I mean what you're describing is the central core of the grift.
Complex sounding technical mumbo-jumbo delivered with supreme confidence and seeming internal consistency is how you convince the plebs to invest their life savings in various forms of crypto.
0.1% understand the original underlying technology
0.9% understands the applications possible to be built on top of it
99% are following the 1% and writing governmental and financial policy, and voting with their wallets.
I wish I could say we will look back and shake our heads at it like we do today at Tulip Mania, but I suspect we're watching the birth and childhood of a new religion. Crypto isn't going anywhere for the rest of our lives, and just as we have to keep vigilantly fighting against Scientology permeating tax policy, or religion in general always attempting to undermine secular society, Crypto will continue to be a thorn in society for a long time.
99% of the foundation of crypto seems to be grift. Just waiting for the bubble to pop when they run out of suckers. Lets see how much their ugly JPEGs are worth then.
All of that is just smoke and mirrors over the fundamental scam of it. Try to understand this: all of crypto is a scam. They can not be anything else. Not for now.
Like seemingly everything these days, crypto has a grifter problem.
It's becoming a predictable story - something with potential arises, with a community of mostly true believers. The true believers make money, but they're not optimizing for profit, they're optimizing for making the ecosystem better. The grifters, optimizing only for profit, not only start to take the lion's share of the profit, but also attract more grifters. The grifters eventually outnumber the true believers, because:
1. true believers are hard to make; grifters already exist
2. grifting as a skill can be applied anywhere; true believers need relevant skills
3. lower profits and higher burnout leads to attrition among the true believers; some of them even convert to grifters
So the grifters completely dominate the market. They then siphon the market dry, offering essentially nothing in return, and then move onto the next grift, flush with the proceeds from the last one.
Oh thank the lord this idiotic waste of (often fossil) energy will find it's end.
Crypto proof of work is such a flawed (proof of) concept in many ways.
The only money you can ever get out of crypto is other peoples money.
Even when 'created' via mining, that has a real world cost in electricity and what not that you paid for.
No money is ever created, even if 'price' goes up. If the 'price' goes up, and you cash out then that just means you got more of someone else's money than you otherwise would've.
You can never separate crypto from scams and grift, because that's what it is fundamentally. A scam and a grift.
I hope one day they are legally treated as such because of how harmful those things are.
Because the entire crypto ecosystem exists to defraud its users and eventually that fraud catches up to you?
I'm still shocked that I hear non-tech people claiming they should put their extra cash into crypto. I guess there's still suckers out there to extract money from.
I know this comment will likely be downvoted/flagged by someone who still has some money to make from this con, but there hasn't been a coherent justification of the current crypto ecosystem is years. All of the early hopes have been repeatedly demonstrated not to pan out in reality and all that's left is grift.
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