>>3957
No. Really. Real currencies are baked by something tangible, like gold, or petroleum, or represent a slice of the issuing nation's economic productivity. Crypto is based on absolutely nothing. There's no "there" there.
Let me lay it out for you. Crypto was created as a thought experiment in decentralized economics, then immediately seized upon by people who thought--incorrectly--that it would allow them to buy fentanyl and CP anonymously and untracebly over the Internet. Crypto is based on massively complex mathematical calculations that can be used for cryptography, you see. That's the "crypto" part of the name. When you set up to "mine," you are doing crypto calculations that, once completed, you can barter and trade with other "crypto" enthusiasts, sometimes for real-world money, which is the only point at which it intersects with anything whatsoever that's real.
Mining gold creates wealth and enriches not only the mine owner but the society in which he lives. Extracting petroleum creates wealth and is good not only for the oil man but his nation. Growing food creates wealth and also increases the supply of a commodity in constant demand, making the farmer's country better. Generating crypto hashes, by contrast, creates abso-fucking-lutely nothing. Crypto miners plug the machine in and press the button and it sucks up electricity, making it more expensive for everyone, and--if they have guessed right and timed it right--makes money condense out of the ether, really out of everyone else's bank account, into their own bank accounts. There is nothing here of value.
The big players in crypto, the only ones who are going to make any significant amount of money, are banksters, hedge fund managers, and trust fund babies who put hundreds of millions into Bitcoin back around 2008. Well, and the people who sell mining hardware. No one else, though.
Since then, at predictable times and places, generally coinciding with tax refund season, or when the Great White Father in Washington is mailing out stimmy checks, a bunch of "Internet financial advice influencers" you never heard of before, and will never see again, appear all over Youtube and TikTok and the rest, with short punchy videos telling the normies, "BITCOIN WILL MAKE YOU A BILLIONAIRE! You've got to BUY NOW or you'll MISS OUT! BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY! Gotta buy crypto! Do it now! NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW" and enough of the normies will do exactly that to give the Bitcoin price a good ol' bump, which will last until the people who hired actors to pretend to be investment advisors can dump some of their Bitcoin at a tidy profit.
And that is all any of this ever was. This is all e-gold was. This is all Monero is. This is all NFTs are. This is all Dogecoin and Chia and Ethereum are. They're ways people who think the world owes them a living make the world a worse place because they think they can plug in the machine and press the button and get rich quick. It is fake. It is gay. It is, to be honest, fam, pretty cringe.