"Crypto is laughably easy for a single person to manipulate. Just look at how much it's fluctuated recently based on a few Elon Musk tweets."
— A Kinky Jackelope on antisocial media
Well, the volatility is a symptom of such a small number of people HODLing. The more people get on board and stop making emotions-based decisions any time a bit of FUD does the rounds, the better for us all. One advantage for those of us with experience, though, is that every time the noobs panic-sell and the price dips, we get to pick up more crypto at a reduced price. It might take a while, but it always recovers, if not moves past the prior low. The trick is to look at by how much the value increases between dips/lows, not between peaks/highs. If it's not doing that, then there's a problem and you should look elsewhere. Besides, 1 BTC is always going to be 1 BTC, irrespective of what the USD cost is. Stop thinking about it in terms of its relation to fiat.
OK, so EM doesn't like BTC. That's perfectly fine; he doesn't have to. It's definitely the first one, but it's not the only crypto option. There are literally over a thousand other cryptos to choose from, most of which aim to solve specific socio-economic problems. Read their white/yellow papers to find their purpose. If they don't have such a document, you can be pretty sure that the purpose is solely for their creators to stage a rug pull in order to get rich quickly. Do your own research, of course.
Those of us who're heavily invested and HODLing long-term are not going to be easily dissuaded or discouraged by just one (admittedly influential) egotistical rich guy (or a handful of them) talking out of his/their naught(s). Ignore him/them and you won't have to pay such a high psychic price as a consequence of one or more fevered egos posting drivel.
That wasn't the end of the conversation, of course. As was to be expected, I then had to debunk a whole lot of FUD and misinformation from idiots who either don't read or don't understand what they read.
... a small number of people at the top hold a vast majority of the coins.
Yeah, centralisation is definitely a problem, which is exactly why more people need to get with the program and exchange their fiat for crypto. The more people get involved, the more distributed it becomes. That's not a design flaw or a bug; it's a feature. A case in point of centralisation is Tron (TRX), for example. If I'm not mistaken, Justin Sun (the creator) holds most (if not all) of the nodes on the mainnet. However, most people with any sense aren't HODLing TRX or interested in working with him. Another case is Tether (TUSD/TAUX) being owned/operated by a single company (Tether LTD), which is why most of the people interested in stablecoins have dropped it in favour of BUSD, TUSD or USDC.
... once again that businesses don't want to accept it. What's stopping Elon Musk from 69ing Bitcoin payments again to dip the price, scoop up more, then accepting payments again to see it shoot back up?
Well, that's the businesses' problem for being dinosaurs who either can't see the incoming meteor or downplay the significance of it. We can either get crypto-backed Visa credit cards until they come on board, or we can simply refuse to deal with them until they do. Do we not have freedom of choice in a free market? (Yes, this is a rhetorical question. While the majority of the world still uses fiat, our choices remain restricted by a few individuals. The cryptosphere is the same only because it is young and participated in by fewer members/adopters than some nations' populations. When you have hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of people with some savvy and some skin in the game, one or two whales aren't going to be making waves in the ocean instead of a lake every time one of them changes direction.)
Its hard to democratize the currency when a number of people can't even afford a full coin.
False, even if you're specifically looking at Bitcoin/BTC (which has a limited supply of 21 million; of course there are not enough for everyone) and Ethereum/ETH (which has no hard cap unless I'm mistaken, without taking into account ERC-20 elastic-supply tokens like Ampleforth/AMPL). Bitcoin has a number of limitations, certainly, but that's to be expected as it's the first of its kind and really a proof-of-concept technology subject to the rules and pitfalls of all technology projects. A number of very clever people have come along, taken a hard look at it, seen flaws and sought to remedy them with crypto solutions of their own. Of course, no technology or solution is perfect, hence the proliferation of currencies. Also, you're ignoring the fact that it's possible to get started with a fairly small amount invested in a number of altcoins, diversify your portfolio, farm/stake them long term and trade the earned rewards for one or more of the bigger/more popular currencies.
And those thousands of other cryptos have zero buying power; most are just trading in FIAT currency for gambling chips that you hope will shoot up so you can exchange them back for a higher value of FIAT currency.
Well, that is a short-sighted tactic of noobs, idiots and (quite literally, losers) who fail to grasp the purpose of crypto, but are trying to get rich quick. Once you invest enough to be able to go full crypto (admittedly a gargantuan amount for the average person), forget about fiat and the exchange price. Otherwise, you're only going to cause yourself undue stress. 1BTC will always be 1BTC, irrespective of what the USD, GBP or EUR does. Why? Because it's not subject to devaluation/inflation like fiat is.
@NoTrueScotman LOL. IDK in what world you live if a five-to-ten year investment is "short term".
crypto is a huge strain on the environment. It’s a complete waste of energy. Instead of killing the environment, push people to vote for legislators that aren’t pushing this agenda.
@NonspecificTask Again, this is bogus, yet more FUD by people who haven't bothered to read the research. The entire crypto mining community uses far less energy than does America, the third-most energy-hungry in the world and alst the third major contributor towards greenhouse gas emissions in the world. A lot of the energy we do use also happens to be green (hydroelectric and wind turbines, mainly, if I'm not mistaken). However, I don't see much happening on the front of changing the USA's country's energy consumption or policies in order to use more sustainable/renewable resources, so perhaps if people pulled their heads out of their naughts and spent their energy campaigning/lobbying appropriately ...
Seriously, unless you've got an actual argument instead of FUD that's been debunked more than once, I'm not interested in further discussion.
All of this, of course, is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand (OF banning pornographic content from October) and is getting us nowhere in the direction of what to do about it, other than jump onto the CumRocket and Spankchain networks/sites.
Post photo/thumbnail by Pixabay on/from Pexels
