this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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You said it yourself. Crypto has nothing to stabilise its value. It is entirely speculative. There is three options to make money with crypto. Sell it to someone that believes in it more than you do. Sell it to someone that believes he can make more of a quick buck than you, or have the gamble work, that it ends up becoming a legit payment system and have the value explode and stabilise there.
In the first two cases you just try to fuck over another gambler. In the third case you yourself gamble.
It is always possible that the hype collapses or crypto gets banned globally. Whoever is left holding it then got scammed by the others.
While in the beginning many investors believed it to become a viable payment system eventually, now most are just looking to not be the last in line to get scammed.
That doesn't make it a scam, it's just speculative.
There's also the belief that it's safer than individual currencies, or that it's less vulnerable to inflation of the money supply. Those are legitimate reasons to buy.
Still with any individual currency there is a market where mandated by law you can pay in this currency, or where you can pay taxes in that currency. So zheir value has a real and a speculative part. Crypto only has a speculative part and that part is often and strongly influenced by deliberate manipulation.
And if yet another crypto currencies is pushed it is highly questionable if there is a serious intent to deliver on the promises made to its laternuse or how much is just scamming people into an ICO and then running with that money.
I'm not sure I'm buyin into the ban concern.
It's a concern, for sure, just really hard to see it implemented.
Look at piracy, torrenting, usenet, etc. So long as people can make encrypted connections, crypto will continue.
I think that governments can, at best, disrupt things. But given governments are a smaller body count than users, my money is on those dedicated users staying one step ahead of the hammer.
Do you mean cryptography in general or cryptocurrencies in particular? Because cryptocurrencies ultimately do need an interface with other currencies, or some economy, where you can pay with them. If you cannot buy any real product or service with it, it has no value. Lets take Darknet market drug dealers for instance. They are not selling drugs because they like bitcoins and buy other drugs for themselves with it. They are selling drugs and exchanging the bitcoin into some fiat currency, so they can buy normal stuff with it.