Crypto: The Giant Ponzi Scam
It was April Fools this Friday. But nevertheless, on Crypto Twitter, it became almost impossible to tell what was a joke and what was real. For the so-called “future of finance”, it was business as usual.
Crypto remains a bizarre nexus of Ponzi scams posing as an intricate arcade game, in which speculators play digital “hot potato” with illegal securities. It’s the first cult-like ecosystem to obscure itself by combining corporate-speak and technobabble into one native dialect, so much that even the executives of pyramid schemes like Herbalife and Amway, operating under the disguise of “multi-level marketing,” can’t believe what they’re seeing.
In fact, we’re watching a replay of how the multi-level marketing (MLM) industry lobbied the SEC (Securities Exchange Commission) to normalize blatantly illegal pyramid schemes, this time with the crypto industry. Today, 1 in 6 households are involved with MLMs, of which 99% of people are losing money. Yet these are still not considered frauds. Instead, MLMs (multi-level marketing schemes) remain pressed against the border between illegal and unethical.
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The likeness between MLMs and crypto is uncanny, only the latter has added gaslighting and lawlessness sprinkled on top for good measure. Every single cryptocurrency has an overtly cult-like sentiment attached to it. At the least, it has multi-level marketing “vibes”, and at the most, it’s a full-on ideology with its own lingo, indoctrination centers, and propaganda machine. Like Scientology, but on steroids.
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As we see with most predatory schemes, quite a few techies and finance people are reluctant to voice their concerns about crypto and Web3. They can’t because it’s detrimental to their position to point out flaws in a technology that has created an ideological aura in their working environment — one of the hallmarks of cult mentality.
As Concoda has previously mentioned, America has already normalized pyramid schemes through multi-level marketing. Now it’s time for the authorities to submit to the new-age fintech oligarchy, legalizing Ponzi schemes through crypto.
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This Friday, the entire Bitcoin maxi establishment descended on my Twitter feed harder than 21 million Will Smith “right palms”. The odd part about this was that I merely forecasted the majority of Americans would stick with the U.S Dollar, not move into Bitcoin. I wasn’t even talking about people outside America, yet they collectively concluded I was an evil anti-humanitarian boogeyman.
In 2022, it’s apparently controversial to say that people will use their country’s currency over what effectively is a counterfeit version of fiat. There’s no other subject in the media, other than crypto, where they have people declaring regularly that anything emerging from the space is a “scam” or “Ponzi scheme.” It’s almost as if they could be onto something.
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Despite what the maximalists say, Bitcoin is undoubtedly the same as other cryptocurrencies, only much slower, less efficient, and more disastrous for the environment, plus a lot of its holders seem overly enthusiastic about the collapse of their own sovereign currency. Ironically, Bitcoin has turned into the true “sh*tcoin.”
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Bitcoin has never been about liberating the masses. That narrative has been debunked by yours truly. Instead, it was conceived to evade societal boundaries for self-enrichment, meaning it’s the most “dishonest” and “corruptable” money on the planet; the exact opposite of Bitcoin doctrine.
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Bitcoin can never become the world’s reserve currency. It’s totally incompatible with modern forms of finance and money, which are always a reflection of global economic conditions. It’s like advocating for a monarchy rule in Great Britain.
In a Bitcoin economy, not only will consumers end up hoarding money, but businesses will hoard resources, realizing they benefit more from saving than producing products. Both sides being disincentivized to transact is the major flaw in deflationary currencies.
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“People were content with horses and buggies.”
“People were content with flip phones.”
“People were content with VHS tapes.”
“Look how that turned out!”
Well, yeh. I can definitely see the masses “upgrading” from a highly stable sovereign currency to an enormous Ponzi scheme by next winter.
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Fiat currency is simply most people in the world exiting from their utopian fantasies into reality and contributing to economic growth. Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme, multi-level marketing scheme, and pyramid scheme, all combined into one perpetual zero-coupon bond of societal, monetary, and environmental destruction.
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A reminder that an NFT is just a block containing a link to a website, which has a URL pointing to some file. This is a fad, not the future of ownership. Every problem NFTs have tried to solve has been remedied in the real world by a company already years ahead in technology and innovation.
That, of course, is apart from crypto VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, the leading innovator in evading securities laws and regulations.
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If NFTs involve spending real money to buy fake money to purchase pretend property rights, in effect the NFT ecosystem has become an elaborate version of Monopoly, which explains why the major use cases for Ethereum — the most popular blockchain on which to “mint” NFTs — includes buying and selling “virtual land”.
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Critics say there’s no superior use case for crypto, but it’s incredibly proficient at forming cult mentalities around links to images of zoo animals, especially unhappy primates. That makes the gargantuan amount of hype and publicity worth it.
Right?
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Leaving a crypto cult is a soul-crushing experience of slowly acknowledging the existence of basic economics, externalities, political science, propaganda, and monetary history. It’s worth it, but few understand this.
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Crypto skepticism is not “hating”. It’s simply providing a critique of what the “other side” thinks about money, politics, economics, and more. It’s no different from the commentary you’ll find in the political realm.
If something is declaring itself the next big thing, it’s essential to have a skeptical community critiquing it. But with crypto, that’s especially important. Leaving the shady individuals within the crypto elite alone and the issues within the space unchallenged won’t end well.
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Crypto critics are people in various professions simply pointing out how their field of expertise in the legacy system solves the issues that crypto has created for itself by effectively starting over from scratch.
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The legacy system is not without flaws. SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies) might as well be the cryptocurrencies of traditional finance. They are much quicker than the traditional IPO route and insiders can negotiate a bigger premium for what usually is a lower quality company.
No wonder that’s the route Circle, the issuer of unaudited stablecoin USDC, has taken.
Probably nothing.
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Reject the financialization of everything. It’s a dystopia you won’t want to live in, created by people who don’t foresee what they’re instituting. Some things just don’t need markets and money attached to them.
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While conventional finance and economics describe the state of the world accurately, crypto is based on a mix of new but mostly old dubious theories that, if enforced, would quickly need to be replaced with the status quo.
It’s not just a bad revisionist attempt at money but a complete rewind of modern finance, an enormous campaign to normalize the removal of rules and institutions that we’d simply add back again, once those who campaigned to get rid of them realized why they had been implemented in the first place.
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The end game for crypto is financialization overload, where we revert to bartering over money itself. We’ll have wallets holding 5,000 hyper-speculative, Ponzi-nomic tokens for each of our personal and business connections, with added layers of complexity to deal with fees, “insurance”, and other factors. It’s truly a dystopian financial future.
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