Really unfortunate that a lot of crypto was just these rich dudes pumping and dumping, and all getting together to perform rug pulls on a bunch of 'retail investors'.
The fact that many if not most of these firms unironically went all in on crypto, and no one got any real consequences for backing what was effectively just brown fat for the economy, makes me unsurprised at the garbage content they produce as well. Clearly many of them made money just by being in the right place at the right time and being lucky.
I think the actors in crypto have no shame. I love crypto, love the potential of the tech -- but does anybody doubt that coinbase, bitfinex, kraken, poloniex -- all the exchanges just flat out robbed people? When the narratives aligned they pumped/dumped.
Then they have no shame. Poloniex gets bought up. Coinbase/gdax announce venture capital arm. Its almost like they sucked too much money selling hopes and dreams to consumers, and now that SEC is watching closely they cannot keep pump and dumping the market. Just look at the volume drop.
Honestly, the democratized/decentralized characteristics everyone promotes is a bunch of bull until someone shows me a way democratically bootstrap ownership without total failures like Satoshi owning 20,000,000,000$ worth of BTC or a couple of whales owning 50% of the ETH supply because they bought when it was worth pennies and after BTC went up 10-1000x.
This whole thing seems to just be another means for wealth transfer.
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.
I feel bad for people who were too ignorant to realize that cryptocurrency is a massive fraud perpetrated by a few very shrewd insiders the same way that Wall Street bankers manipulate financial markets.
The worst thing that happened to crypto is that the line went up too much before it was ready. I’m sure there are a few legitimate business ideas in there but it’s still 99.9% hyped up garbage that everyone treats as a get rich scheme
It is very unfortunate for people like you understood that crypto was a scam and then assumed that the next thing that all the same people pivoted to was also a scam.
This is so sad. Crypto (including Bitcoin) serves as a money funnel while takes from economically insecure middle class retail investors and pours it into the pockets of the tremendously wealthy.
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