The Republicans and Donald Trump seem set on establishing a strategic crypto reserve. They are claiming this will somehow be an important source of economic security for the country. It’s clear that establishing the reserve will be an important way to give tens of billions of dollars to Donald Trump’s campaign contributors, but it is much harder to see how it will provide any economic security to the country.
The original promise of crypto was as a distributed, peer-to-peer way to transact, without the permission of any third party. Think Paypal or Venmo, but without having to trust Paypal and Venmo with your bank details. And when the price of BTC was a few hundred dollars, people were slowly using it to transact. But then, the price started to climb. And that was the worst possible thing to happen to Crypto, because now people started considering it to be an “investment” and too precious to spend. (BTC developers even deliberately kept their on-chain transactions expensive, to push their off-chain solution for small transactions, but That’s a whole different post).
There are coins that are still good as currency, they’re just not a good “investment” so they don’t get attention. (Some Monero shill will be along shortly to tell us how awesome XMR is.)
I spent a lot of time in the crypto space, not as a “true believer”, but rather as someone who wanted to know how it all worked. And I’ve concluded that crypto really does enable trustless transactions. However, I’ve convinced myself that nobody (outside of the extreme libertarians) actually wants that. Your average Joe doesn’t care that PayPal, Google, or their credit card company is spying on (and perhaps taking a piece of) all their transactions. They want something that is easy to use, and whose value doesn’t fluctuate with Elon Musk’s tweets.
Yes, the crypto scene is constantly crying about their massive gains. \s
There’s no real problem with people not wanting to spend a solid investment. It’s called “savings”. People used to do it back when the dollar was almost worth something, but they constantly devalue the money to prevent it. The petrol-dollar needs people spending and consuming exponentially more to prop up their pyramid scheme. This system is literally impoverishing humanity and destroying the planet. That’s a much bigger problem than cryptos going up.
part of the problem with bitcoin is it was programmed to increase in value. It takes more processing power to create new bitcoin as time goes by. This is the reason it became a lure to invest.