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Is Crypto Dead?

Crypto is the hollygraal for all black market operations: mafias, gangsters, services similar to CIA...
Thus it will continue to exist.
After that, normal people have always be tempted by Ponzi schemes.
As long as humanity will go on, Crypto will go up and down.
Does humanity needs crypto??
For sure not.
 
Luna was backed by other crypto assets and is why it depegged. The assets backing it dramatically dropped in value.

USDC is backed by U.S. dollar-denominated assets held at regulated and audited U.S. financial institutions.

USDT is similar, but there is some question as to whether the company has 100% backing. All I can do for you is copy what I was able to find with a quick search. "As of May 12, 2022, it was reporting assets of $81.3 billion for USDT. As of the same date, Tether reported holding 83.74% of its reserves in cash, cash equivalents, short-term deposits and commercial paper, 4.61% in corporate bonds, 5.27% in secured loans to unaffiliated entities, and 6.38% in other investments including digital tokens."
Thanks. I understood that both, and certainly Tether, are currently quite heavily invested in Ethereum... but it looks like that is fake news.

And never mind crypto, real national currencies are very volatile over time and not solidly backed any more.
 
And never mind crypto, real national currencies are very volatile over time and not solidly backed any more.
USA Federal Reserve wants modest amounts of inflation, because by slowly devaluing currency, it encourages people to do productive things with it, rather than hodling.

But right now, inflation is too high, and if need be, they'll inflict pain (like starting a recession) in order to rein it in.

There's no point in returning to the gold standard, and in fact, gold is a great example of a non-productive asset. It's decorative, and has limited industrial applications, but otherwise, it just sits there.
 
USA Federal Reserve wants modest amounts of inflation, because by slowly devaluing currency, it encourages people to do productive things with it, rather than hodling.

But right now, inflation is too high, and if need be, they'll inflict pain (like starting a recession) in order to rein it in.

There's no point in returning to the gold standard, and in fact, gold is a great example of a non-productive asset. It's decorative, and has limited industrial applications, but otherwise, it just sits there.
I don't expect a return to the gold standard or anything similar. In fact i think Britain's return to the gold standard in 1925 exacerbated the international contagion after the US stock market crash in 1929. Sterling couldn't take the load as an alternative reserve currency. But that's not the common view, of course.

There's no way out of the world of floating currency values and the question of what is backing a currency in practice. It's just worth pointing out that cash, or anything else, is not a guaranteed asset in this day and age. Crypto is not as exceptional as we might think, though the value of most coins, at least, is much more tenuous than many other things. Even the Mona Lisa may suddenly become publicly regarded as a piece of tat, no longer worth seeing, one day!

I'm also going to point out that this is an international forum and your answer is somewhat US centric, and we do need to take into account the international ramifications of the sharp rise in US interest and the resulting demand for the US dollar, as well. Given the cause of the current round of inflation, that's not a simple question.

There is always, when the value of investments is under threat, a tendency to buy US assets and currency and to move out of other currencies, and we can see that happening at the moment.
As cryptocurrencies are the riskiest of all, we could expect a rush out of them at this time as well. It doesn't mean they are dead, any more than say the Australian dollar is "dead" because it's value against the US dollar has fallen by 15% or so in the last few months. The difference in the fall in price of non-US currencies and other investiments represents the perceived difference in the degree of risk of owning those things... and cryptocurrencies are being seen as much riskier than most national ones, that's all.
 
I read this site every week.

Here's the header, link below:

Illustration: A sad-looking Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT monkey looks at a world engulfed in flames.

Web3 is Going Just Great​

...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.

 
Sure, they sense an opportunity in providing services, but that's not the same thing as believing in the value of today's crypto.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/22/jamie-dimon-calls-bitcoin-a-decentralized-ponzi-scheme/
 
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Dimon has always said that. He also sees it as an opportunity, nonetheless. It's also funny because it's no different than stocks, which he does believe in.
 
Dimon has always said that. He also sees it as an opportunity, nonetheless. It's also funny because it's no different than stocks, which he does believe in.
I guess that can be sort of true if meme stocks are your thing, but *sigh*.
 
I guess that can be sort of true if meme stocks are your thing, but *sigh*.
Meme stocks are just stocks that a group of people created a community around and bought up thinking they would all get rich. But fundamentally what makes the price go up or down is the same as any other stock (or crypto asset).
 
If I understand correctly, a bitcoin's history can be followed on the blockchain. If so, are there "collectible" bitcoins based on when they were mined? Is a piece of the first ever mined bitcoin of some special value? What about one that was mined when the hash value was particularly high, making it extremely difficult to mine. Why wouldn't that one be worth more than one that was mined when the hash value was lower? Why are they treated as all the same when each bitcoin is actually specifically a different thing that can be differentiated, thanks to the blockchain? Regular currency has collectable status due to rarity that includes an item of special interest. Technically speaking, every coin is as rare as any other if you get forensic about it. The blockchain is highly forensic, but as with physical currency, some differences stand out as more interesting than others.
 
That line of thinking is veering into NFT territory, which thankfully is something that the internet seems to have wisened up to.

Just stay out of crypto unless it speaks to your ideologies. There is nothing to be gained from it.
 
What about one that was mined when the hash value was particularly high, making it extremely difficult to mine. Why wouldn't that one be worth more than one that was mined when the hash value was lower? Why are they treated as all the same when each bitcoin is actually specifically a different thing that can be differentiated, thanks to the blockchain?
When copper, helium, gold get harder to come by, do only the prices of the new materials go up?

If I understand correctly, a bitcoin's history can be followed on the blockchain. If so, are there "collectible" bitcoins based on when they were mined? Is a piece of the first ever mined bitcoin of some special value?
This could be a thing but is unrelated to scarcity or difficulty. No different than people collecting coins or stamps. Even though they all have the same value, they could have a different perceived value to certain people.
 
When copper, helium, gold get harder to come by, do only the prices of the new materials go up?
They don't as far as I know, because they are valued for their functional use cases, although a special chunk of copper or gold might fetch something extra from somebody due to historical significance, or whatever. What I guess is confusing me is this "proof of work" idea. There's no value in that. It's just there to ensure rarity. But we could ensure rarity with a ledger that was populated completely from the beginning and didn't allow for anything more to be added. There'd be no way to make more. You may say, why should anyone offer money for those rare bitcoins? I don't know, same as I don't know why wasting energy mining them would give them any value. They're rare, and like gold, diamonds or whatever, if it's rare and you've got the real deal, I don't care how hard you had to work for it or not. If it's the real deal and it's hard to come by, why does it matter how hard it was to produce? So why the mining? I get the impression the mining is the mind trick for this scam. Maybe all money is a scam, but I don't think so when there's real power in control of vital resources that's issuing it.

Update: I understand now that the mining is tied to transaction processing as well. Somebody has to pay for that, of course! Still, there are transaction fees on top of that.
 
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I will do that this evening.

The part I find interesting is how AI will be able to use Bitcoin to track what people do, and how meta data of other things is being used so invasively. At one point he says if some safeguards aren't implemented the developed world's citizen may be as close as 5 years from being almost completely controlled by governments.
 
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