Zero Is the Future of Money

But it works pretty well as a gambling/speculation scheme.

In the article's assessment, bitcoin/crypto is really just a digital collectable --- not much different than a NFT.

In my assessment, it is at the center of a semi-covert attempt to destabilize the US financial system. Look at how much the crypto marketplace bas historically been associated with China --- and still is.

The world's largest crypto exchange was started in China by a Chinese national and is currently under investigation for money laundering and tax evasion. For much of it's early history, most bitcoin mining was done in China. Now that crypto exchanges are losing access to the US banking system, Chinese state owned banks are stepping in and throwing them a lifeline --- even though crypto remains illegal inside China.

I'd love to hear a semi-rational explanation as to why something outlawed in their own country is such a significant interest/concern to state owned Chinese banks. This is no different than providing support and haven to manufacturers of fentanyl --- which they do even though fentanyl is banned in China. The most logical motive is societal harm to western competition.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-state-owned-banks-turn-...

> There’s a lot of dark fuckery that goes on in the fiat system, but it certainly expands with our population, whereas a disproportionate amount of the Bitcoin supply arbitrarily lies in the hands of a few thousand random early adopters. Consider the fact that there are almost 8 billion people on the earth right now - not including future generations - and yet the 21 million possible Bitcoin units were being given out in 50 token chunks to people who happened to be around in 2009 with the expertise, capital, equipment and peer groups to exploit it.

> To justify the massively unequal initial distribution, many Bitcoin proponents rely upon dubious ideological positions (like claiming that the early users are being rewarded for being bold risk-takers) and semantic trickery, noting that there’s no problem in running short on units because a bitcoin can be split into smaller increments like Satoshis. It’s somewhat like noting that a tonne of gold can be split into 1,000,000 grams, without asking who owns the tonne of gold. So, one day the big holders of Bitcoin (people like Michael Saylor and Elon Musk) will be old, and future generations will have to wrest small fragments of Satoshis out of their wrinkled hands, a process that would presumably give those ‘whales’ an ability to extract huge amounts of labour from them in return. Given that most of these big holders basically did very little labour to get the original distribution, this is extremely problematic.