The Republicans and Donald Trump seem set on establishing a strategic crypto reserve. They are claiming this will somehow be an important source of economic security for the country. It’s clear that establishing the reserve will be an important way to give tens of billions of dollars to Donald Trump’s campaign contributors, but it is much harder to see how it will provide any economic security to the country.
He has done the rug pull successfully with his own coins, which are now burned. Now he thinks amassing other coins will enable them to rug pull even more.
I don’t get crypto… is there any coin that’s actually usable as, you know, currency?
From what I can gather, none of them scale so each transaction is slooooow and expensive.
The coins themselves carry no value and is backed by jack-shit. Comparing them to baseball cards seems very apt. Baseball cards, bubbles and FOMO.
The original promise of crypto was as a distributed, peer-to-peer way to transact, without the permission of any third party. Think Paypal or Venmo, but without having to trust Paypal and Venmo with your bank details. And when the price of BTC was a few hundred dollars, people were slowly using it to transact. But then, the price started to climb. And that was the worst possible thing to happen to Crypto, because now people started considering it to be an “investment” and too precious to spend. (BTC developers even deliberately kept their on-chain transactions expensive, to push their off-chain solution for small transactions, but That’s a whole different post).
There are coins that are still good as currency, they’re just not a good “investment” so they don’t get attention. (Some Monero shill will be along shortly to tell us how awesome XMR is.)
I spent a lot of time in the crypto space, not as a “true believer”, but rather as someone who wanted to know how it all worked. And I’ve concluded that crypto really does enable trustless transactions. However, I’ve convinced myself that nobody (outside of the extreme libertarians) actually wants that. Your average Joe doesn’t care that PayPal, Google, or their credit card company is spying on (and perhaps taking a piece of) all their transactions. They want something that is easy to use, and whose value doesn’t fluctuate with Elon Musk’s tweets.
Crypto is more worthless than the fiat currency we all currently use.
The coins themselves carry no value and is backed by jack-shit. Comparing them to baseball cards seems very apt. Baseball cards, bubbles and FOMO.
This is true of every currency. Even precious metals are only precious because we think they are.
Not arguing pro crypto here, more like, anti capitalism, with crypto only being the next generation of a thing that only has a value because some ppl have decided that it does.
Well with other currencies you sort of have a nation state behind it, backing its value. Failing that, that nations armed services :-)
