I want to preface this by saying I don't own crypto and I think its often full of scams (eg. squid coin). But it has some real potential and isn't always as bad

I want to preface this by saying I don't own crypto and I think its often full of scams (eg. squid coin). But it has some real potential and isn't always as bad as it seems. Tether is a real risk, I agree. > Everything real has been exfiltrated through electricity bills, taxes and early adopters selling, the entire crypto economy is a hollow shell, leveraged on retail deposits. Yeah, but that's not untrue for banks. Conceptually, a bank's job is to store money for depositors. That has a real cost, so theoretically you should have to pay for banking service. We know that banks make that money back from lending the money with interest (profiting off interest). This lending behavior is theoretically possible for individuals to do while skipping banks, but it is not practical at scale. So, basically depositors "pay" with opportunity cost - and since the world fiat currencies have inflation, this is essentially paying the devalued difference of money. Crypto is similar... it costs real money to maintain the deposits - aka POW to secure the ledger. Instead of lenders' interest paying the cost, it is paid by deflation by depositor by more currency being circulated. Not too different than fiat-at-banks. Crypto also is potentially more egalitarian since anyone can mine (at a small scale at least) to potentially make some small income, and certain complex financial actions can be done for "free-ish" in contracts (conditional swaps/lending, escrow, multi-sig transactions).