I used to subscribe to the pop Austrian hard money ideology. Watching cryptocurrency devolve into a HODL cult and gambling casino is one of the things that chan

I used to subscribe to the pop Austrian hard money ideology. Watching cryptocurrency devolve into a HODL cult and gambling casino is one of the things that changed my mind. I saw by watching the evolution of Bitcoin that Keynes was right, at least about that particular topic. Everything Keynesian and modern monetary theorists said would happen happened, and for easy to understand reasons. In science we call that a correct prediction. What I saw in 2017 was a giant bubble driven by the greater fool theory followed by a complete abandonment of cryptocurrency as a payment method. This abandonment actually coincides with the bubble as this boom-bust cycle made it very inconvenient to use as a currency. All this accomplished was to make early adopters rich at the expense of later adopters, like any Ponzi. (Again I don't think it was an intentional scam, but unfolded as a Ponzi for structural reasons.) Today I am hard pressed to find anyone who accepts Bitcoin for anything but drugs and black/grey market stuff, and those people have a special need that overcomes the currency's downsides as such. Today the cryptocurrency world seems like nothing but scams and even those are fading away. Most articles I see about it are scammy. Bitcoin is very unlike gold. Gold costs little to nothing to maintain while BTC has a huge electricity cost. That must be slowly consuming the actual value in the ecosystem. Eventually nothing will be left but Tethers and other fictional tokens. When those collapse the music will be over.