[aeroheim]

The most alarming thing to me is how effective cryptocurrencies are in drawing out the inner greed of most people. It's created an obsession of quick wealth among a lot of otherwise normal people, hijacking their rationality and further propagating the viral nature of it. If you take a look at many of the online communities for cryptocurrencies online you'll notice a lot of disturbing behavior that's very cult-like.

I'm not even sure why there's still a pretense of innovation behind most coins these days - every time I hear or see any new fad of cryptocurrency I can already smell the greed from miles away, and the smell is unbearably intense. More recently there's been lots of obvious scams going around social media where bad actors are hacking accounts and replacing them with content shilling their coins and scamming people into sending them coins. When this shit starts invading your personal feeds you know things have started to get really bad.

[22c]

Do you think that is related to cryptocurrency, or simply any fast moving asset in general?

How many people really bought GME just to stick it to the hedge funds? How many people really liked the stock?

[aeroheim]

Cryptocurrency has an edge over other assets due to its inherent nature - it's much easier to employ sophistry and obfuscation by technology to sell it to people. Even well-educated people are vulnerable because it appeals to their sense of curiosity and has enough of a foundation to be viable.

People see the impact and success of technology in their lives. They start looking into cryptocurrencies and go "Wow, this must be revolutionary! This will eventually become as big as the internet!" Most don't care about the practicality or details, just that technology is a winner and that's where they should put their eggs into. And the ones that do care are probably so engrossed and invested into it that they're no longer rational about it.

Once people are invested it's in their best interests to propagate their ideas so they can succeed, regardless if those ideas are actually beneficial or not. I'm no psychologist but I feel like this is instinctual on a human level, which is why I say peoples rationality can get "hijacked". Anecdotally, talking to those who are invested and seeing the ridiculous amounts of irrational goalposts and whataboutisms being thrown around just reinforces this even more for me.

[narwally]

I think it's all of them, but the scary thing is what involvement in the markets for these assets can do to people.

[22c]

It's possible that we'll see attempts to regulate these markets in a similar way to how binary options trading has become regulated in some markets.

[xxxxxxx12]

> It's created an obsession of quick wealth among a lot of otherwise normal people

It's showing a demand for an asset that isn't linked to the central planning of government where they continually and arbitrarily inject as much extra currency as they want whenever they catastrophically mess up sovereign budgets.

That's not greed. It's an interest in safety from a drug-addict-like government that opens the floodgates on a whim.

[knorker]

No, that's not what it is.

That's not why people buy BTC. They buy it because it's going up.

[xxxxxxx12]

The ceiling of BTC is infinite cause USD is always falling (due to the simple dynamics of virtually every fiat system) towards a floor of 0.

[knorker]

Ok coiner.

[gher-shyu3i]

They'll buy it if it doesn't go up either (and doesn't go down obviously). Hedging against inflation is a huge benefit.

[DataGata]

If it were a hedge against inflation, it would behave like a hedge against inflation, and yet it shows no similar characteristics to preexisting inflation hedges? hmmmmm

[xxxxxxx12]

> yet it shows no similar characteristics to preexisting inflation hedges

Is that because, so far, if you were to measure since its inception, it's outperformed any other hedge against inflation?

[CRConrad]

So did tulip bulbs, for a while.