| Actually, this industry routinely runs what you'd call "hero marketing," and what makes it especially dangerous for young people is that they're being sold success stories by actors playing people who don't exist, fictional characters who supposedly got rich through crypto. 1.A tiny handful of success stories are pushed to the front. 2.The vast majority who lost money are made invisible. 3.It manufactures the expectation that this time, you could be the one. 4.The price movement itself becomes the reward stimulus. 5.The platform, the exchange, the issuer, and the early investors all hold an advantage in fees or liquidity. The problem is that this is identical to gambling. But it's dressed up as "finance." The industry obscures the fact that crypto functions as gambling by making people think of it as a new kind of financial asset. Of course, crypto is technology. It's true that there are technological components, blockchains, smart contracts, and the like. But just because something contains technology doesn't mean the mass marketing around it qualifies as technology investment. Anti-counterfeiting technology is also technology. That doesn't make putting money into circulating counterfeit bills an "investment in currency security technology." By the same logic, the fact that crypto contains technological elements is being used to justify the marketing structure built on top of it, and that, precisely, is the deception. And for all the talk of decentralization, the reality that USDT and similar tokens end up tethered to a single dominant exchange, heavily coupled to nation states, essentially proves that true decentralization is impossible in practice. This is only natural. Decentralization makes trading inconvenient, so people gravitate toward a single centralized exchange. And at that point, what exactly is the difference between that exchange and a government? |