Friday
Crypto’s virtue is that they have a degree of anonymity and can be used to shift funds to less unfriendly jurisdictions. A lot of ‘money’ was got out of China and into Australian real estate using cryptos.
Apparently anonymity is no longer certain, though I don’t know that personally.
My quibble with the Bitcoin aficionados is the claim that Bitcoin’s limited use as a medium of exchange somehow magically transforms it into money.
It does not.
Just about anything can act as a medium of exchange; money has a far more exclusive property.
The world’s monetary problem is the debt, the towering debt that wobbles over Western Civilization and threatens to crush it. How do Cryptos help remove that debt? They don’t and they can’t because Cryptos are not, and can never be, money.
Cryptos are just one more way of exchanging with something that is intrinsically worthless; one more way that a lot of people are going to lose a lot of wealth; one more means of wealth destruction via irrational speculation; one more sign of the madness that is building to a crescendo.
Cryptos are an electronic version of fiat currencies, but with severe limitations. The rise in dollar value of the Cryptos relies solely on the bigger fool theory. In a world of Peak Stupid it should have been obvious that Cryptos would be a wonderful speculation. Does this current plunge in the dollar price of Bitcoin indicate that we have reached the Apex of the biggest fool? I doubt it.
I read that the current value of Bitcoin is about US$33,000. The current price of one ounce of Gold is about US$1880. Would you hand over 17.5oz Gold for one Bitcoin?
One is a speculation for the desperately, terminally naive. The other is a wealth preserving life-jacket for the storm that is already gusting over Western Civilization.