That’s for you to decide. Its properties aren’t hidden. You get the rules handed to you upfront and the rules are always adhered to - BTC inflation will always be what the whitepaper describes.
Think of it like poker. People lose money playing poker too. Is poker a scam? Nope. You might call it unethical or gambling, but unless a player is cheating, its not a scam. And any participant willingly agreed to the rules before playing.
Same with BTC. If you bought BTC, you willingly agreed to the rules. If you didn’t “win”, that’s on you, not the “game” itself.
I don't understand what's the scam in this. You buy BTC because you either seek to profit from it, or you believe in the core philosophy behind it. Both of these are your own decisions.
A scam would be you buying a phone from Amazon and getting a brick. BTC is exactly what it describes, nothing more, nothing less.
If you got greedy enough to dump your BTC onto a centralized service for 3% yield, that's on you. As is the decision to buy BTC.
Much of this seems to be a complete miscalculation of the “new normal” of the pandemic. There was a narrative that somehow all the wild growth we had seen in the pandemic years when everyone was forcibly locked at home would sustain forever.
Of course that wasn’t going to happen and should have been obvious to anyone. The pandemic is over and the “new normal” has just gone back to the “old normal” with marginal changes in work/play patterns.
This was always going to happen, with or without current rate hikes. The rate hikes just accelerated everything by 2 years.
> state’s fiat powers come from its credibility, transparency and the power of taxation
Nope. State's fiat powers come from its monopoly on violence.
Completely opaque and corrupt states have fiat currencies too. Many thriving ones. The only reason people use these fiat currencies is because not doing so invites violence from the state - imprisonment and fines at best, actual physical violence at worst.
Crypto down so bad that the Winklevoss twins are now fronting an (awful) rock band. They don't even state their Gemini affiliations in their Twitter bios anymore.
man, I used to hear about XBox Series X/PS5 way back before 2020 and I've never found either to be easily available in stock. As a casual gamer, I can't be bothered to juggle through multiple websites and pay a premium.
my productivity craters in the summers because I'm forced to be indoors all day in air conditioning. No random walks around just to clear my head and break the monotony.
I work everyday too. But not having debt and enough cash cushion to do nothing for years gives you a sense of freedom and confidence that can help you make life changing decisions.
If you observed the absolute insanity that has been happening in asset prices, venture funding, equities, and crypto, there is absolutely no way you'd think that money printing doesn't lead to inflation (at best) and the complete Mickey-Mousification of the economy (at worst).
Money has started feeling like a joke. It's thrown around for anything and everything.
An ERC-20 memecoin called Shiba Inu hit a market cap of $41B. A dying video game retailer hit a market cap of nearly $30B. A taxi aggregator swallowed $33B in funding and never turned a dime in operational profit in 12 years of its existence. A house bought in 2019 doubled in price in under 2 years.
There is no real retail demand for crypto. Happens every bullrun. Retail comes in, gets a heady rush as their $5,000 becomes $20,000 (on paper) practically overnight. So they fomo in more and keep holding through the top before cashing out for less than their initial. 90% swear off crypto and never come back.
You can't have retail demand for something that's only meant to go up and do nothing else. There are no "normal" users buying NFTs because they love the art, or buying ETH because they want to use it to get overcollateralized loans on AAVE (when they can get undercollateralized loans for cheaper).
I can't understand how VCs wouldn't get something every crypto degen instinctively knows after a single bullrun.
Coinbase is being very poorly led. They haven't innovated at all and they're confused as to who their target customers are. The brief mainstream retail rush has thrown them off.
The target customers for crypto are other investors, degens, and gamblers. Most of the money in crypto is house money, i.e. money that was made from existing crypto investments. Just see the transaction volume on OpenSea (decentralized ETH house money) vs CoinBase's NFT marketplace. Retail neither cares nor has the money for shitty jpegs.
FTX understands the target market. Which is why it has focused so aggressively on futures. You can short/long practically everything on FTX with leverage. That's the investor/degen/gambler class - the bulk of money in crypto.
Binance doesn't do anything extremely well, but whatever it does, it simply works. Withdrawals work, support is clumsy but works, perps work, spot trading works, even their awful chain, as full of scams as it might be, works.
I’m personally very bearish on any consumer focused company that couldn’t turn a profit in 2020-21. You couldn’t have asked for better conditions to make money than these two years.
If your food delivery startup, for instance, couldn’t turn a profit when your entire customer base was sitting at home, your delivery partners had limited work alternatives, and your restaurant partners had limited bargaining power, how can it turn a profit now when your customers are back in the office, better jobs abound, and restaurants have dine-in customers to look forward to?
Think of it like poker. People lose money playing poker too. Is poker a scam? Nope. You might call it unethical or gambling, but unless a player is cheating, its not a scam. And any participant willingly agreed to the rules before playing.
Same with BTC. If you bought BTC, you willingly agreed to the rules. If you didn’t “win”, that’s on you, not the “game” itself.