I can only speak for myself, but since everyone keeps mentioning this subreddit as if we're happy and that we're gloating over people losing money... it's more that I'm relieved that this might finally be over. It's exhausting watching all of this nonsense go on for so long. You can't even avoid it because the promoters work hard to be in your face wherever you go.
I am glad that the people who came in here to gloat saying "have fun staying poor" at the peak as well as a lot of the people running or promoting the fractal scams are (hopefully) losing money. I'm not happy that ordinary people, who got scammed by the constant advertising and social media spam, are losing money. This is a much larger group of people. Anyone you know who's bad with money probably lost a lot of it in crypto already. A friend, a relative, an acquaintance. Maybe even that nice, elderly neighbor across the street. The press treats crypto as a legitimate place to put your money so why wouldn't they do that? Even smart people with very diversified investment portfolios might put 2% into crypto because it's another "asset". Even if they don't do that directly, they own an increasing amount (until things started crashing very recently) of MicroStrategy, Coinbase, etc., through ETFs or mutual funds. Some ETFs, like ARK, really concentrated your crypto exposure. That didn't work out too well for anyone who bought that ETF.
FTX is everywhere, Binance is everywhere, crypto dot com is everywhere, and Coinbase... well, they barely tried (did you see their Super Bowl ad?). And those are just the crypto exchanges. If you have an app or website that has money, it probably added crypto support. You can YOLO your retirement into crypto with GBTC — and Fidelity wants you to be able to directly YOLO it into BTC. All of these and more are trending or promoted on the two mobile app stores.
The head of the SEC is a crypto bro who taught blockchain classes at MIT. You know, blockchains, the thing that everyone has tried to make work as a data structure, but no application outside of cryptocurrencies has been found. I'm shocked that the SEC hasn't approved a crypto ETF yet, but BITO is probably close enough. It tracks Bitcoin futures. Real, regulated futures, not the sham Binance ones that are actually just a casino. Other countries already have crypto ETFs. This shit has integrated itself into finance, technology, politics, and culture by now.
That Matt Damon video ad had huge reach on television and online and apparently even in the movie theaters. This got a lot of people to buy high. Right around the peak. South Park, a show with a libertarian bias, made fun of it multiple times. Remember when libertarians were the ones promoting Bitcoin?
Crypto is in every sporting event. They're buying naming rights for stadiums. They're constantly in your face. FTX even paid for a patch on baseball umpires. Crypto's a major part of financial news, on television and online, both sponsored and just because it drives clicks/views. And of course they're advertising there, too. Heck, they're literally advertising right here, on Reddit, probably next to this post. Twitter is way worse than Reddit because the Twitter crypto bros are really into the NFT trend, but the Redditors mostly didn't join them.
Hyped funds like ARK ETFs or VC funds have been shuffling money into increasingly ridiculous (NFTs being the peak) crypto bets that will not pay off and that have already lost investors massive amounts of money. That's probably why the number's going down. Smart money has been moving out of this sort of speculation because of the rising interest rates. Sure, you can have stablecoins fabricate over 150,000,000,000 "dollars" out of thin air, but you need some real money coming in, too, and ordinary people just don't have enough cash to sustain an "investment" with Ponzi-like characteristics.
Crypto has never been more widespread, and all it's doing is providing exit liquidity to scum who got in years ago as everyone new is already deep in the red. Even people who joined this trend in 2020 probably averaged up, hoping for $100,000 Bitcoin. And they probably got involved in numerous rugpulls. Maybe they even bought a few NFTs with a high "value" that they can't sell because the market's illiquid and most of the demand was faked.
Twitter fully embraced NFTs. Reddit half-embraced NFTs. Plenty of apps or websites or game publishers wanted to go full crypto, but backpedaled after user backlash. There are so many apps I used to trust until they embraced crypto. Remember when Signal pumped and dumped a shitcoin called MobileCoin? No? You don't? Exactly. Because there has been so much crypto or NFT shit over the past two years that you can't possibly keep track of it all. But that's yet another messaging app you can't trust anymore. Discord tried to get involved, but the backlash was too strong. Not like it matters. Every single rugpull that wants to take grandma's inheritance from you is organized on Discord.
The sometimes richest man in the world is buying Twitter after using it to pump and dump Dogecoin last year. Plenty of shitcoins still pump and dump based on Elon's tweets. Binance is helping Elon Musk acquire Twitter. Binance is going to use your money to do it. It's not like they're going to pay for it in Tether. Binance shows that crime does pay because the only reason that they can invest all over the real world is because they can run an exchange using those counterfeit dollars called Tether and get away with it. Binance regularly disables withdrawals for specific cryptocurrencies, too, so it's not like they're solvent. Even if you think Bitcoin has value, Binance and similar exchanges probably couldn't satisfy everyone's Bitcoin withdrawals. At least in the Mt. Gox days, people cared about that sort of thing, but Binance has been doing this for over a year without anyone caring.
Speaking of losing your money, "smart contracts" are still a bad idea. They were a bad idea back when the DAO lost everyone's money (Ethereum rolled that one back) and they still are now, after another thousand times of the exact same thing happening over and over again (with no reversals) because nobody can write bug-free code. Immutable code simply does not work. Any serious programmer knows this. Look at games. Back when they couldn't get patches, they were full of glitches. These days, games are (sometimes) stable because they can get patched after release. All a smart contract can do is migrate. But people keep putting money into smart contracts so people keep trying to make it work. You can programmatically do finance without smart contracts. What do you think high frequency traders do? Or what do you think your online bank does?
Celebrities like Paris Hilton are pushing not just crypto, but also NFTs. The most ridiculous ones. Bored Ape Yacht Club was on the Tonight Show. People were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a blockchain receipt that pointed to a URL that referred to a JPEG. An ugly, auto-generated JPEG. Just about any image on the front page of Reddit looks better, and that includes the ones that are just screenshots of tweets. You can't make this shit up. If history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, then as a farce, then NFTs are the farce that makes the dot-com bubble companies all look like they had solid potential. A few of them did. Google and Amazon run the world today. Bitcoin and Ethereum never will.
The Tether scam and Tether-priced futures on Binance are the main thing driving the price. There are lots of smaller scams also driving the price. Any exchange that accepts Tether is probably insolvent to some degree and they're all in this interconnected web of shit that will make Mt. Gox look like nothing. We've known about this since the start of 2021, if not earlier. This was known before the all time highs. Nobody except the New York Attorney General and China and a handful of others have done anything about it. The scammers just avoid the jurisdictions that care and do business literally everywhere else in the world. We're wasting Argentina-scale levels of electricty on producing literally nothing during a climate crisis while simultaneously making GPUs overpriced and unavailable for more than two years. Fortunately, the altcoin that made hard drives expensive crashed quickly.
So I'm relieved that this might be ending. But I followed this in early 2020 when it looked like it was over when the stock market crashed and Bitcoin crashed harder. I followed this in May 2021 when it looked like it was over because Tether was finally exposed. Things looked poised to crash harder until Coinbase added Tether and El Salvador bought Bitcoin. I followed this in January 2022 when it looked like it was over because the "inflation hedge" narrative fell apart. I'm still half-expecting exactly 10,000,000,000 totally-legitimate, totally-backed Tether from "institutions" to pump Bitcoin up to $90,000 right when sentiment is at the peak bearishness, even if stocks keep going down on rising interest rates and the impending recession. Everyone will FOMO in and keep the scam running for another year or two, giving real cash to scammers who will gladly sell you nothing to keep their negative sum game running.
But if this ends? Yes, a lot of people will lose money. But they lost their money when they put it into the crypto ecosystem in the first place (because only a few can cash out) so at least they won't be able to keep losing money by putting even more money in. It's a negative sum game and a lot of money has to constantly leave to pay the miners' and exchanges' bills as well as the massive, massive amount of advertising and bribery. Yes, bribery. El Salvador didn't adopt Bitcoin as a currency 4 years after the narrative moved away from digital currency because of the fundamentals. El Salvador did it because it has a corrupt government that got bribed to pump the price right when Bitcoin was right about where it is now and bearish sentiment was higher. And all of the crypto insiders are probably desperately trying to pull off something similar right now.
I could have made every sentence a hyperlink if I wanted to. All of this and more has been discussed at length here and elsewhere (and almost all of these sentences refer to posts in here over the past few years), but nobody cares when the number is going up. They only care to criticize when the number is going down, with the exception of NFTs. Those were so ridiculous that nobody in the general public took them seriously, no matter how much they advertised. Maybe NFTs were a bridge too far because, unlike with cryptocurrencies, you don't have to learn that much to know that NFTs are a scam.
This should've ended last year. This should have ended years ago. It really seems like it will never end since people just keep coming back to lose even more money, just like a casino. Even if it ends now, the scammers have already won because they've had more than two years to slowly sell high without crashing the price while you have all been buying. And the worst part is that most of the scammed will just hate this post and this subreddit instead of accepting that they got scammed.
No comments:
Post a Comment