[lurkerasdfh8]

honestly, anyone with half a brain do not see that cryptocurrencies are re-hashing (heh) every single scam from the unregulated investment market times?

every single one of them. Many times over.

I think everyone knows, because, c'mon. But everyone thinks they are the smarter one and will be the ones fooling others and making money. Which makes this article, and yours, pointless, because, everyone already knows that.

[ve55]

I think you're significantly overestimating how much experience and knowledge most that briefly dabble in currency have both over what is currently going on and over what types of finance scams have happened in the past.

[knowaveragejoe]

I've heard "it's a scam" a lot recently, but nobody can articulate how in a way that is similar to any real, provable scam in the past. It's a giant, distributed scam?

[daenz]

I think its based on a fundamental idea of buying something that you know is worthless in order to sell it for more than you bought it by convincing the buyer that it isn't worthless. Eventually it will burn through all potential buyers and there will be no one left to sell to. Then it collapses because everyone finally agrees that it actually has no value.

[fastball]

Cryptos have intrinsic value because they drive efficiency of value exchange. Specifically they allow for trustless exchange of value, which in an increasingly globalized world has become appealing for various reasons.

Some cryptos have value beyond that, like ETH, because the Ethereum network itself has intrinsic value, and ETH is the only thing you can use to pay the Gas fees if you want a program running on the network.

[drdeca]

Hm, is there a theory of pricing ease-of-transfer ? Of course, it would have to depend on the preferences and whatnot, but still, seems like something that there should be some good theory of, but I haven’t heard of one.

Side note: Aren’t there tokens that sort of have a kind of stored gas? Like, you can cash it in to get a refund of some of the gas cost of the transaction?

[fastball]

Yep, I'm not sure what exactly you call that in econ. What I do know is that this is the entire thesis behind Visa, Paypal, etc. who have some of the highest market caps in the world. If they have value for facilitating transactions then cryptos do too.

WRT the gas fee thing: yes, technically you can send a miner whatever you want in order to incentivize them to include your tx in a block, but the only thing baked in is ETH. Additionally, after the London hard fork (slated for release next month), EIP-1559 will be live which changes the fee system to become a "burn" fee system rather than a "tip to miner" fee system, which will force all fees to be paid in ETH (and algorithmically determined, rather than somewhat arbitrarily picking a fee that you hope is high enough for miners to include your tx).

[WanderPanda]

I think the most valuable thing that makes bitcoin efficient for transactions is its cheap verifiability in comparison to gold where there is a long history of counterfeiting. Additionally Bitcoin is easier to transfer (in most cases) and harder to confiscate

[WanderPanda]

Wow it is really amazing how gold, the biggest scam of all times, is still finding people to scam nowadays. Or is there some value to limited goods?

[audunw]

Wait, you really think gold is only traded for speculation? Gold is an extremely useful metal. Its not just an artificially limited good.

If you’re buying gold you’re not purely depending on finding another sucker to buy your gold. You can sell it to any one of the countless manufacturers or jewelry makers using it every day. If the price crashed too much, these would probably just increase their inventory of gold in anticipation of a future price increase, which would itself drive up price. If the price stayed low they can lower prices on the goods they’re making, increasing demand for gold, stabilizing the price.

That’s why cryptocurrency is not digital gold. There are no such mechanism setting a fundamental floor for how low the price can go.

[initplus]

Crypto is really exciting for new entrants to the finance space.

In traditional finance all water has been wrung out, but in crypto relatively unsophisticated versions of strategies like arbitrage can be quite successful. Traditional finance institutions are more sophisticated and have more resources than their crypto equivalents. I really think traditional finance orgs need to realize they can employ the same skills to the crypto space with a much lower investment for the same returns because the space is so immature.

[duxup]

Cryptocurrency is a long lesson about why things are the way they are.

[WanderPanda]

Quite poetic! Can thou elaborate?