Crypto Fooled Us Once. It Will Fool Us Again

Literally the entire basis of free market ideology is the notion that buyers and sellers operate on an equal footing and a presumption of good faith can be assumed, or at least, that's how it's been sold historically. So, so much of crypto is just outright lies. The notion that every member of a project, for instance, can all walk away rich is at face value a lie: because crypto cannot create wealth, merely move it, the people who cash out big on top can only do that because so many others have bought in on the bottom. It's just a techy retooling of a bigger fool's scam: you can only make money on the asset you've bought by finding a buyer to buy it at a higher price later. The only way you can conceptualize these things as a store of value is to presume an infinite chain of bigger fools ready to buy it at an ever increasing price, ad infinitum. Or, if you prefer to operate in reality, there will eventually be a bag holder, someone who holds something that is now worthless and cannot sell it.

Like, for example, all the people who hold Ethereum Classic, which is probably why it's worth a tenth what Ethereum is: because the principles of this technology don't fucking matter, what matters is the traction the coin has with the investor class, and the people who are in this to make money (which is the vast, vast majority of them) are going to follow the chains that the big stakeholders go to.

> Again, a scam implies someone being "misled". If you buy some ecstasy and its laced with fentanyl, you were scammed (to say the least). If you buy ecstasy and you get ecstasy, you were not scammed as you got exactly what you asked for.

And this again is exactly the attitude I absolutely loathe in the tech space. This notion that if you aren't smart enough or knowledgeable enough to see the bad shit coming, if you, by your very basic human nature can be taken advantage of by someone who knows more, than you apparently deserve to be. Buyer beware.

That attitude sucks ass. If the crypto guys were really about changing the world for the better, they would be building a financial system that is, yes, detached from the current, highly biased and corrupting one that is rife with problems, and on-boarding people with education. With understanding of the underlying tech, imparting knowledge about the failings and foibles of the systems they're replacing, and showing a new, better version, decoupled from the corrupting influences of governments they claim render fiat unusable. That's NOT what they've done here. They have not built a replacement financial system, they built a near exact copy of the current one, minus all manner of consumer protections, any insurance of value, with a singular goal: to recreate the structural inequities of the old system, with them on top. That's fucking it. That is the entire difference between fiat and crypto.

The overall point I'm trying to make is it's hard to compare Bitcoin to our current banking system if you don't really even understand how Bitcoin works

My point was that for regular payments that regular people do Bitcoin is simply too expensive for. The average transaction amount is indeed very useful to backup that statement.

Not to say that it's dumb or silly to align yourself with the current regime, even though we all know that it will, sooner or later, be replaced by something else. Maybe that's next year, or maybe it won't happen in my children's lifetimes.

But for me, I already have 95% of my life and wealth tightly coupled to the stability and durability of the current regime, and it doesn't seem completely mad to diversify a bit into something that might possibly have a chance of surviving a regime change, or could retain some value in the event the current regime decides to appropriate or restrict or sanction how I can spend or transfer wealth currently locked in their system.

Perhaps twenty years ago it was unimaginable that the current regime could end, or transmute into an totalitarian hellscape, or even just continue with the appearance of liberal democracy but be undermined by authoritarians.

If it's become easier to imagine scenarios like these in recent years, is it insane to want a 5% allocation to independent, uncorrelated, uncensorable assets to correspond to a 5% probability of previously unthinkable scenarios?

You’ve just made speculation small scale and complicated.

And my bread costs 8% more dollars than it did a little while ago. My dollar didn’t lose 92% of its value. They’re entirely different issues. My fifty USD will still buy enough bread for the week. My fifty BTC might if I happen to want bread at the right time.