I wouldn't touch the stuff now.
The ability for regular people to invest in crypto back then made the ponzi-like architecture of it worth the risk.
Now the VCs are trying to push their agendas, and it's blatantly obvious it's vapor.
You’re complaining about VCs pushing vapor while simultaneously admitting you participated in pumping “ponzi-like” schemes on regular people?
You do realize those 7 figure returns you made were a direct wealth transfer from later-stage victims of the ponzi to you?
I’m astonished you’re claiming moral superiority over VCs while sitting on wealth you took from thousands of poor people in places like Vietnam, India, Brazil, Nigeria, etc. (whom were all later stage investors in these crypto schemes).
VCs are in there for entirely different reasons, and 'later stage investors' are always at risk of having their hair cut if what they invest in isn't worth what they paid for it, after all, they too were trying to take money from later day suckers.
I never paid a cent for any bitcoin, but I did pay about $100 to my electricity company to mine some just for the heck of it (and ended up giving it all away).
And how exactly did these mined coins become USD ?
The entire value of the Bitcoin you mined came from later stage “investors” in Bitcoin.
is this good? well, ordering mob hits on some darknet site via BTC is obviously bad, whereas ordering magic mushrooms is much better than funding street gangs.
meanwhile burning down the planet just to calculate hashes endlessly? obviously bad.
Did you miss the last 47 threads where people discussed the real world goods and services they purchase with cryptocurrency?
No you don't.
> And if you find a service that lets you buy food with crypto, eventually they will need to pay their suppliers with 'real' money.
No they don't.
The point is that when there's liquidity smoewhere (on an exchange), any security have "de facto" act as a "money", or at least a "saving account", because there's always at all an actual value defined by the market. whether it's stock, crypto etc... It doesn't have in practive to be tied to a central bank / governement. Even historically, currencies have existed well before someone tried to regulate them
Cryptocurrencies do not share this property. They are zero-sum, which is a hallmark of a Ponzi scheme.
Frankly, I have lost all respect for all those VCs who invested in crypto companies.
A lot of people think crypto are plain useless but that is just wrong in practice. They are de facto actual "currency", which is already a lot especially for people in third world countries whose national currencies have gone down relatively to the dollar (venezuela, lebanon, turkey). Any of these people have been better off investing in crypto than in their local banks. It's diversification.
I had to difficult time replying to pembrook because their reply was so venomous that I felt out of breath by just how far off the mark pembrook was to how it was for me in 2017.
Crypto in 2017 really felt like the beginning of something big and amazing, like we were going to change the world's currency, solve reputation, etc.
Me personally, I've been weathered by the constant fraud. I still 'believe' in it, like I did in 2017, but I don't invest in it.
Once I looked at how the prices rose and the at didn’t support the Eth use case, I thought the architecture was stupid or at worst built purposely to have unnecessary scarcity to drive prices up.
What would make a market melt up illegitimate? Traditionally I was taught that pump and dump and painting the tape are illegitimate market behaviors. Otherwise is a mania illegitimate or isn’t it just a natural market phenomenon?
If they are marketed as temporary, volatile, risky currencies, then sure, they are not a scam.
The whole crypto industry reeks of sensationalism and trapping gullible idiots who are fed dreams of "returns".
If you invest in a company you can be investing in a productive asset that will produce more than you put in. You get a cut, but society does as well, and everyone is better off. With crypto, you're getting your money from the person you offload the crypto to. You're richer, they're poorer. They can try to offload it to someone else, but eventually someone will be left holding the bag. Things that can't go on forever, won't.
Even in the highly unlikely best case scenario where these assets stabilize at high prices, you're expanding the monetary base and getting your money by inflicting price inflation on the rest of society (the amount of products isn't increased, but the amount of currency trying to get those products will be).
That would be true if there is no value in what was sold but taking ETH that he bought for $7, in 2019 when he sold it was about $250 and is now about $1500 so people buying ETH then would have done just fine. Ponzi schemes are cons that collapse, not open source assets that go up for years and years.
BUT... that does not mean that the technology is fundamentally BS. It just means that it happens to be extraordinarily susceptible to the kinds of abuses we are seeing.
This year, Ethereum will become Proof-of-Stake based, and "Layer 2" solutions will be emerging which greatly reduce transactions costs, and sharding will be emerging that will GREATLY reduce transaction costs. It's a real technology with a real future. And to transact with Eth you'll need to own Eth, providing non-ponzi motivation to buy, and it will be a deflationary currency (i.e. there will be less of it over time rather than more). IFF the tech is successful, its price may still go up by a LOT. I don't know that it will be successful, but I've been following its development closely and I think this is a very competent team making good decisions.
I'm bullish on Ethereum long-term. Once it's converted to PoS, it will have by far the largest market cap of any PoS chain, and the security of a PoS chain is ultimately based on its market cap (and how decentralized it is, something the Ethereum world is very aware of). So, it should be the most secure PoS chain, as well as having at least as much high-quality technical development going on as any other when you include the Layer 2 teams.
But it will take a few years for many of the practical potentialities to start to be manifested in the real world. It needs Layer 2 and sharding before it will happen. In between now and then, the price of Eth is anyone's guess. I don't think anything, in particular, should be read into any short-term price trends. Instead, the question should be whether the fundamental technology is moving forward toward its goals, and whether another technology emerges in the meantime that has the same potential benefits but somehow does them better.