Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari Calls DOGE a Ponzi Scheme (cointelegraph.com) 103
The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Neel Kashkari, took a jab at Dogecoin (DOGE) last week by referring to the memecoin as a Ponzi scheme, upping his rhetoric against cryptocurrencies. Cointelegraph reports: Kashkari's comments were in response to a LinkedIn poll by Paul Grewal, the chief legal officer and corporate secretary of Coinbase, who asked his connections about the proper way to pronounce "Doge." "The right pronunciation is pon-zi," Kashkari quipped.
This isn't the first time Kashkari has taken aim at cryptocurrencies. In February 2020, he said digital assets like Bitcoin (BTC) lack the basic tenants of a stable currency and praised the Securities and Exchange Commission for "cracking down" on initial coin offerings. Kashkari is not a member of this year's Federal Open Market Committee, the group responsible for setting United States monetary policy. The Minneapolis branch of the Fed will serve as an alternate FOMC member in 2022 before rotating back onto the committee as a voting member in 2023.
This isn't the first time Kashkari has taken aim at cryptocurrencies. In February 2020, he said digital assets like Bitcoin (BTC) lack the basic tenants of a stable currency and praised the Securities and Exchange Commission for "cracking down" on initial coin offerings. Kashkari is not a member of this year's Federal Open Market Committee, the group responsible for setting United States monetary policy. The Minneapolis branch of the Fed will serve as an alternate FOMC member in 2022 before rotating back onto the committee as a voting member in 2023.
Pump and Dump cult (Score:4, Insightful)
Doge is irrelevant but the Fed is the real ponzi! (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Austerity, no one wants that
2. Default, can’t do that
3. Redistribution (taxes run out)
4. Debasement (printing)
Governments will always choose #4, plan accordingly
https://twitter.com/1MarkMoss/... [twitter.com]
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You forgot (2) options: ...
- sell assets, ie Louisiana, Alaska,
- plunder assets, ie war, and spoils of war
Re:Doge is irrelevant but the Fed is the real ponz (Score:4, Insightful)
True... but the OP is still correct that almost certainly in the case of the USA, at least? They'll opt for option 4.
Selling assets like individual states isn't really viable. Who would we sell them to? Obvious buyers would be countries like China or maybe Saudi Arabia who have already invested in some of our manufacturing, banking and real-estate. But buying a state wholesale from the USA would imply they get to govern it their own way too -- which would prompt another civil war.
Plundering assets via war is a strategy we've collectively agreed is uncivilized and goes against our principles as a nation. (People still constantly complain that America "belongs to the native Americans" and was plundered to begin with. That's despite the fact we've gone on to make quite a few concessions to them, including giving them big swaths of land under their own governance. Not likely most would agree to fight to steal land and resources from other countries just because our own government went broke, mis-managing everything.)
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Plundering assets via war is a strategy we've collectively agreed is uncivilized and goes against our principles as a nation
Not likely most would agree to fight to steal land and resources from other countries just because our own government went broke, mis-managing everything
Tell them do it or your kids will starve. With the right propoganda they'll get over it and quickly.
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Plundering assets via war is a strategy we've collectively agreed is uncivilized and goes against our principles as a nation.
You're right that it's uncivilised in the sense that it's inhumane & a crime against humanity. However, the USA was founded on the principle of manifest destiny & the resulting genocide & perpetual slavery, which are still vehemently defended or denied by members of your elected leadership. It's very much at the core of your principles as a former British & now independent colony.
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> Plundering assets via war is a strategy we've collectively agreed is uncivilized and goes against our principles as a nation.
Unless we 'think' there are WMDs, then it's justified? Then when we find out the intel was bad, we still take the oil as compensation.
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But the cryptocoin ponzi schemes fix none of this. The only reason to point out the faults in the federal reserve is as an excuse to say "if they cheat a little, then we should be allowed to run our scam too!"
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There are only 4 options at the end of the debt credit cycle 1. Austerity, no one wants that 2. Default, can’t do that 3. Redistribution (taxes run out) 4. Debasement (printing)
You think as if money is in short supply. It isn't. We're awash with it. Far too much of the stuff. If you want the majority of the people to have more money, the Fed can issue it to them, from thin air, just like that. If you want the hyper-rich to have less money, the IRS can tax it from them. A reasonable, humane balance restored. That's how money works on a national/macroeconomic scale.
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Not a Ponzi scheme (Score:3, Insightful)
This is an attention seeker making a headline.
Ponzi schemes require deception. Doge has deceived no one. If anything it's the opposite.
You can't credibly expand the definition of a Ponzi scheme enough to include Doge without also encompassing all manner of perfectly legal, above board investment actively that goes on routinely.
Obviously that won't matter when the Doge bubble pops and the 'investors' that lose start whining to their lawyers and the political class — already annoyed that something emerged independent of their preferred narratives — discovers an opportunity to expand their power and criminalize more stuff. But it still won't be Ponzi scheme.
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Ponzi schemes require deception. Doge has deceived no one. If anything it's the opposite.
Yeah, sure. All those diamond hand memes and "TO THE MOON" rockets from the likes of Musk et al surely had nothing to do with it.
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Diamond hands isn't just a phrase. It requires years of holding. If you had even 5k worth of Doge last year it would be worth more than 200k right now even after it "crashed".
Re: Not a Ponzi scheme (Score:3)
For you to make money, someone else has to lose money. That's how it works with blockchain coins. There's no operating profit paying for dividends, no input of value into the system besides what people pay for it (or, at least, no other input of value people can get back. Those mining cycles are gone, "investors" pay for their payouts too).
So statements like this are basically a lie. You won't get back what you paid until 1. almost everyone else has accepted they won't get it back, and cut their losses/lost
That's not the definition of a Ponzi scheme (Score:5, Insightful)
You fell for GP trying to redefine what a Ponzi scheme is.
A Ponzi scheme is when there is no underlying investment; buyers can get paid only when new buyers come in (or existing ones buy more).
An investment is when you put resources (money) into acquiring an income-producing asset, such as ships, factories, chip fabs, or ever when you invest in your education. The money is used to get something which produces.
A Ponzi scheme is when people are expecting to make money, but there is nothing that produces money - they can do so only if there is a "greater fool".
A scheme that takes someone's money based on deception is the definition of *fraud*. That's not the definition of a Ponzi scheme.
If you put money into Doge, do you become an owner of a farm, a factory, an R&D lab, or something else that produces useful output? If so, that's an investment. If not, and you're expecting to make money based on someone else buying in, it's a Ponzi scheme.
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A Ponzi scheme is when there is no underlying investment; buyers can get paid only when new buyers come in (or existing ones buy more).
Broadly speaking I'd say this is accurate, although I think you're glossing over one key point. In a Ponzi scheme, monies received from today's 'investors' are used to pay the dividends of previous 'investors'. Directly.
An investment is when you put resources (money) into acquiring an income-producing asset, such as ships, factories, chip fabs, or ever when you invest in your education. The money is used to get something which produces.
This, however, is a limited definition of an investment. People invest in all sorts of things which are not related to production: art and other collectibles being just one obvious example. People buy them with the expectation that the value will increase, making it an investment in their fu
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All good points.
If you put money into Doge, do you become an owner of a farm, a factory, an R&D lab, or something else that produces useful output? If so, that's an investment. If not, and you're expecting to make money based on someone else buying in, it's a Ponzi scheme.
I'm afraid I disagree. The above characterisation omits several classes of both assets and scams.
Whilst I am loathe to refer to any of this new 'class' of non-producing, non-physical 'objects' as assets, even if preceded by the word digital, it strikes me as more appropriate to view them as akin to "objet d'art" than it does to either traditional assets, as you define them, or as simply a scam, specifically a Ponzi scheme. Sure the realisable value, going forwards, is dependent on someone else being willing to buy whatever it is you have, but that's a principle that applies across the board. Whether what you're selling is practical or useful or productive is not the defining factor in whether it's a scam or not.
Investment-wise, crypto-currencies have the potential be be similar to foreign currencies, the values of which are largely set by the overall economies of the counties using those currencies. If you correctly deduce (or guess) that Canada's economy is going to do much better in the future (compared to your country) than most other people think it will do, then you can purchase a bunch of Canadian dollars now and when the rest of the market figures out the same thing, the value of the Canadia
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PS:
> If you correctly deduce (or guess) that Canada's economy is going to do much better in the future (compared to your country) than most other people think it will do, then you can purchase a bunch of Canadian dollars now
The United States has a negative balance of trade and a debt ratio consistently well over 100% so the US currency does better when the economy is better.
Canada has a positive balance of trade and a somewhat lower debt most of the time, so the CAD tends to do better when the economy i
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> > If you put money into Doge, do you become an owner of a farm, a factory, an R&D lab, or something else that produces useful output? If so, that's an investment. If not, and you're expecting to make money based on someone else buying in, it's a Ponzi scheme.
> I'm afraid I disagree. The above characterisation omits several classes of both assets and scams.
You mentioned "scams" a couple of times. I think it's useful when defining terms like "Ponzi scheme" to stay focused on defining that term
To clarify - people fly to the Louvre (Score:2)
It just occurred to me how I could have said part of that much more clearly.
People travel all the way from the United States to France in order to go to the Louvre and see the art. So clearly seeing the art is valuable to them. Fine art produces something valuable, people *want* something that they get from it as it hangs on the wall. So it is a productive asset. It produces whatever those people come to get from it.
People don't go to museums to see Doge. A Dogecoin sitting there produces nothing.
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A Dogecoin sitting there produces nothing.
I find myself wondering how you think 'intellectual property' fits into things. After all, does a patent produce anything? Is one required to produce something? And yet, apparently, they have value...
I would hope you'd answer "no" to these (before, I suspect, giving a rationale as to why patents are different - e.g. legal standing & protections, etc.). However, I raise this to highlight that what the world considers an 'asset' is broader than the classes you have listed.
My point, in using an analogy wit
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> My point, in using an analogy with fine art, was that 'value' for many things is subjective
The value of *anything* is subjective. That's why we can buy and sell things. You'll buy X from me, and I'll sell it, if you value it more than I do. Anything purchased indicates that the buyer values the thing more than they value the money, while the seller values the money more.
We can *objectively* measure how much people *subjectively* value things by looking at things like the price they sell for. Of I sell
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To directly address your first question, when Master of Puppets comes on the radio, people jam out in their cars. After turning the volume way up. It produces something alright, every time it's played.
At the other end of that transaction, Metallica makes money from their song - it produces income.
Clearly you're upset that Metallica owns their work, but that doesn't change the fact that they do, in fact, own it.
I know, I know, I know. It's unfair that they own the stuff they make. It's a gross injustice that
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I do enjoy our conversations, but...
Clearly you're upset that Metallica owns their work, but that doesn't change the fact that they do, in fact, own it.
I know, I know, I know. It's unfair that they own the stuff they make. It's a gross injustice that in order to hear that particular song, you have first hear an ad for the frozen custard place. (Or pay a whole dollar to hear it any time you want, ad free). They should be forced to work for free, I know.
...please don't put words into my mouth. My point was simply that the class of assets commonly known as intellectual property does not fit into any of the, as I read it complete list of, classes you listed as productive assets. By the logic you were using that makes intellectual property a scam. I was simply pointing out that that made your list incomplete, hence your conclusion was flawed.
For the record, as someone who produces a fair amount of both copyrighted and 'copy
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Sorry I made that assumption, wrongly.
When somebody on Slashdot drags "intellectual property" into an unrelated conversation, you know where that's normally going.
But yeah I would bet that your software produces something good. Making it a the software a productive asset. Some people think you shouldn't own your software, but you do. It seems to me that's a productive asset that you own. You *invested* resources into making something that produces good over time.
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Except that very few people who tout crypto are up-front about the power cost of maintaining (not mining) the network, which generally makes it completely unsustainable. With Bitcoin its running around 700kWh, and with the average commercial cost of electricity being 11c/kWh, that puts the transaction fee at $77. Right now that's being subsidized by users, like the uber driver who's making mad bank if you ignore the cost of gas, wear and tear, and depreciation. That won't - can't - last.
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With Bitcoin its running around 700kWh
Here [ge.com] is a GE 7 frame gas turbine. Based on your kWh figure one of those makes enough power to run 13 bitcoin networks. There are thousands of these running all over the planet.
Your premise that the cost of electrical power supply imperils Bitcoin is farcically wrong and we're not even talking about Bitcoin.
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Do you have the source for the 700 kWh per transaction figure?
Historically, the actual transaction fee has been very volatile, going up during times of high activity and down during lower activity. It is $4.80 right now. It has been less than a dollar for stretches of several months as recently as 2020.
Here is a chart:
https://bitinfocharts.com/comp... [bitinfocharts.com]
As I explained elsewhere, the bitcoin network does not require large amounts of energy to run. It is designed so that its operation is insensitive to increased
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That cost is per transaction. So your $50 million, bus sized turbine, when hooked up to an industrial scale source of natural gas, can churn out something like 130 transactions per second.
Warning: calculation is half-assed. Do not use for applications requiring full ass or better.
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* per hour.
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That energy is not required to maintain the network. The "difficulty" is adjustable over many orders of magnitude. As miners go offline, the difficulty will be reduced and the kWh required will decrease (potentially by many orders of magnitude). Bitcoin is designed so that the block creation rate remains relatively constant irrespective of the hash power of the network. Said another way, when hash capacity is added to the system, the difficulty goes up.
For perspective, in 2014, you would have to try around
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Also, 700 kWh sounds awfully high to me for a single transaction. Do you have a source?
That figure is actually way off. A single Bitcoin transaction requires ~1600 kWh, end to end: https://digiconomist.net/bitco... [digiconomist.net]
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More barely sourced fearmongering stuff. If someone came in and claimed it was 3200 kWh, would you be able to argue with them?
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Yes. The math for this is straightforward and can be calculated from the total hashrate for the BTC network.
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Thank you! Seems like the methodology is reasonable. I would just need to double check that the source numbers and arithmetic are correct. But if they aren't, I am pretty sure someone would have keyed into that by now. That is an eye opener!
I still quibble in that the energy is
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Yeah. If only slashdot allowed editing, I would fix it.
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This is exactly why bitcoin will continue to have ridiculous energy usage per transaction.
As long as the value of bitcoins created by mining exceeds the cost of electricity + capital cost of hardware, there is an incentive to keep throwing more hardware and electricity at the mining.
The only way to make bitcoin energy efficient is to reduce the mining reward.
Right now, that reward is 6.25 BTC per block - about $200,000 USD at time of posting. That means there is an incentive for miners to spend up to this m
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Yeah. One way for the reward to go down would be for bitcoin to crash vs other currencies. That would immediately reduce the incentive people have to mine. Another way would be for it to halve again, but that is not until 2024. As long as bitcoin remains very valuable the incentive to mine will remain very high. Another way to reduce the per transaction energy would be to put more transactions in each block, I guess. That doesn't seem likely.
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The Doge bubble will never pop, because since the beginning the value of a Dogecoin has always been 1:1 with other Dogecoins.
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There is plenty of deception going on. All the lies about these being "currencies" and the claims about this being the "future" and even the claims as to "anonymity" often make, all plain, direct deception. Of course, it is not _good_ deception, but the "investors" seem to be even more stupid than the classical Ponzi targets.
Incidentally, you are one of the liars that push the deception here.
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Ponzi schemes require deception. Doge has deceived no one. If anything it's the opposite.
You can't credibly expand the definition of a Ponzi scheme enough to include Doge without also encompassing all manner of perfectly legal, above board investment actively that goes on routinely.
Hmm. I think if anything "Ponzi scheme" hasn't been applied liberally enough. You're right that many above board investment activities share the same attributes as Ponzi schemes. To me this reveals that perhaps the line for Ponzi schemes isn't well defined, and that many so-called legitimate investments are more insidious than we realize.
Oxford defines Ponzi schemes this way:
a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors.
This is exactly how all cryptocurrency works. The first investors make absurd wealth off the backs of later investors. And on and on d
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Well, of course it's not a Ponzi scheme.
What Doge really is a a Pump and Dump scheme lead by Elon Musk. You would think that he would have learned his lesson from that "Funding Secured" Tweet a few years ago, but I guess not.
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"Ponzi schemes require deception. "
Deception can come both externally and internally. Normal Ponzi schemes require external deception from the perpetrator because most people are unable to supply enough self-deception.
The true mark is the one that thinks they are in on the con.
I'm not saying he's wrong (Score:3)
But maybe less disingenuous than say "Wall Street" or the Fed itself.
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I once suggested on slashdot the stock market is a long-running ponzi because dividends return very little compared to what's put in. I got modded down to hell for that.
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Social security is a multi-generational ponzi or wealth transfer scheme. Anyone under like 30 or 40 today is a bagholder.
The first person to ever receive social security (Ida May Fuller) put in like 20 bucks over a period of two or three years near the end of her career then withdrew like $20k over the rest of her life (she lived to a ripe old age). The early participants got way more than they ever put in, even if you use fair accounting that accounts for value increasing due to interest accumulation.
This
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That is the funny about politics in this country. If 'sustainability' is something that is important to you Social Security really should be the first thing in your cross hairs! So much of our economy implicitly depends on unlimited growth, but Social Security does EXPLICITLY so. More over unlike other elements that growth because of the way its structured pretty much MUST come from more contributors, you cant excuse it the irrationality of it with arguments that growth may instead come from other sources
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A sort of UBI for persons over a certain age simply paid for out of general funds would be a lot more sensible. The current scheme is that the more your pay in the greater the benefit you receive. Of course you don't control how much you pay in (not directly anyway). The higherest earners pay in the most but they also usually over the course of their period of receiving benefits draw a amount out that is disproportionately greater compared with the disparity in contributions between them and lower contribu
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I am not arguing for or against social security. But it was set up so that it paid out a lot of money to people who contributed only for a very short time. It was also set up in such a way that from the very beginning, some of the immediate contributions would be used to pay beneficiaries of the program, and so that it would eventually become insolvent. If you don't want to call it a ponzi scheme that is fine. But it enriched people alive at the time it was created and has left a giant gaping debt for us no
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Well, it's not a ponzi scheme because you can pull your money back out. Ie, invest in IBM, they pay regular dividends, later on you get frustrated and sell it and buy Siemens instead. Not a scam, and money was actually made. That used to be the normal way that the stock market worked most of the time - you invested in quality companies while also doing some speculating on up-and-comers.
Ponzi means that you pay off early investors with the investments from the later investors. The early investors then cl
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After it lost 90% of its value. A technicality.
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"Worth" is in the eye of the beholder, making it a psychology game.
Whereas paper... (Score:2)
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Except that the gold standard was never a ponzi scheme, and neither is using a bank. Assuming no crash in the economy, you should be able to pull out the money you put in. Also the US dollar was not invented on a whim with no value attached to it in the hopes that if it catches on that the inventors can become fabulously wealthy.
Trying to equate natural currencies with cryptocurrencies is almost always flawed, and usually because of too much idealism clouding out the pragmatism, or too much anti-government
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Over generalizing (Score:1)
Of all the cryptotokens, Doge is the least Ponzi-like. It was explicitly a joke when it was created and has never tried to obscure the fact. The Ponzi scheme fraud depends on people thinking what they are buying is valuable, not humorous. Anyone who thinks a token whose front man is a Shiba Inu is valuable is not a competent adult.
Admittedly the dog appears more trustworthy than some of the two-legged front men in the crypto 'industry'...
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I'm thinking of forming Ponzicoin, and when I finally pull the plug, bilk investors, and buy an island (not nec. in that order), in court I just point out that the name of the product sufficiently informs investors about what it is.
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Darn Webtubes! They also beat me to Lego porn.
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Ponzi in that the originators of the currency retained some current for themselves so that as the price rises so does their own personal currency's value. Ponzi means that early investors, including the originators, are paid off by later investors (or speculators in this case). Did the creator of Bitcoin really earn a billion dollars from hard work? Even Warren Buffet had to actually run and invest in companies to make his money; maybe he was paid more than he should have been, but he owns and invests in
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Going ad hominem because you do not have facts? Figures.
In actual reality, crypto-"currencies" are a non-classical Ponzi-scheme, but they share enough characteristics that the name can be used with some additional explanation. For example, the crowd cheering and deriding any and all criticism with no understanding of what is actually going on is fully classical Ponzi.
Ponzi Scheme (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're being silly, the dollar has been working fine. Meanwhile, crypto "coins" fail all the tests of money, they're just gambling tokens.
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You're confused, bitcoin is not a currency, fails the tests of money.
Inflation isn't happening because velocity is slow. When velocity picks up Fed will decrease supply, easy peasy. Study economics, then argue.
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The only thing keeping the dollar from becoming another DogeCoin is " legal tender for all debts, public and private". And the US Marines threatening to hang anyone who trades oil for currencies other than the dollar.
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nonsense sound bite/meme, oil can and is bought with other currencies such as Yuan and Euro. Do you imagine India buys oil from Iran in dollars? hint, no they don't, they use Rupees
Wait... (Score:4, Interesting)
Do the people 'promoting' Doge take it in any non-sardonic tone? I'm sure there's some - but not many I've seen at least.
I mean - I'm not much of a cryptocurrency guy - don't trade in any of them - but I recognize the role in the market Dogecoin has - it's the joke currency, just copypasted from the code of other coins.
Like - I'm sure some folks are doing the normal 'pump' part of pump and dump - but that part is a flaw in the market, not in Doge.
Doge is a garbage 'currency'. It's supposed to be. It's also a functional parody of a currency.
Sure - some folks will give a serious 'aw, man' when if the lose 90% of the value when it crashes or whatever - but I don't think many of them don't expect that.
If anything, I think those pushing seriously against it as a target really just don't like meme culture, or youth interests in general - which is definitely understandable and a normal aspect of cultural divides - but kind of the point of the parody is to say that every flaw in Doge is actually a pointed example of what is wrong with investment culture in general.
And again - I roll my eyes at all crypto and most market-based decisions.
None of them are a good way to decide the value of anything in a serious culture. Sure - open trading is part of value - but it's also caused a huge history of crashes and resource shortages over time. It's always needed oversight, since the motivation to play the system is so high, and well rewarded. There's much better ways to decide all of that, in my limited opinion.
In any reasonable culture that cares about a productive future, those motivations should be understood, and obviated in a lot of ways, while still having a healthy trading culture.
But we're so enraptured by the ability to 'play' the most destructive options with the market, that we think of that as the heart of the market, while it's always been the worst part.
So - I'm biased - I'm against crypto and all it stands for, but am interested in a living parody example, and find only targeting that example to be missing the whole point of WHY it is bad, because of what it's showing you.
Ryan Fenton
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>>Good post, I appreciate your points. However, don't you find value in the work being done to create a network that can be trusted by transacting strangers and theoretically the cost to use said network (electricity, depreciating hardware, etc.) will become a commodity? Meaning, the protocols being built will result in the network (hopefully) having no ability to be captured by centralized players.
Well, sure - but I think the whole idea of treating cryptography as a form of a 'trust chain' as silly -
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Capturing happens by show of force, man. If government declares a currency illegal to own and throws people in jail for owning it, no amount of protocol sophistication is going to work around that.
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Dogecoin may be a step up from the traditional scam cyrptocurrencies, but it's still not a legitimate as collectable beanie babies :-)
So what? (Score:2)
Gambling is also legal. The financial world itself is an utterly corrupt scam rigged by our wealthy masters for whom we wage wars and much more. The world is utterly evil and utterly hopeless because humanity is both those thiings, so smart people take profit from fools at every opportunity.
There's no reason to respect anything except profit, and with open Ponzi schemes no one who doesn't deserve to get fucked will be fucked. It's perfect because it confines idiots and people who deserve to profit from idio
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Explaining reality is not "being against" (Score:2)
I wish the stupid reporting on crypto-"currencies" would stop.
So.... (Score:1)
the fact he sees fit to even discuss it... (Score:2)
...suggests he doesn't know what he's talking about. The people who support it won't listen (or dismiss his comments outright anyway) and for the people who don't really know about it now the Fed is discussing it...he's just given it some credibility by feebly dismissing it.
It - and any other cryptocurrency - is a sham of fake value. Then again, so is fiat paper currency not backed by anything. We consensually agree on what a dollar is, and is worth. Intrinsically, there's nothing stopping us considerin
Either lying or stupid. (Score:1)