I'm guessing a lot of people also tried to get in on the dot com bubble, does it mean we write off the internet as a speculative bubble that's not providing any value?
How does it compare against Bitcoin? What intrinsic value (besides "ooh, shiny") does gold actually have?
I agree that BTC and cryptocurrencies generally are utterly wasteful, but what too many look at is the headline figure of energy consumed, and not what energy is being consumed.
Disclaimer: I think BTC is a total waste of time, and I am long BTC because I think it'll buy me a house one day too.
(EDIT: I also have gold too)
I don't know how you can show status with Bitcoin though. Maybe show your server farm or something.
Ex ante, it is difficult to differentiate a Pets.com from an Amazon, or a dot com bubble from a beanie baby boom.
Arguably a small minority were able to differentiate and it paid off very well for them.
True. But from a policy perspective this punts the problem. Ex ante, identifying the president from the deluded is difficult.
I'm guessing you might have meant "prescient" there?
Then again, perhaps not.
But we're well over a decade into cryptocurrencies, and there is no application for them yet except crime.
- You could lose your wallet and have nobody to phone in to get your information back (regular banks often can help you here)
- Conversely, you may think "Gee, I should make backups of my keys!" which isn't a bad strategy, except if any one of your backups is compromised, you lose everything, and each new backup creates an inherent new risk in getting leaked
- You could get some trojan horse with steals your cryptocurrency, and once again, you're SOL
- There's a lot of moving parts that all need to be present to make cryptocurrency even remotely viable to so-called unbanked classes (I presume you mean poor people that have little means in the first place?)... like an active internet connection to talk to said blockchain, possibly even a vendor or other party even willing to deal with cryptocurrency in the first place
- The volatility swings are absolutely ridiculous
And of course let us not forget that those that simply want to transfer to someone, then have that someone quickly convert to their home currency of choice may not necessarily be possible, due to some exchange level ban by their country's exchange controls.
I wish cryptocurrency proponents would just be honest and just say they want to make a quick buck with as little effort as possible, and leveraging the peanut gallery to get here is the best way to do it.
Sounds unethical.