How many of our generation's best and brightest minds are doing crypto and day trading?
Imagine if these minds were focused on societal problems -- energy, health, food.
I know multiple Harvard CS graduates who went right into the crypto space.
What a waste.
Besides shitting on other peoples choices, why don't you try to reach out to the graduates and ask them why they work in the cryptocurrency space?
Most of the people I know, including myself, have "improving the world" as the reason for working on cryptocurrencies. Even though you might not agree with that, you have to understand people see things differently in the world, and what you see as "the most important issues" is not often the same as what other people see as important.
What's even more important is to not shit on what others chose to spend their time on. Instead, be quiet and work on your stuff that is sooooo important and will solve everything with humanity.
Consensus through profit, financial incentive, is lazy - and arguably greedy - vs. doing the actual work of building real trust, and aligning people through real trust and relationship, community building; there is an argument that Bitcoin is required as a bridge, an impetus, to force democratically elected governments to do better - however they now have to fight the regulatory capture that Bitcoin will cause for its own benefit to further society-wide, global adoption to help realize the earlier adopters' unnecessary and unreasonable profits.
Bitcoins accessibility to people without banks is an extremely valuable asset to the world. This is at least 30% of the world population.
Perhaps you [and everyone else] should also be required to divulge if you/they have financial interest in Bitcoin whenever communicating about it.
I guess not, as I don't see Bitcoin as any MLM scheme. You seem confused regarding how the price is set for Bitcoin. It doesn't automatically increase the more people are using Bitcoin. It's entirely set by the open market of what people want to buy/sell Bitcoin for, nothing else.
For it to be a MLM, current holders of Bitcoin would have to receive Bitcoin for each new person who gets/uses Bitcoin, which is clearly not the case.
Most if not all of the early holders/investors/users of Bitcoin did so because it was fun. None of us expected the price to even go above $1. Sure, it's cool that it did, but the goal was always being able to transfer funds without limitations, not to speculate on the "final" value of Bitcoin.
And yes, people who hold stocks/funds/cryptocurrencies usually talk positively about them. Not only because they probably put money in them in the first place because they believe in them, but also because it's beneficial for them if the price goes up.
This is hardly anything to do with MLM, which if you did some brief reading on MLMs and Bitcoin, you'd soon realize.
And you're going to be able to argue that it's not being manipulated by people who already own Bitcoin, who want to make it seem like there's an upward trend, which of course enriches weighted towards the earliest adopters? In fact there's multiple occurrences of evidence by researchers seeing this kind of manipulative behaviour done by just a few actors.
"For it to be a MLM, current holders of Bitcoin would have to receive Bitcoin for each new person who gets/uses Bitcoin, which is clearly not the case."
What? No, the Bitcoin they already own increases in value - that's quite the gymnastics in your logic, there's no need for an increase in actual ownership unit wise.
"Most if not all of the early holders/investors/users of Bitcoin did so because it was fun."
Hilarious, fun as in gambling fun perhaps - otherwise there's countless people talking about how much money you can make by buying into Bitcoin, along with people talking about how they're doing it for profit - and don't care if it's an MLM or gambling. You've really convinced yourself of these narratives though?
Please don't misappropriate/equate actual stocks of companies to being equivalent to crypto-assets/crypto-"currencies."
It's simply disingenuous to claim it doesn't overlay perfectly with MLM schemes. You've not proven anything. We could actually create charts to overlay the benefit/behaviours of MLM schemes with Bitcoin and it would match perfectly.
There's another way to create consensus among society, and it doesn't require tapping into greed to align the greedy or gullible - and the VC-finance industrial complex - into alignment. It's through democratically elected governments created blockchain databases so governments are forced to be transparent, among the other benefits, and then mandating through law that they are used - with proper safety measures to counter potential pitfalls - and without redistributing wealth from the latest adopters to the earliest adopters. It will be a challenge to counter the "army of HODLers" and attempt at regulatory capture that will continue to reach as far into society as it can.
I'm far from alone in this understanding I have, and I'm not financially incentivized to write all of this out either; most people who see the same as me simply aren't spending the effort to counter the "army of HODLers" who inevitably use similar gymnastics or simply the lazy downvote mechanism to suppress counter-narratives.
No
I hope you didn't take my "be quiet" as a "shut up and don't criticize" but more of a "put your money where you mouth is". We need people who are skeptical as much as we need people who are optimistic. But instead of complaining and asking "how can people do this?!" you're almost certainly better off trying to enact the change your want to see in the world, than posting about it on random forums.
if you live in an affected country you may ponder about this while you see your money evaporate in front of your eyes.
or you can buy BTC to get your money in an exchange and distribute it into stable coins.
yes, one may implode, right now our national currency has imploded, whatever their governances are doing it's better.
I think the building of those alternatives is actually rather important, given how poorly these well established institutions seem to be at solving problems, including the ones you list.