Oh I understand them fully. People want a way to make digital assets, which can be copied for a virtually nil marginal cost, to become scarce so money can be made selling it. So they invent artificial scarcity for digital assets using mathematics, except the original asset still has a nil copying cost unless everyone pretends it doesn't. Only the mathematics is scarce.
Cryptocurrency is exactly the same. Everyone agrees the math is scarce and there is only one of each coin. Unless... you copy all the coins. And then you get forks of Bitcoins like Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin SV (all of these are real). And now you have two copies of the same mathematical asset that both have some value. A totally scarce asset unless you can convince enough people to fork, and now you have more assets. But with the invisible hand of the market, wouldn't the net value be the same, because the utility is split? Nope. Not if the utility is market speculation.
The problem I have is that I think I could make a lot of money on these speculative assets. It just feels distasteful. Putting aside all of the environmental concerns of BTC for a minute, and aside all of the money laundering, and aside all the theft, bitcoins are a pretty cool idea. But even with those gone, the whole speculation feels stupid, because people are not buying cryptocurrencies for their utility, they are buying for speculation, because the asset is untethered to any physical good and can therefore cost as much as anything. NFTs at this moment are basically an art project except you add back in the concerns about theft and money laundering.
I'm honestly at the point where I could be making more money on investments, but I feel like most of the things I could make money on are distasteful to me. I don't want to make money by pretending like a cryptographic hash in a blockchain is worth something. I don't want to make money by investing in stocks of companies that treat their employees like shit, and for publicly traded companies that's almost all of them. I think it's fairly hard to be rich and be a moral person.
Cryptocurrency is exactly the same. Everyone agrees the math is scarce and there is only one of each coin. Unless... you copy all the coins. And then you get forks of Bitcoins like Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin SV (all of these are real). And now you have two copies of the same mathematical asset that both have some value. A totally scarce asset unless you can convince enough people to fork, and now you have more assets. But with the invisible hand of the market, wouldn't the net value be the same, because the utility is split? Nope. Not if the utility is market speculation.
The problem I have is that I think I could make a lot of money on these speculative assets. It just feels distasteful. Putting aside all of the environmental concerns of BTC for a minute, and aside all of the money laundering, and aside all the theft, bitcoins are a pretty cool idea. But even with those gone, the whole speculation feels stupid, because people are not buying cryptocurrencies for their utility, they are buying for speculation, because the asset is untethered to any physical good and can therefore cost as much as anything. NFTs at this moment are basically an art project except you add back in the concerns about theft and money laundering.
I'm honestly at the point where I could be making more money on investments, but I feel like most of the things I could make money on are distasteful to me. I don't want to make money by pretending like a cryptographic hash in a blockchain is worth something. I don't want to make money by investing in stocks of companies that treat their employees like shit, and for publicly traded companies that's almost all of them. I think it's fairly hard to be rich and be a moral person.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto