For anyone interested; here's a link to the Freakonomics episodes on crypto... at least the recent ones (episodes 45-47... just click them and you can click
play after that).
https://freakonomics.com/series/hours/
Here's where I'm at. I wouldn't call crypto as a whole a scam, but of course there are scammers who have learned how to scam via crypto, so yeah, everything in the crypto world isn't safe from scams. ...and of course it's very volatile even in it's most non-scammy form. The get rich opportunity for the vast majority of people is mostly gone. I think everyone here other than a few kick themselves for not laying down a couple thousand dollars for a few hundred coins 10, 11 years ago (or even better a few hundred dollars for a few hundred coins a couple years before that....shit, if I used the $3,500 I spent around that timeon gold/silver on bitcoin....ouch), but hey, can't spend too much time crying over opportunities that you missed out on.
So the main pluses seem to be no centralized control... government can't completely make your savings useless like some governments have done (they mention I think Mugabe's hyperinflation, and China being able to zero out people's accounts in their centralized crypto), and people in places like Cuba being able to get remittances from relatives without the government taking a cut and converting what they receive into cuban curreny and of course the fact that the way the shit is structured technologically (blockchain), it's hard for anyone to actually hack in the way that banks can be hacked. Also, the short amount of time for payments to be settled as opposed to banks. I missed plenty, but those are some main advantages....
For people in countries where hyperinflation has and will take hold (as bad as inflation is here, it's no where near that shit), and countries where the government arbitrarilly does shit like saying we don't like what you said on social media, so your bank account is now empty), there are huge reasons to shift
to crypto and its volatility probably isn't much worse that the volatility of their every day national currency.
For people like most of us here in the U.S., those reasons mentioned above are still valid, but a lot less of a worry than people in those countries. Yeah, inflation is a bitch right now, and the purchasing power of the dollar is always dwindling, even when inflation isn't like it is now, there's no urgency
to get away from the dollar. People have been saying that it's gonna die for a long time, and it's just not (gonna die soon). That's not to say that it can't happen one day, and that getting into crypto isn't a smart idea (finally started buying myself), but for people like Joe 9-to-5er like myself, the biggest advantages of crypto don't really make it a must.
In the freakonomics podcasts they compared right now in Crypto to the early internet boom a lot, and I guess that's not a bad analogy, but there are huge differences. Firstly, a whole lot of people getting into crypto are getting into it for speculative reasons. They want to spend X and have it be work
X * 100 one day soon. 99.9% of people who have ever used the internet, including that mid to late 90's boom period, were not using it for speculative reasons... they were clicking on links for porn, articles, videos, etc, so very few people that were using it lost a dime. Some people lost money investing in anything ending in .com, but because using the internet didn't mean spending money on it, the internet bust didn't really hurt 99.9% of it's users.
Also, unlike the internet, at least so far, there hasn't been any killer technology that makes crypto easy for even the dumbest people to safely and painlessly use it to do useful things. The shit is complicated and even a show like freakonomics that is pretty good at breaking complicated stuff down can't do a good job of making complicated shit more simple when it comes to it. In 1996, thanks to hypertext, a low IQ person could click a link and get to cnn.com or whitehouse.gov (or... um...asstomouthorgies.com... err...I guess). Nobody really had to care what happened between clicks to bring the data to the screen. To this day, the vast majority of users don't know how tcp/ip, etc does shit, and it's not necessary.
So, I don't think it's a scam, but it's rife with opportunities for scam artist, so shit... be careful and maybe put money into it that you can afford to lose so you can be prepared as the market matures. Years from now I think it'll be better to have some than not, even for us latecomers
thefinger
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Oh yeah, for the people with knowledge on here... do you consider specifically Dogecoin to be a legit investment or an example maybe not a scam, but bullshit that a barker like Musk was able to legitimize by mentioning it? I mean, it was literally created as a joke, right?
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