For sure. It really has become a more distributed lottery.
The people I know who are obsessed with slot machines and buying lottery tickets are the people I know that own dogecoin.
This whole thing gets more absurd as USD Coin and Binance USD climb to the top with Tether.
The whole space to me feels like such a massive waste of resources and brain power.
It's different in terms of inflation schedule, contract support and of course that it's not trying to be anything but a meme. Would you mind elaborating on your thoughts?
I guess I just don't think inflation schedule or contract support are particularly meaningful. And Doge is explicitly a meme, but all of them are implicitly a meme. People want crypto because they are bought into the viral idea of owning crypto. Unless you have a ransom to pay, nobody is buying it for its inherent utility.
I've seen people increasingly buy stablecoins to earn interest from lending them (higher rates than a bank or bond gives you), which I would argue is inherent utility. Plus, the idea of holding USD stablecoins in countries with poor banking infrastructure is gaining steam, which is inherent utility.
My best friend is Venezuelan and I assure you there are real humans in the world who get real value from a stable digital form of currency that doesn't require a central bank account. The only ones they can legally have are ones in their country, and the exchange rate for foreign currencies is a rigged price that doesn't reflect real inflation.
They're almost literally financially enslaved to their countries central bank, which devalues their only legal form of life savings by 25% every month by printing more and more (for government members) and no other country will give them banking access but their own, which has regulated against them using any alternative currencies than the one the central bank controls.
Just imagine if the US made it illegal to own any currency besides USD, and then started printing so much that you lost 90% of the value of your savings every 3-6 months.
They've experienced 10,000,000% inflation since 2014. That would turn someone's retirement account of $5,000,000 into $49.95.
The only option there is a digital store of wealth that doesn't discriminate against them based on their citizenship, unlike every central bank in the world. Otherwise, the rug is just constantly being pulled out from under you, and your only legal store of value is the things you can buy in the store and keep in your closet to sell later. Back to a financial system more primitive than in ancient Athens (400BC).
Americans benefit from a global banking structure that is rigged in their favor. Their government prints the global reserve currency, most countries in the world welcome them with open arms and offer banking solutions, and their hegemony is backed by hundreds of military bases armed with tanks, airplanes, and soldiers across the world, and miltiary ships across the seas.
It's very easy for all the rich tech people in this thread living in stable countries to denounce crypto as useless, because to them, right now, it is. But it is careless to denounce it as a concept.
The tweeter mentioned that it is a right wing tool. In the US that has a dirty connotation, and I agree that coming from the US, we can see first hand the dangers of unfettered right wing policy. But people coming from countries that have experienced extreme left wing governments that describe daily common horrors far worse than people peeing in bottles on Amazon's factory floors.
A little bit of sympathy for them and the real life saving use case the "right wing" tool of decentralised finance against the troubles they experience could go a long way.
All that said, I was very skeptical of the crypto community for a long time as well, because it is most of the same people who do MLM schemes. But real life experience has now made it impossible for me to ignore that the underlying tech has real humanitarian use cases as well, and those should be nurtured.
> My best friend is Venezuelan and I assure you there are real humans in the world who get real value from a stable digital form of currency that doesn't require a central bank account.
I have friends living in Venezuela, and one of them had to receive medical treatment that he could only afford thanks to a crypto transaction.
Yet, I assure you that crypto was completely irrelevant in that equation. Crypto's only role was ensuring a way for medical professionals in Venezuela to be paid through means other than domestic transactions and out of Venezuela regime's radar. This time around it was crypto, but it could as easily be a transfer to an offshore account. The end goal is the same.
And let's not fool ourselves into believing that people are in crypto to pay doctors.
This whole thing gets more absurd as USD Coin and Binance USD climb to the top with Tether.
The whole space to me feels like such a massive waste of resources and brain power.