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That’s the thing I can’t ever come to understand about crypto. It’s purely about perception of value. At least with some precious metal, it has a floor value

That’s the thing I can’t ever come to understand about crypto. It’s purely about perception of value. At least with some precious metal, it has a floor value as a function of its practical uses and abundance. Which leads me to believe that the only thing that could be honestly said is that a crypto is purely about winners and suckers and timing.

mlinhares 2y ago
In this specific case its also about buying access, so I doubt he'll rug pull, he can just direct the access requests to buy something.
sali0 2y ago
The legal landscape forced the industry to be purely financial. Hopefully this changes soon.
doomroot 2y ago
There are pros and cons of cryptocurrencies as money, just like gold, which cause people to speculate on the price.
- myvoiceismypass 2y ago
  What are the pros of the trump coin or the melania coin?
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    A brainwashed group of drones that are willling to pay money for it. But I'm convinced most people that buy memecoins like that are thinking that there's other suckers that will buy it and make the price go up.
tenthirtyam 2y ago
> At least with some precious metal, it has a floor value as a function of its practical uses and abundance. I don't really give this argument much credence any more. If the value of, say, gold or diamonds were to drop their practical-use-floor-value, they'd be valued at probably less than 1% (maybe much less) of current value. I mean, how much gold is actually consumed by industry? And we even have industrial diamonds now. A friend argued to me that crypto is "A Terrible Thing" because its just used to fuel the (illegal) narcotics industry. At this point, I'm doubting that too - the market cap of all crpyto, and the value being transacted e.g. daily volume, has increased massively recently. Are we to believe that narcotics have caused that? I can't imagine so - more likely to me it's around 90-99% speculation which, you might well argue, is "Another Terrible Thing."
- wat10000 2y ago
  I think the main thing precious metals have going for them is tradition. That’s no small thing. They’ve been considered valuable for millennia, and that’s likely to continue. Bitcoin might be replaced by some other fad in a decade. It’s like if you’re betting on a religion, Christianity is more likely to last than Scientology. They might both be equally made up, but one has demonstrated staying power.
- XorNot 2y ago
  I mean, this is all true which is why we have fiat currencies. The UK government has consistently honoured debt for longer then the US has existed, for example.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    Inflation, and especially controlled inflation, is much easier with fiat money. Most governments see it as an extremely valuable tool.
- amluto 2y ago
  The actual market value of diamonds is pretty low. You can pay a jeweler a lot of money for a shiny diamond, but good luck reselling it for a similar amount of money. Gold, OTOH, is fungible. You can melt it, mold it into different shapes bars, resell it, etc.
  - jajko 2y ago
    With diamond jewelry, you pay mostly for the manual work of jeweler since folks don't go to jewelry shops to buy a diamond stone alone. If we talk about gold bars, no sophisticated manual work involved, just pouring molten gold into some mold on semi-industrial automated scale. If you buy sophisticated golden jewelry, you also pay ton for work that nobody else may appreciate. Sure you can get it smelted into something else, but you burn most of the original value, and some more on the change itself.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  > A friend argued to me that crypto is "A Terrible Thing" because its just used to fuel the (illegal) narcotics industry. My general argument against this is that Ransomware _predates_ Crypto. There's also the whole Regan airlifted Iran literal USD for helping him win a presidential election so you don't need crypto for scummy behavior.
dumah 2y ago
There’s at most a zero floor value on holdings of government debt, corporate equities, bank holdings, and any asset held by a custodian. The floor value of physical commodities with significant storage costs is negative. The market is aware of these possibilities and these risks are generally recognized as being embedded in asset prices as premiums.
halfcat 2y ago
> It’s purely about perception of value All money has always been about perception, whether we used paper, shiny rocks, or sea shells as money, it’s always been about perception. Is it real or counterfeit, do you trust the person you’re transacting with, are enough people you know using it, and will people with weapons show up to protect your money if someone else tries to steal it? The “people with weapons” part turns out to be a key component. The novel thing about crypto is that you are less reliant on the “people with weapons” to protect you and tell you what you’re allowed to do with your money, and more reliant on the “people with encryption”.
- wordpad25 2y ago
  No. Fiat is backed by tax base. US has more assets than debt. Additionally US is the largest economy in the world, how much would the right to tax it be worth? A lot. It's not at all just perception and influence as you claim.
  - macinjosh 2y ago
    So hyperinflation only happens when the tax base disappears? Perception and influence is clearly part of the picture.
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      It’s one of the core attributes. Zimbabwe wasn’t going to be raising a trillion dollars of revenue.
  - abdullahkhalids 2y ago
    US economy has been second largest for over 10 years now [1]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-maddison-project-database?tab=chart&time=1935..latest https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-maddison-project-data...
    - malfist 2y ago
      I don't know where that site is pulling their data from, but not even the Chinese government claims their GDP is as high as that. And our GDP is higher than that site claims
miohtama 2y ago
There is brand value in Trump. Trump is the largest meme on this planet. What should be the fair value of his fan coin?
- dotcoma 2y ago
  Zero in 4 years’ time.
hinkley 2y ago
The American dollar is also about perception of value, but via a maze of interlocking attributes that make it slow to move. A new fiat currency without a state sponsor is fragile by comparison. Always will be.
- lanstin 2y ago
  But it isn’t just the military and the taxes, it is the labor of all the people who are willing to work for US dollars that give it value. While the majority of people paid in dollars are hard working and generally honest, it seems that the majority of people paid in cryptocurrencies are scammers or criminals in one way or the other, or else financial operators. So till more people are getting paid in bitcoin or whatever I don’t see why anyone will find it something other than a speculative asset for dollar owners.
henry_bone 2y ago
That's true of everything we use as money, including precious metals. You can't eat them, live in them, use them as weapons, walk down the street in them. They have value bacause we all agree that they do and we all agree to use them as a means to exchange that value. Also, and this is important and I should have said it first, they have value because their supply is restricted. The same is true for crypto. It's fungible, private, and limited in supply. It's also independent of governments although they are doing their level best to correct that.
- losteric 2y ago
  What are you talking about? We can wear gold, make weapons out of iron, cups out of copper… coins have both a fiat face value and real tangible value (the “floor”). Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It’s entirely belief. That’s not a bad thing. MLMs can be very profitable, some turn into multi-generational institutions of faith. I own bitcoin because it’s like buying a share of the Mormon church early on. Absolutely, do it! But comparing it with gold? Come on, be real.
  - sgregnt 2y ago
    Bitcoin physical value is that, one way or the other, billions of humans got atoms in their brains, arrange in such a way that they recognize bitcoins, and have a certain understanding of it's setup... this is a lot of atoms, and is no small fit.
    - losteric 2y ago
      You're describing the belief value.
  - henry_bone 2y ago
    [flagged]
- pandaman 2y ago
  It's mostly correct except it's just the governments that agree to take gold and silver to settle debts (no, going off "gold standard" did not change this, gold and silver are still accepted as bank reserves around the world). And governments have the power to take your property to settle your debts with them. So for anyone, who is a subject of a government assigned debt (via taxation usually), gold has very practical value as it allows to keep one's property. The same is not generally true for crypto, perhaps in El Salvador they really take crypto to settle taxes but in any other country crypto only has value because of speculators.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> At least with some precious metal, it has a floor value as a function of its practical uses and abundance. Suppose the price of gold is 80% perception of value and 20% utility for making electronics etc. Then if you buy it, 80% of what you buy is perception of value. You could get the same result by buying 80% Bitcoin and 20% commodity rock salt. Is someone who buys the latter any more of a sucker? What about somebody who then decides to divest the rock salt because it has a below-market rate of return when they have no direct use for it?
NoLinkToMe 2y ago
Agreed. Even the scarcity is artificial, and based something between a contract and a gentleman's agreement, not any physical reality. That is, the bitcoin software can be changed if enough people want to, to make more of it. And you can create infinite copies of bitcoin software and call it bitcoin or something else. That's simply not true for the scarcity of gold. Finally, insofar as there are uses for the blockchain, the ostensible finite volume of bitcoin has no bearing on anything, as you don't need 'one of 21 million bitcoin' for its blockchain functionality, you can use 0.1 or 0.0001 bitcoin. It's infinitely divisible, and a small unit of bitcoin can get you blockchain functionality. And yet I've begun to put 5% of my monthly savings into it, as it seems to have become the long-term speculative asset. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere. But it really appears like an utterly ridiculous proposition, a self-fulling prophecy.
catlifeonmars 2y ago
Precious metal floor value is not immune either, since (1) it is dependent on supply and (2) specific technologies/industries that require their use may become diminished or obsoleted. Definitely a lot less volatile than something not bound by reality though.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Are you proposing that "value" is meaningful in the absence of some perceiver? All value is the perception of value. The only difference is that it's easier to find people who value precious metals, but that sort of thing always depends on where you look. One can easily imagine situations where a position at the front of a queue is more valuable to the people nearby than a gold coin. Finding value in a blockchain is no different. It's just that none of the blockchains have yet managed to situate themselves such that people are likely to value their effects. Instead they're focusing on scarcity, which is kind of silly because all of the competition is equally empowered to create artificial scarcities. I think they'll figure it out eventually.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  > Are you proposing that "value" is meaningful in the absence of some perceiver Yes. Gold conducts electricity. Bitcoin has no physically useful properties. However, I will admit a public ledger is actually probably very good for the USA so we can see all the grifting easily.
  - cle 2y ago
    Nobody cared that gold conducted electricity until very recently in human history.
PeterStuer 2y ago
And fiat currency isn't purely about perception of value? Just as not all crypto is equal, the Zimbabwean dollar isn't remotely like the Swiss frank, just as bitcoin isn't remotely like hawktua.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  > And fiat currency isn't purely about perception of value? Of course not. I don't know the laws of the country you live in, but in the US, the dollar is always acceptable as the payment of a court judgement and for the payment of taxes. That's not perception of value, that's value. All money is just IOUs, but getting an IOU from your landlord is different than getting an IOU from a stranger. You will have to pay your landlord in the future, or the landlord will send someone to physically throw you into the streets, and might be given license from the government to just take arbitrary possessions from you. An IOU from the landlord will automatically offset that. When you get IOUs from entities you don't have a ongoing financial relationship with, you need buyers who either 1) have an ongoing relationship with or are willing and able to transact with that entity, or 2) trust that they can find someone who has a relationship with that entity who will buy the IOU. 1) is value, 2) is the perception of value. Crypto has 3), in which there is no entity issuing or accepting the currency against a real debt (such as taxes or legal liabilities, which if not paid result in men in uniform hitting you with sticks, chaining you up, and locking you in a room), and no place to dump the currency other than other speculators. You can find people who believe in bitcoin, so bitcoin is liquid. But bitcoin support relies on a constant and enormous amount of marketing and lobbying, in the exact same way as "hawktwa." Crypto (thus far) only has value in that it can aid in criminal transactions (semi-privacy), and that enough wealthy people own it that they're now convincing weak governments to subsidize it. Dodging law enforcement and government handouts to the wealthy on one hand; maintaining preexisting legal obligations and paying taxes already owed on the other. Both fiat and crypto rely on government, but crypto is government subverting itself. Crypto only has value to the degree that governments allow or encourage lawbreaking and corruption. Crypto (as it is, not a hypothetically) is parasitic. > Zimbabwean dollar isn't remotely like the Swiss frank The Zim dollar is exactly like the Swiss franc, except it's harder to find people who pay Zim taxes and court judgements than people who pay Swiss taxes and court judgements. Just as hawktwa is exactly like bitcoin, except they lack the lobbyists, and the marketing is focused around a viral youtube clip. The big difference between the two classes is that you don't have to be convinced that government fiat is worth something, you know it is. The reach of crypto, outside of fraud and government graft (which is real value) is simply the reach of crypto marketing.
mandmandam 2y ago
> That’s the thing I can’t ever come to understand about crypto. It’s purely about perception of value. It's not though. It became about that, in general, but there are crypto projects out there which don't focus on hype or valuation. It is functional and useful to be able to move value worldwide for 10% of the energy of a credit card transaction, decentralized, at sub-second speed, with no fees, even when just moving tiny fractions of a cent. There are a lot of maxis and bag holders trying to prevent people from figuring that out, but sooner or later a crisis will hit and everyone will remember what crypto was about in the first place.
WinstonSmith84 2y ago
You're mixing up a bit everything. Bitcoin is totally different from Ethereum or Solana and these 2 networks are different from all the NFTs and meme coins launched on these Ethereum and Solana. By the way, if you thought that Trump was doing something illegal, which certainly sounds suspicious, well it isn't. This guy gives a good overview of the why https://x.com/wassielawyer/status/1881995797245600248 https://x.com/wassielawyer/status/1881995797245600248
- kasey_junk 2y ago
  It’s not illegal for a celebrity to launch a meme coin or collectible. It’s not as clear if the President and his direct family can do the same. Anti-bribery/corruption is the concern with the coins (just as it was with his hotels in the first administration). Not the legality of the coin. But it’s moot, this admin has decided that norms don’t constrain it and it will not allow investigations into itself. So it’s de facto legal.

mlinhares 2y ago

In this specific case its also about buying access, so I doubt he'll rug pull, he can just direct the access requests to buy something.

sali0 2y ago

The legal landscape forced the industry to be purely financial. Hopefully this changes soon.

doomroot 2y ago

There are pros and cons of cryptocurrencies as money, just like gold, which cause people to speculate on the price.

myvoiceismypass 2y ago
What are the pros of the trump coin or the melania coin?
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  A brainwashed group of drones that are willling to pay money for it. But I'm convinced most people that buy memecoins like that are thinking that there's other suckers that will buy it and make the price go up.

tenthirtyam 2y ago

> At least with some precious metal, it has a floor value as a function of its practical uses and abundance. I don't really give this argument much credence any more. If the value of, say, gold or diamonds were to drop their practical-use-floor-value, they'd be valued at probably less than 1% (maybe much less) of current value. I mean, how much gold is actually consumed by industry? And we even have industrial diamonds now. A friend argued to me that crypto is "A Terrible Thing" because its just used to fuel the (illegal) narcotics industry. At this point, I'm doubting that too - the market cap of all crpyto, and the value being transacted e.g. daily volume, has increased massively recently. Are we to believe that narcotics have caused that? I can't imagine so - more likely to me it's around 90-99% speculation which, you might well argue, is "Another Terrible Thing."

wat10000 2y ago
I think the main thing precious metals have going for them is tradition. That’s no small thing. They’ve been considered valuable for millennia, and that’s likely to continue. Bitcoin might be replaced by some other fad in a decade. It’s like if you’re betting on a religion, Christianity is more likely to last than Scientology. They might both be equally made up, but one has demonstrated staying power.
XorNot 2y ago
I mean, this is all true which is why we have fiat currencies. The UK government has consistently honoured debt for longer then the US has existed, for example.
- nine_k 2y ago
  Inflation, and especially controlled inflation, is much easier with fiat money. Most governments see it as an extremely valuable tool.
amluto 2y ago
The actual market value of diamonds is pretty low. You can pay a jeweler a lot of money for a shiny diamond, but good luck reselling it for a similar amount of money. Gold, OTOH, is fungible. You can melt it, mold it into different shapes bars, resell it, etc.
- jajko 2y ago
  With diamond jewelry, you pay mostly for the manual work of jeweler since folks don't go to jewelry shops to buy a diamond stone alone. If we talk about gold bars, no sophisticated manual work involved, just pouring molten gold into some mold on semi-industrial automated scale. If you buy sophisticated golden jewelry, you also pay ton for work that nobody else may appreciate. Sure you can get it smelted into something else, but you burn most of the original value, and some more on the change itself.
lesuorac 2y ago
> A friend argued to me that crypto is "A Terrible Thing" because its just used to fuel the (illegal) narcotics industry. My general argument against this is that Ransomware _predates_ Crypto. There's also the whole Regan airlifted Iran literal USD for helping him win a presidential election so you don't need crypto for scummy behavior.

dumah 2y ago

There’s at most a zero floor value on holdings of government debt, corporate equities, bank holdings, and any asset held by a custodian. The floor value of physical commodities with significant storage costs is negative. The market is aware of these possibilities and these risks are generally recognized as being embedded in asset prices as premiums.

halfcat 2y ago

> It’s purely about perception of value All money has always been about perception, whether we used paper, shiny rocks, or sea shells as money, it’s always been about perception. Is it real or counterfeit, do you trust the person you’re transacting with, are enough people you know using it, and will people with weapons show up to protect your money if someone else tries to steal it? The “people with weapons” part turns out to be a key component. The novel thing about crypto is that you are less reliant on the “people with weapons” to protect you and tell you what you’re allowed to do with your money, and more reliant on the “people with encryption”.

wordpad25 2y ago
No. Fiat is backed by tax base. US has more assets than debt. Additionally US is the largest economy in the world, how much would the right to tax it be worth? A lot. It's not at all just perception and influence as you claim.
- macinjosh 2y ago
  So hyperinflation only happens when the tax base disappears? Perception and influence is clearly part of the picture.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    It’s one of the core attributes. Zimbabwe wasn’t going to be raising a trillion dollars of revenue.
- abdullahkhalids 2y ago
  US economy has been second largest for over 10 years now [1]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-maddison-project-database?tab=chart&time=1935..latest https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-maddison-project-data...
  - malfist 2y ago
    I don't know where that site is pulling their data from, but not even the Chinese government claims their GDP is as high as that. And our GDP is higher than that site claims

miohtama 2y ago

There is brand value in Trump. Trump is the largest meme on this planet. What should be the fair value of his fan coin?

dotcoma 2y ago
Zero in 4 years’ time.

hinkley 2y ago

The American dollar is also about perception of value, but via a maze of interlocking attributes that make it slow to move. A new fiat currency without a state sponsor is fragile by comparison. Always will be.

lanstin 2y ago
But it isn’t just the military and the taxes, it is the labor of all the people who are willing to work for US dollars that give it value. While the majority of people paid in dollars are hard working and generally honest, it seems that the majority of people paid in cryptocurrencies are scammers or criminals in one way or the other, or else financial operators. So till more people are getting paid in bitcoin or whatever I don’t see why anyone will find it something other than a speculative asset for dollar owners.

henry_bone 2y ago

That's true of everything we use as money, including precious metals. You can't eat them, live in them, use them as weapons, walk down the street in them. They have value bacause we all agree that they do and we all agree to use them as a means to exchange that value. Also, and this is important and I should have said it first, they have value because their supply is restricted. The same is true for crypto. It's fungible, private, and limited in supply. It's also independent of governments although they are doing their level best to correct that.

losteric 2y ago
What are you talking about? We can wear gold, make weapons out of iron, cups out of copper… coins have both a fiat face value and real tangible value (the “floor”). Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It’s entirely belief. That’s not a bad thing. MLMs can be very profitable, some turn into multi-generational institutions of faith. I own bitcoin because it’s like buying a share of the Mormon church early on. Absolutely, do it! But comparing it with gold? Come on, be real.
- sgregnt 2y ago
  Bitcoin physical value is that, one way or the other, billions of humans got atoms in their brains, arrange in such a way that they recognize bitcoins, and have a certain understanding of it's setup... this is a lot of atoms, and is no small fit.
  - losteric 2y ago
    You're describing the belief value.
- henry_bone 2y ago
  [flagged]
pandaman 2y ago
It's mostly correct except it's just the governments that agree to take gold and silver to settle debts (no, going off "gold standard" did not change this, gold and silver are still accepted as bank reserves around the world). And governments have the power to take your property to settle your debts with them. So for anyone, who is a subject of a government assigned debt (via taxation usually), gold has very practical value as it allows to keep one's property. The same is not generally true for crypto, perhaps in El Salvador they really take crypto to settle taxes but in any other country crypto only has value because of speculators.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> At least with some precious metal, it has a floor value as a function of its practical uses and abundance. Suppose the price of gold is 80% perception of value and 20% utility for making electronics etc. Then if you buy it, 80% of what you buy is perception of value. You could get the same result by buying 80% Bitcoin and 20% commodity rock salt. Is someone who buys the latter any more of a sucker? What about somebody who then decides to divest the rock salt because it has a below-market rate of return when they have no direct use for it?

NoLinkToMe 2y ago

Agreed. Even the scarcity is artificial, and based something between a contract and a gentleman's agreement, not any physical reality. That is, the bitcoin software can be changed if enough people want to, to make more of it. And you can create infinite copies of bitcoin software and call it bitcoin or something else. That's simply not true for the scarcity of gold. Finally, insofar as there are uses for the blockchain, the ostensible finite volume of bitcoin has no bearing on anything, as you don't need 'one of 21 million bitcoin' for its blockchain functionality, you can use 0.1 or 0.0001 bitcoin. It's infinitely divisible, and a small unit of bitcoin can get you blockchain functionality. And yet I've begun to put 5% of my monthly savings into it, as it seems to have become the long-term speculative asset. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere. But it really appears like an utterly ridiculous proposition, a self-fulling prophecy.

catlifeonmars 2y ago

Precious metal floor value is not immune either, since (1) it is dependent on supply and (2) specific technologies/industries that require their use may become diminished or obsoleted. Definitely a lot less volatile than something not bound by reality though.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

Are you proposing that "value" is meaningful in the absence of some perceiver? All value is the perception of value. The only difference is that it's easier to find people who value precious metals, but that sort of thing always depends on where you look. One can easily imagine situations where a position at the front of a queue is more valuable to the people nearby than a gold coin. Finding value in a blockchain is no different. It's just that none of the blockchains have yet managed to situate themselves such that people are likely to value their effects. Instead they're focusing on scarcity, which is kind of silly because all of the competition is equally empowered to create artificial scarcities. I think they'll figure it out eventually.

lesuorac 2y ago
> Are you proposing that "value" is meaningful in the absence of some perceiver Yes. Gold conducts electricity. Bitcoin has no physically useful properties. However, I will admit a public ledger is actually probably very good for the USA so we can see all the grifting easily.
- cle 2y ago
  Nobody cared that gold conducted electricity until very recently in human history.

PeterStuer 2y ago

And fiat currency isn't purely about perception of value? Just as not all crypto is equal, the Zimbabwean dollar isn't remotely like the Swiss frank, just as bitcoin isn't remotely like hawktua.

pessimizer 2y ago
> And fiat currency isn't purely about perception of value? Of course not. I don't know the laws of the country you live in, but in the US, the dollar is always acceptable as the payment of a court judgement and for the payment of taxes. That's not perception of value, that's value. All money is just IOUs, but getting an IOU from your landlord is different than getting an IOU from a stranger. You will have to pay your landlord in the future, or the landlord will send someone to physically throw you into the streets, and might be given license from the government to just take arbitrary possessions from you. An IOU from the landlord will automatically offset that. When you get IOUs from entities you don't have a ongoing financial relationship with, you need buyers who either 1) have an ongoing relationship with or are willing and able to transact with that entity, or 2) trust that they can find someone who has a relationship with that entity who will buy the IOU. 1) is value, 2) is the perception of value. Crypto has 3), in which there is no entity issuing or accepting the currency against a real debt (such as taxes or legal liabilities, which if not paid result in men in uniform hitting you with sticks, chaining you up, and locking you in a room), and no place to dump the currency other than other speculators. You can find people who believe in bitcoin, so bitcoin is liquid. But bitcoin support relies on a constant and enormous amount of marketing and lobbying, in the exact same way as "hawktwa." Crypto (thus far) only has value in that it can aid in criminal transactions (semi-privacy), and that enough wealthy people own it that they're now convincing weak governments to subsidize it. Dodging law enforcement and government handouts to the wealthy on one hand; maintaining preexisting legal obligations and paying taxes already owed on the other. Both fiat and crypto rely on government, but crypto is government subverting itself. Crypto only has value to the degree that governments allow or encourage lawbreaking and corruption. Crypto (as it is, not a hypothetically) is parasitic. > Zimbabwean dollar isn't remotely like the Swiss frank The Zim dollar is exactly like the Swiss franc, except it's harder to find people who pay Zim taxes and court judgements than people who pay Swiss taxes and court judgements. Just as hawktwa is exactly like bitcoin, except they lack the lobbyists, and the marketing is focused around a viral youtube clip. The big difference between the two classes is that you don't have to be convinced that government fiat is worth something, you know it is. The reach of crypto, outside of fraud and government graft (which is real value) is simply the reach of crypto marketing.

mandmandam 2y ago

> That’s the thing I can’t ever come to understand about crypto. It’s purely about perception of value. It's not though. It became about that, in general, but there are crypto projects out there which don't focus on hype or valuation. It is functional and useful to be able to move value worldwide for 10% of the energy of a credit card transaction, decentralized, at sub-second speed, with no fees, even when just moving tiny fractions of a cent. There are a lot of maxis and bag holders trying to prevent people from figuring that out, but sooner or later a crisis will hit and everyone will remember what crypto was about in the first place.

WinstonSmith84 2y ago

You're mixing up a bit everything. Bitcoin is totally different from Ethereum or Solana and these 2 networks are different from all the NFTs and meme coins launched on these Ethereum and Solana. By the way, if you thought that Trump was doing something illegal, which certainly sounds suspicious, well it isn't. This guy gives a good overview of the why https://x.com/wassielawyer/status/1881995797245600248 https://x.com/wassielawyer/status/1881995797245600248

kasey_junk 2y ago
It’s not illegal for a celebrity to launch a meme coin or collectible. It’s not as clear if the President and his direct family can do the same. Anti-bribery/corruption is the concern with the coins (just as it was with his hotels in the first administration). Not the legality of the coin. But it’s moot, this admin has decided that norms don’t constrain it and it will not allow investigations into itself. So it’s de facto legal.