I wager once people have to start going back to work and all the free government money dries up, there will be a run on crypto to realize their gains en-masse, and this will trigger a massive wipe out for many latecomers.
Frankly, cryptocurrency being invented and created was a huge mistake for society at large. I hope the comeuppance isn't super destructive outside of cryptocurrency circles.
One of the shocking things is how much cryptocurrency has poisoned the minds of youth who see it as their easy path to riches. Young people simply don’t want to work anymore, everyone is planning to retire very soon and a job is only a temporary inconvenience while they wait for their crypto coins to moon in value and make them millionaires set for life.
The truth is while many people did get very rich getting in early on the cryptocurrency wave, less and less people these days are actually growing meaningful wealth by investing in crypto. Eventually reality will catch up and people will not be able to afford keeping a bunch of coins with questionable prospects, and when they begin liquidating all at once I guarantee some people will become very poor, poorer than they could ever imagine.
So many people I know immediately took their stimulus check, dumped it into some dumb crypto meme, and lost all their money. There is something to be said about money allocated for low level economic activity is instead obliterated into the worldwide ether, sometimes at massive electricity costs just to rub salt into the wound of our warming world. I wonder if in the future we will see national economies shrink as people dump more local fiat into economically useless, speculative crypto that is distributed globally.
Crypto is our generation’s write off. The cost of a free market economy. We’ll have people with stranded skill sets. They deserve compassion; though based on precedent, they will find none.
Maybe in a hundred years we’ll realise they were ahead of their time. When some UN blockchain extends across the solar system. Like how we remember N. Tesla and the 90s’ satellite internet folk. Financially ruined. But cute in their own way.
There are a lot of boomers recapitulating their 90s in crypto. They’re fine. They’re gambling. I have a lot more sympathy for the young people wrapped up in the whirlwind. They’re making me wealthy. But oof, do I wish they’d widen up.
When profits are being made, who cares what happens to future generations.
Cryptocurrency is, for the most part, a contagion. We opened Pandora's box and the genie is out of the bottle. Short of some kind of cataclysmic black swan event, I'm not sure this insanity will end anytime soon. :(
The end of the story is that crypto people who stole these billions will do well, and the millions of people who lost their savings because of cryptos (including myself) will have to work twice to make it again.
Enslaved to work because of scams, such a dream world.
VCs are pouring money into this space. Do they care about adoption? Nope. They know that this largely unregulated, liquidity challenged space that’s too technically complex for the average rube is the perfect ground to make wild, wild returns.
Unless something changes drastically on the regulation front, the story will repeat itself. VCs and early adopters will buy tokens in the “ice age”.
Come next cycle, the media will start hyping up crypto again, bringing the retail rubes pouring in. And then the VCs and early adopters will walk away with their 50x returns, leaving retail with the bags
I don't hate crypto per-se. Nor am I particularly gloating about it. However I hope that the silver lining here is that this will be yet another in my evergrowing list of examples to share when I advise people not to get involved in crypto. It's not a safe environment and the people getting hurt don't deserve to get hurt. The only weapon I have to help more people not get hurt is to use these cautionary tales to help inform them of the risk. The track record of crypto indicates that right now many governments are better at the whole monetary policy thing than any blockchain.
Will blockchains fix these problems and mitigate the worst facets of human nature? Maybe, but I have no reason to believe they will right now and every argument that they will is rooted in a faith based statement about the inevitability of technilogical progress. A faith I don't subscribe to and therefore is unconvincing to me.
It was all fun and games while the crypto bubble was inflating. You basically could do no wrong, any mismanagement would be hidden away by the exponential appreciation of the underlying assets; just hodl until the next bull run and everything would be fine again.
When things stabilize and start going down, it's like the morning after the frat-party, bad things come to light. Crypto is fundamentally a negative sum game, it takes enormous resources to run and has generated a large number of self-minted millionaires that have cashed out and lamboed their earnings. There is very little actual marketable utility that crypto provides that could cover these large outlays, perhaps with the exception of facilitating money laundry and illegal transactions. I guess that's a business, but (hopefully) not a multi-trillion business suggested by the bubble's peak.
So it's inevitable the game must end with someone holding the bags.
and when it stops the vast majority of people will have no reason to use cryptocurrency at all and it will go back to being a niche thing for libertarian nerds
Good! The sooner cryptocurrencies die, the better. The damage they are doing to society right now is immense, and it will only grow larger if they are not stopped.
Modern crypto has to be the most ostentatious display of our generation’s detachment from reality and laze. I pray the big players pumping these like penny stocks on a much grander scale are eventually held accountable. While digital currency and decentralized finances are ideas societies should explore, modern crypto has served no other purpose than to funnel drug money and fund North Korea. I hope a crash becomes a reminder to at least some people that actual “value” involves natural resources being extracted and prepared with a lot of time and ingenuity required by humans, not thin air.
hypeee, the more massive failures in crypto the better off we are as a society
definitely cautiously optimistic that crypto will become largely irrelevant in the next few years, sadly most of the worst actors will still have profited and won't end up broke or in jail, but looks like at least some of them will
When 99% of people realise that they've essentially been scammed by the reserve banks, the backlash is going to be massive. There will be discussions about asset seizures and wealth redistribution. That's just a matter of time now. The cryptocurrency crowd knows this and wants this. They're helping to accelerate this. Guess what asset is hard to seize?
The masterplan is this: Let the banks mess things up, ruin people's trust in their governments and in capitalism, you move to a country that's unlikely to fall to communism, HODL your crypto, then wait it out then watch your crypto price moon as capitalists desperately try to flee into crypto to protect their wealth while their home countries fall to communism.
Cryptocurrency became popular as a result of the increasingly obvious dysfunction of the fiat monetary system.
Unfortunately, this dysfunctional monetary system which crypto was meant to replace has managed to take control of crypto and has turned it into a parody of itself.
Still, it's difficult to think of a better alternative to cryptocurrency to replace the current failing system.
The best we can hope for is that fiat proponents will keep deploying their endless printed fiat currencies towards the continued corruption of the crypto ecosystem until they destroy all of society and their own monetary system along with it - They will keep systematically feeding the greed, deception, inefficiency, incompetence and insanity until it takes over everything.
In their quest to discredit the cryptocurrency ecosystem, fiat proponents are also discrediting their own monetary system. It's a self-destructive and mutually-destructive race to the bottom.
Frankly, cryptocurrency being invented and created was a huge mistake for society at large. I hope the comeuppance isn't super destructive outside of cryptocurrency circles.
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