this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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No, you can't paint that broad of a stroke. It's true that crypto INVESTING might be no better gambling, but crypto wasn't invented to be an investment tool, it was invented to be a financial transaction tool, and in that regard it has some real utility.
But that's not how most people use it anymore. It's become almost entirely a speculation market. Plus, transaction times for payments on Bitcoin e.g. make it totally infeasible for use in any retail application.
It's just a bunch of people passing Monopoly money around to each other at this point, trying to pretend they're making bank.
No, they made it to be an investment tool from the start. They wanted it to be a new gold standard, where the limited resource increases in value over time. Completely ignoring history on why that is a bad idea. It's was created to be the ultimate, "I got mine, so fuck you!"
Bitcoin at least is inherently deflationary because there's a fixed market cap of 21 million bitcoins. Once all of those are mined, all value from then on is some fraction of a fraction of one of those, thus they decrease in value over time. I should also note, I like Bitcoin as a proof of concept but don't think it's viable as a currency, and PoW isn't viable as a consensus protocol (although it demonstrated that such consensus protocols are possible).
Deflationary means the costs of goods and services fall relative to the currency. So holding onto 1BTC or whatever would make you richer in the future just by holding onto it. Also means debts become increasingly more expensive over time.
Hm, yeah I think you're right. I was wondering why it wasn't sitting right in my head. Deflation encourages hoarding because the value of each unit keeps increasing so if you spend now instead of later you lose some amount of potential value. I don't think it was meant to be a scam though. In this case I'd consider it ignorance of the knock-on effects later exploited rather than an explicit conspiracy from the get-go.
Which it failed at
Negative utility is still utility, right?