This Is What You Sound Like: A Corrupt Politician's Guide to FUDing Crypto

These days, whether you're a hypocritical politician or just an oil baron trying to preserve a net worth with three commas, it's hard to lobby against the availability of deflationary decentralized assets to the masses without sounding like an asshole. It just doesn't seem fair that only the poor billions under your boot should be aware of how hypocritical you sound. Fortunately, using science, I've prepared the following translations, a guide, if you will, so that YOU TOO can understand your own dumbshittery:

YOU SAY: "Crypto is primarily used by criminals for money laundering and extortion."

WE HEAR: "Automobiles are primarily used as getaway vehicles in bank robberies."

You see how this works? Sure, we could get into the fact that the illegal uses of crypto represent a smaller fraction than those of fiat, or that fiat money is far more untraceable than crypto, and so forth, but we're just gonna cut to the chase. Let's move on.

YOU SAY: "Crypto has no intrinsic value."

WE HEAR: "The Mona Lisa has no intrinsic value."

Newsflash: "Value" is a property that we assign to things. It's never intrinsic. You think a rectangular piece of paper with the number 100 on it is 100 times more valuable than the same rectangular piece of paper with the number 1 on it, intrinsically? No. That's a value humans assign to it. Just like how crypto has the value assigned to it by the market.

YOU SAY: "Crypto wastes energy."

WE HEAR: "Watching reality TV wastes energy."

Stop the presses! Society uses energy! Go back to living in caves and we wouldn't use so much energy. If your problem is with coal mining, or petroleum, or natural gas, or whatever, than complain about those things. You don't get to be an environmentalist on one application of energy (which often uses renewables anyway) and ignore the actual polluting sectors they're drawing from.

YOU SAY: "Crypto is too volatile."

WE HEAR: "The weather is too volatile"

Crypto went from zero to over a trillion in a decade, so yes, there's volatility along the way, but that doesn't mean you can't draw conclusions from the trendlines. Somehow, even though daily temperatures are unpredictable, farmers manage to make use of the existence of seasons. And by the way, volatility decreases as the market caps grow.

YOU SAY: "The government will outlaw crypto."

WE HEAR: "The government will outlaw alcohol."

Governments can pass whatever laws they want, but it won't make crypto cease to exist. What do you think happens to the value of an asset when it's illegal? You think it becomes less valuable? Take a look at how marijuana prices plummeted in places it became legal, for example. In any event, when a government "bans" crypto, they're just opting out of wealth to their country. It doesn't take long for countries to realize doing so means they're just losing and reverse course.

YOU SAY: "Crypto can't scale, so it'll never be usable globally."

WE HEAR: "The internet can't scale because it's run on 56k dial-up modems."

Throw a rock in the crypto space and you'll hit a scaling-solution project. This isn't a problem that's unsolvable. We're not talking about how to invent cold-fusion here. The Wright Brothers flyer only flew 900 feet, but I doubt anyone concluded, "whelp, guess we've hit the theoretical distance a plane can fly."

YOU SAY: "Crypto is a bubble."

WE HEAR: "The mobile phone is a bubble."

It's been over a decade, crypto has had four major cycles of 1000% appreciation, each followed by drawndowns to higher prices than the previous. That's not what bubbles do. The word you're looking for is "adoption."

YOU SAY: "Crypto is controlled by China."

WE HEAR: "I have literally not read a single thing about Crypto in the last year."

Okay, we're breaking symmetry with this one, but China FUD, at this point, means you're paying zero attention. China banned bitcoin mining and what happened? the miners moved and the hashrate returned, proving that this FUD was always dumb.

YOU SAY: "Crypto is backed by Tether, which in turn is engaged in fractional banking."

WE HEAR: "Equities are backed by USD, which are issued by fractional banking."

This one is an onion of stupid, layers of stupid upon layers of stupid. I'll just make two points about it: First, if I trade a Picasso for a car, and you trade the Picasso for a house, and the next guy trades the Picasso for cash, and the Picasso turns out to be fake, that doesn't mean the car, the house, and the cash are now worthless. They are not "backed" by fake Picasso. Second, we may suspect that Tether is engaged in fractional banking, but we know that the USD is engaged in fractional banking. Your objection is to all markets, not just crypto.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this rant.