherwise occur. The reason non-speculators would ultimately want to have any.
Bitcoin doesn't generate intrinsic value from a business operation - it's just a digital version of a rock. There's no money for it to pay out. Therefore you have to limit the example to the exchange which gives it value, which again is a zero-sum game in a way that traditional markets for business and government equity and bonds is not.
Except that it makes the rocks not worth as much.
You had a corporation with a million dollar business and a million dollars in cash. It pays out the million dollars in cash as dividends. Now the rockholders have a million dollars in rocks and a million dollars in cash, when they used to have two million dollars in rocks. Their rocks decline in value by the amount of cash no longer inside the corporation.
> Bitcoin doesn't generate intrinsic value from a business operation
Sure it does.
Bob wants to buy something from El Salvador, the merchant in El Salvador wants payment in Bitcoin, so Bob has to buy some Bitcoin in order to pay the merchant. The more Bobs there are, the more valuable Bitcoin is as a currency, and the more the person holding the rock can get for the rock.
You, the holder of rocks, get the increase in business value as "rock price appreciation" rather than dividends, but you still get it.
Nope, that is not the way it works. When you have ownership of a company (by holding stocks), the company can pay out a dividend and the price of the stock does not go down. On the contrary, the price of the stock may go up because the company has proven that it generates cash and will pay this cash out to shareholders periodically.
This is why companies viewed as assets have “intrinsic value” and something like BTC does not. If I own stock in a company that pays out dividends and the stock does go down, at least I still get money in the form of dividends. I can be assured that if the dividends continue (not a given), then the price of the underlying stock will “correct” to match the intrinsic value of the company over time.
Contrast that with BTC - I have no real way of knowing the “real” value of BTC. If the price goes down, then it may stay down forever as there is no way of accurately pricing it based on some real-world metric. It produces nothing, therefore this is why some people say it is not a good asset to own.
So BTC for you is at the same time an asset AND a currency ?
How does it work ? It goes to the moon forever, so a loaf of bread cost goes ever higher forever ?
The important thing that differentiates shares and bonds from other assets such as commodities and virtual currencies, is that the former produce income (in the form of profits or interest) while the latter don't.
I think it's incorrect to the of crypto-currencies/etc as heading towards some sort of equilibrium.
>>"Check out meme stocks a few years later. Remember, all this stuff is zero-sum. For every winner, there has to be a loser."
I think this is similar to the mistake of the last 4 decades' monetary/macroeconomic theory and practice. Expecting that inflation/default would ultimately balance/equilibrate rising public debt. Well... debt rose for decades while inflation remained much lower than it had in earlier periods.
Same here. Sure, the equilibrium price for bitcoin may be zero. In that case, for every winner there is a loser.
I find the hesitance towards bitcoin and crypto extremely puritan in ways that nothing else can live up to.
Bitcoin have had several booms and busts. Each time it crashed it found a new higher floor. This has been going on for more than 12 years now.
Technology is not what makes Uber, Airbnb, Booking.
Which area of modern tech is not about "make money fast" ? Lol You're ngmi amigo
Completely agree with this sentence. Now, have you happened to frame this sentence in your head when talking about fiat money? Just wondering.
Whether or not you agree with the different thoughts people have about any of these things, I think it's possible that there's in fact a movement into Bitcoin borne out of more than just "greed," but instead, fear and hedging.
I agree that there are a lot of horrible shit coin projects out there, but there are also several blockchain projects utilizing the new technology for its intrinsic value of decentralization and what that affords.
Hillary Clinton seems to believe that cryptocurrencies are about nation state vs the next social mechanism [5]. It's likely true, and that change is being brought forth by blockchain. Books changed the world. Churches changed the world. Radio and TVs changed the world. The Internet began to decentralize it... and blockchain is finishing the job.
[1] https://i.redd.it/8csx4xepjm381.png
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/24/republicans-...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/12/06/nyregion/ghislaine-m...
[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-19/cryptocur...
Your counterfactual is nonsense. There is no world where Bitcoin remains stable for a decade. It's precisely the nature of Bitcoin that it either eats a large fraction of global monetary value or ends up close to zero. Bitcoin's existence provides the purest possible application of Gresham's law. The price of Bitcoin reflects the imputed probability of bitcoin eating monetary value, as well as the fraction it ends up eating.
> all this stuff is zero-sum
Bitcoin is positive-sum if you believe in the benefits of sound money, but yes, people who are net dollar bagholders (e.g. US govt and people with US govt debt) will lose wealth if Bitcoin successfully demonetizes the dollar. It would probably be wise to hedge against this scenario by balancing long dollar positions with long Bitcoin positions.
Bitcoin found some early use cases. Drugs first. Then getting money out of China. Money laundering. Tax evasion. Scams. Bitcoin is the scammers dream - remote, anonymous, irreversible transactions. Much less risk of the mark coming for the scammer with a baseball bat.
Then China cracked down on cryptocurrency, shut down all the miners, and arrested a few hundred of them. Financial regulators in the more legit countries started regulating Bitcoin exchanges, so the operators couldn't just steal the money. Know Your Customer became a thing. In the US, the IRS, FinCen, the FBI, and the SEC all started paying attention to what was happening on blockchains. Cryptocurrency crime was no longer risk-free for the crooks.
But by now, sheer momentum kept Bitcoin going up. That's a powerful force. It's not forever, though. Check out meme stocks a few years later. Remember, all this stuff is zero-sum. For every winner, there has to be a loser.
That's what provides the engine behind "Web3", NFTs, DAOs, and whatnot. It's not the technology.