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Crypto entrepreneur eats banana art he bought for $6.2m
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2024
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“Entrepreneur.”
Gentle reminder that you cannot make money in crypto unless someone else loses money. It’s not entrepreneurship. At best, it’s scam artistry, at worst fraud or theft.
Wouldn't that also describe wall street in general?
To some extent. Speculation on the stock market used to be illegal until the 80’s, meaning that investments had to be based on a company’s tangible performance. Companies are not ephemeral, like crypto, but represent real people doing real work. So the stock market is not a zero-sum game (like musical chairs).
Crypto is fundamentally different. Bitcoins have no utility. They don’t “do” anything (except consume ungodly amounts of power to no discernible end).
Let me put it this way: if Microsoft died tomorrow, some would chortle with secret delight, but the truth is that a lot of our infrastructure would need to be rebuilt from scratch — hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, computer networks, servers, websites, gaming and cloud ecosystems would be decimated. Something like 25% of the internet would be down.
If bitcoin disappeared tomorrow nothing would happen, because bitcoin isn’t real. It does nothing and represents nothing. It’s a distillation of the most purified nothing that ever was. If bitcoin vanished that would be a boost for the environment and a boost for the economy (as people stop pissing away money by buying literal nothing).
The good old days. Every month I discover a new good regulation that we lost :(
Do you feel the same way about centralized currency's apparatuses? Visa, MasterCard, Chase, BoA, PayPal, the U.S. Mint, the FBI's anti-counterfeiting department, point-of-sale terminal manufacturers, etc. These all use so much more resources than all of crypto combined, not to mention the human lives wasted to support it all.
You say that if crypto disappeared, nothing would happen. I posit that if fiat currencys disappeared (and were replaced by a crypto that isn't energy intensive) that you would have a net improvement to global society. You could hand out lifelong annuity/pension/UBI for all the displaced workers, pay them to dump all the executives/shareholders at the bottom of the ocean, and still have excess money left over. All those former bank tellers would have time to pursue their interests, and maybe produce some music/art/whatever for the rest of us along the way. (Bitcoin and proof-of-work's energy waste do need to be trashed though.)
Well, fiat currency is just IOU’s, literally. Check out Debt the First 5000 Years for an anthropological look at the origins of money.
So would I prefer to live in a moneyless (i.e., debtless) post-scarcity anarchist utopia? Of course I would! Incidentally, that’s how small tribes and communities were organized for tens of thousands of years before the rise of nations.
Fiat currencies have a few advantages for maintaining a modern marketplace, whose purpose is to allocate scarce resources.
A few other things to clear up. Fiat transactions are infinitesimally cheap. I’m not sure whether ordinary transactions are 1000 or 100,000 times cheaper than using crypto, but the difference is gross. Just attempting to acquire crypto can take minutes and costs enormous fees. I know this from experience.
Dollars represent faith in the power of the US government to extract taxes from its population. Crypto represents nothing. It stands for nothing. “Coins” come and go, and if you’re the last one standing in the zero-sum game of musical chairs, you lose your savings. For that to happen with dollars, the US government would have to implode, which is unlikely.
Crypto is, quite possibly, the purest form of speculative trading (gambling) we have ever concocted. The only reason I don’t think it should be illegal is that I have no interest in saving people from their own cupidity and greed.
Tbf, money isn't real. Blips on a monitor.
Wouldn’t this describe any economy…?
Good point. I agree it would
I’m sure the banana wasn’t what the money was for. It was the cache of weapons and drugs being delivered somewhere.
I mean, that's capitalism in a nutshell no? Unless you're a government mint, No one can make money unless someone else loses money.
Currency yes, but value no. In fact that’s part of why you can’t set currency at a set number of dollars per person. If you did that currency would deflate
Depends on what you mean by “money” I guess, but banks create money every day when they give out loans for more money than they actually have.
Yes, if you consider paying for service to be losing money. If you invest in a company and it succeeds, you earn a portion of the money (in exchange to providing some up-front). In theory, this is a win-win-win situation: the investor gets a return, the company gets capital to get things going, customers get a new product/service provider.
That said, things like stock trading, especially high-frequency trading, do seem to function in this way.
Yes, if you invest in a company you initially lose money while the company gains money.
You invest so that eventually you get money back, which means the company pays you back and therefore loses money.
The money the company pays you with is money that the company gained by other people's such as clients and customers giving them money for their service, and therefore they lose their money which eventually ends up in your pocket as your investment starts to earn you money.
In the end the company and the investor earn money if the company is successful but ultimately the the money comes from the customers who are losing that money.
I only take issue with the phrasing of "losing money" - but if we agree that that's just semantics (because everybody is getting value for their money), then yeah, I completely agree