The great crypto crisis is upon us
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If we think an occasional CEX collapse is bad, the financial surveillance and political manipulation that would occur under a CBDC scheme is far more damaging to freedom and financial security in the long run.
Be vigilant of articles that slip in advertisements for CBDC - they are quickly becoming a propaganda weapon.
"A more promising approach is through central bank digital currencies that operate within the broader digital monetary system. This is an approach that builds on the trust embedded in central bank money, and could serve public interest in a future monetary system(opens a new window). The technology benefits flow to real world economic activities rather than just other types of crypto. The economic benefits of decentralisation should also be scrutinised more effectively. We are now seeing what happens when an industry rests simply on an article of faith."
Download wallet Exodus for PC
or install Metamask wallet plugin for web browser
or install Brave web browser and use integrated wallet. Advanced learners can later download ethereum or bitcoin open source software and create wallet on command line.
Back up private key and seed phrases. Write them down and seal into an envelope. Back up these secrets now!
Have someone send you crypto to your public key. Or get a kraken/coinbase account to buy some and then send to your wallet public key. This gets the crypto off the exchange.
Start small.
Decentralized exchanges with proofs of reserves on chain less so, e.g. MakerDAO's over-collateralized stablecoin called DAI: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1316928/dai-reserves-bre...
Crypto is going to be a tool of defence for many, especially now that the tide has gone out, and we see who’s swimming naked.
When the petrodollar collapse proceeds, as it must, then we’ll see how this is actually going to play out.
To keep "believing" in crypto at this stage requires something approaching religious devotion.
Putting trust in monetary policy founded upon mathematics and physics (Bitcoin) is hardly religious.
Putting trust in a monetary policy founded upon a bankers ballsack (USD) most definitely is, however.
Bitcoin crystallizes energy / work into value in a mathematically predictable way, that is fully auditable, with no humans able to manipulate minting to their own benefit. You put in the work and crystallize value and gain, or you don’t and gain nothing. It doesn’t matter to the protocol.
What you can’t do is manipulate public sentiment with wars, crisis, and corporate influence to control the monetary supply and policy. You can’t install your little buddies into privately owned “Federal Reserve Banks” which somehow have managed to control the monetary system without being elected or directly accountable to the public.
And this is just scratching the surface of the lunacy of legacy systems.
Who are the real cultists? Those born into a system of servitude following the charismatic allure of leaders and the rigidity of traditions with USD? A system of censorship, centralized unaccountable, unsupervised, unauditable, “trust me bro” mechanics?
Or those who, painfully, broke free of the populace and placed their trust and confidence in value bound to mathematics and physics?
The first step to seeing reality is you gotta take your head out of the sand.
/s
And you say that this celestial sphere is full of space cryptocurrency?
The only place in the universe where you can get bitcoin is on Earth…I wonder if there are any other assets that can make that claim? Perhaps most other cryptos — but bitcoin was the first, so it has scarcity and historical significance, making it, at a minimum, a valuable collectible. Life, maybe. But not gold, platinum, or any other scarce atoms.
And in the entire universe, 21 million is the cap for bitcoin. Whether it works as anything else, there is no denying it is an extremely scarce asset in a possibly infinite universe. And it is a scarce asset whose ownership can change at the speed of light, without any but the two involved parties deciding whether or not it happens, from anywhere within 15 light-minutes.
Think about it.
Now excuse me while I ride my unicorn to magical lands beyond the veil of time, where constraints like the speed of light and gravity don’t apply.
The only place you can get the US Dollar is on Earth. The only place you can get Beanie Babies, Hummels, Pogs, <pick-your-fad> is on Earth. As a standalone argument, this carries no weight.
> so it has scarcity and historical significance, making it, at a minimum, a valuable collectible
A collectible, sure, for people who care to collect it. Whether or not it's valuable will be determined by the market, not just blind belief that the value is there.
Throughout history, civilizations have found any number of things to act as a proxy for value. Pebbles, seashells, necklaces, pieces of metal, glass, and so on.
But in order for such inanimate items to hold value, everyone must agree that they're valuable. The current upheavals in crypto are certainly calling this into question for everyone involved, especially those who have lost their life savings on shiny pebbles.
The idea that "this one blockchain has uniqueness value, and the rest don't, this is the only one that does" is just more faith-based bollocks. They're all equally without any intrinsic value.
"thoughtfulness" won't help you if you haven't thought it through.
Parent's statement that "The only place in the universe where you can get bitcoin is on Earth... bitcoin was the first" is also not provably true. What if Aliens arrived and said "we've had our sacred blockchain for centuries, yours is the valueless knockoff, buy ours!" ? They'd be right about the valueless part, but we'd see no value in theirs either. Pretending otherwise is egocentric babbling not thought.
The greatest challenge here is a prospective customer thinking analytically about the benefits because for most people the answer is either zero or negative. If you present it in this quasi-mystical form the claims are conveniently resistant to analysis since they rely on things like conspiracies or massive societal shifts, and keeping things emotional is a good way to get buyers to overrule their critical thinking skills. It’s the same thing you see for related industries like goldbugs or preppers, only this time with billions of VC dollars giving much better production values.
ETH and BTC were not VC backed, and seem to have established some product-market fit. Lots of dev activity on ethereum codebase.