I may be a few days early, but I think it's the beginning of the end for crypto. It's going to burn a lot of people. Trust will never be restored.
Now it's just democratized. But at least Web2 led to tech that served a lot of people, until it got commoditized. Crypto doesn't really have great applications yet. (With a few exceptions.)
I seem to remember Softbank propping up companies like WeWork... and spectacularly losing money. Even this year they lost a lot. Uber and many others were basically money-losing unit economics being propped up by ever larger infusions of money until the stocks were dumped on the eager public in an IPO. But at least the corporations serve people.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443720204578004...
How were Adam Neumann, Travis Kalanick and Elizabeth Holmes any better than these crypto bros?
The online advertising industry is in a constant race to the bottom. Look at how much Facebook and Google dropped relative to, say, Apple and Verizon.
Throughout all this, the open source community in Web1, Web2, Web3 has been building some amazing stuff, but people like to create business models to dump
People still seem to think they're an aberration.
They're not. The entire modern economy is fundamentally scammy. Especially, but not exclusively, the financial industry.
Crypto is just the stinky tip of an iceberg of fraud and predatory exploitation which goes all the way from top to bottom.
Bitcoin will be back in a few years in a new bubble. Halving in 2 years...
That's the only way it will grow.
Betting on investors risk tolerance for cryptos success is a losers game long-term. At least from a technologist perspective. From a finance perspective there's plenty of money to be made if you aren't left holding the cards.
It earns nothing so that's near zero. (Not quite zero because apparently you can use it to buy drugs or avoid export controls)
To use your metaphor, Bitcoin and Ethereum are more in the [schemes] class, rather than two specific schemes.
Now of course nothing is eternal, but years-shorting crypto is too much of a risk for me.
Some miners are already spending more on energy & operations cost per coin than the market value, so even if the price holds I expect to see some miners drop out of the market.
-0% in 2 years is a less impressive number.
https://www.proserveit.com/blog/five-monkeys-experiment-less...
I am not convinced it will end crypto, a lot of people still want to speculate and the system is too extensive to topple easily. Market not moving seems to be proof of that.
But really who cares? Smart contracts and stablecoins can continue to work the same no matter market volatility.
Even ignoring the constant hacks of smart contracts, work for what purpose?
Trying to rebuild a user base without those things will essentially be impossible. Even during the days of free money in 2021, the full crypto user base wasn't huge. With high interest rates, tons of fraud in the rearview mirror, and enormous obstacles to usage, the community will be a tiny fraction of even its previous tiny fraction of traditional banking customers.
$100K-$1m: At this point, you are looking at a heavily regulated exchange or an OTC trader. Those exists (ie: Gemini).
$1m+: Deal OTC directly with an "exchanger" that has a banking license. (There is one in WY)
If FTX kept to their ToS they would have all the funds available and there would be no collapse. But they were greedy, decided to use user funds without authorization, then lost them and the whole thing came coming down.
Exchange which is transparent and truly does not trade with customer assets has no risk involved (other than hacking and similar) and should/would be a massive money printing machine.