People Aren’t Actually “Investing” in Cryptocurrency, They’re Just Gambling

90,000+ views and hundreds of comments later, not a single commenter made a genuine effort to refute my proposition that Bitcoin is currently being treated as a Ponzi scheme and that BTC won’t be the global currency of the future.

Because the honest folks stay quiet.

Though plenty of people speculate on forex markets, true investors don’t “invest” in American dollars, Mexican pesos, or British pounds, because they know currency is just a representation of underlying value — be it actual real value or just government-sanctioned violence. Bitcoin has neither of these underlying properties.

• You make a bet on human psychology.
• You profit someone else who bought earlier than you.
• You hope to turn a profit by selling to someone who will buy later than you.
• You hand over (albeit highly corrupted) legal tender for some bytes in a file. Because that’s all cryptocurrency is: bytes in a file to which people have temporarily assigned extravagant prices.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy Bitcoin. I think it’s a wonderful way to vote with your dollars in protest of government manipulation of fiat currency. Just stop pretending that crypto is a sound investment.

There’s a reason why governments make Ponzi schemes illegal — because in the end, the vast majority of the speculators lose their money and society is poorer for it.

When “Satoshi Nakamoto” started Bitcoin, his/her/their/its dream wasn’t to create a Ponzi scheme where people would buy and hold coins until the price increased. It was to spread power, create a distributed ledger, popularize blockchain technology.

Now, because of human greed, the industry is best known as a get-rich-quick scheme. And if we know anything about governments, it’s that they’ll use this hysteria as an excuse to crack down on crypto speculation.

And maybe that’s not a bad thing, because then blockchain technology can re-focus on fulfilling its ultimate destiny — not as a casino to snatch quick cash at another’s expense, but as a means to revolutionize the banking, insurance, healthcare, remittance, voting, contract, securitization, and education industries.

I hope this article has been insightful. I hope it helps you have more sensible conversations with people who think uncritically about cryptocurrency.

None of us will ever perfectly master the art of rational debate, but it’s vitally important that we try.

In the meantime, I hope my lovely haters will take the time to re-visit the works of Plato and Aristotle and learn the Socratic method so we can have a fruitful discussion that builds up our society. I’m strongly pro-blockchain, but I also want to protect millions of people from getting burned by crypto. This technology is far too important to not steward it well.

Source: https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/people-arent-investing-in-cryptocurrency-they-re-just-gambling-cc0896823fdf?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency