This is all about narratives. You describe this market as wealthy early adopters taking money for poor later adopters. You also describe saavy marketing from big players to pump exit liquidity. Let's break this down. Early adopters and investors make more money than late. Isn't that true for any market? If you invested in Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. early, you likely made significantly more than someone who invested later on. Marketing? You're telling me nobody markets gold? Nobody markets Apple? Nobody markets Microsoft? Nobody markets Tesla? Looking at objectively, Bitcoin is following the same path as many other emerging technologies that came before it. The only difference is the narrative people use to describe it. There are a lot of solid criticisms that can be hurled at Bitcoin. Those criticisms require a technical knowledge of Bitcoin and getting past these lazy, regurgitated talking points.
Other innovations and technology provided an inherent advance and solved specific problems. What problems does blockchain solve? Everything I read and heard of does not sound like it really addresses any specific need. Why do you think we still settle many assets at T+1 or T+2? Because we did not see the need for DECADES to speed up settlements of assets or transfer of money. What's the need now?
There are long term fatal structural issues with cryptocurrencies in a world made up of centralized governments. No matter how we may frame our arguments or try to characterize the opposite side’s opinions, these structural issues will remain. This is without going into the multiple competitive disadvantages cryptocurrencies have against other, more widely accepted forms of payment that have lower cost, purchase related benefits, and provide protection in case of a compromised account. By the way, while my post was overall negative on Cryptocurrencies, especially their long term outlook, I will make money on a Bitcoin price increase. It is important to know when a trade idea has weak foundations so one avoids becoming over committed to it. Perhaps later, I will repost some of johnarb’s articles showing the state of the art marketing effort in support of cryptocurrencies. Such marketing to the public does not come free. Guess who might be paying for that marketing?
A lot of the arguments against cryptocurrency I see from people that know very little about it usually involve talking about crypto attempting to be money or a store of value. Those are old 2016-2017 arguments. The vast majority of tokens today are not at all trying to be money or a SoV or a MoE. There are also differences between L1 blockchain tokens and protocol tokens. The only L1 token I hold is Ether. Outside of that all of the tokens I hold are protocol tokens. These tokens act similar to shares of a company. Some of them give me voting rights. Some of them give me profit sharing from the revenue generated by the protocol. A lot of nocoiners are stuck in a time period from 4 years ago and really have no idea how the space has moved forward since then. They get their information from other people who themselves have no idea what's going on in this space. What's the saying about the blind leading the blind? There are a lot of very solid arguments against a vast number of tokens. Those arguments come from a place of knowledge and understanding of this space. None of the talking points I've seen here come from knowledge or experience. If someone wants to bash on crypto today they really need to take the time to update their knowledge and update their talking points. To people that are investing and building in this space, these old, rehashed talking points are laughable and have little or nothing to do with the majority of what's being developed today.
the one major difference that all of the example above gained value via fiat. BTC was pumped by Tethers. Only 25% is traded in fiat the rest in fake money. Disappearance of any of the above would have been detrimental once they got big. If BTC disappears tomorrow most of the world would not care.
Have you ever held Tether? Do you know how you get Tether? That's right, you swap it 1:1 with fiat. I almost exclusively use USDC for my stablecoin of choice. Nobody gives me USDC for free. I don't mine it. I transfer my fiat and swap into it. Whatever you're posting here doesn't mean anything.
yes if you want tethers you need to swap. But BitFinex just creates them out of thin air. Did you see the auditor they finally hired??? Tiny 3 people firm in Maldives. You just can not make this shit up. the spike over last 1.5 years in BTC corresponded with insane amount of Tethers printed. Charts looks almost identical. This is what making this bubble unlike any other. I was too stubborn and stupid not to acknowledge what Tethers be able to accomplish.
I too am eagerly waiting for this. After all the bitcoin bulls cheered that the legal case turned out well, the date of the first audit seemed like a good time to revisit this issue. But if the auditing firm in a joke, well, it won't solve anything. Will the courts really accept a joke firm?
Wait, you mean if the MC of Bitcoin goes up the MC of stablecoins trading said Bitcoin will go up as well? Shocker. Difficult to believe people missed out on generational wealth because of Tether conspiracy theories.