The actors change, but it's the same play over and over again. Roughly once every four years. People with addiction problems and their influencer-enablers find "crypto" and go absolutely apeshit over it. Even after the inevitable crash, those who lose everything are mainly concerned with how to make it back.
> Roy started spending all his time watching YouTube videos and speaking to other cryptocurrency enthusiasts in private groups on the messaging app Telegram.
So I don't really get this article. Let's take out the human psychological factor such as addiction and gambling for a second.
Similar things can be said to traditional stock crash as well, can it not? Before the 'crypto-mania', the amateur investors would read a few posts/websites or gain influence from what their friends/peers/social groups would recite about [insert certain stock] and when it crashed, this is the same cycle.
My point is without actually spending time conducting deeper research and really understanding the technology(topic), this is will happen to anyone(amateurs).
Crypto’s “improvements” over traditional stocks include:
* lack of regulation comes with lack of enforcement of rules as well. If you get ripped out, there’s no one that can help you, that is by design.
* cult-like behaviour and manipulation. Crypto users are lured into forums that use their own language and memes (“line goes up”), there’s a strong dense of “us” versus “the rest”, commenting isolation. Celebrities and influencers are paid to promote. People in these groups start following “advice” and end up “having to buy in”… and then the head of the pyramid cashes out, and they are left without anything.
I’m not saying this kind of thing doesn’t happen in traditional finance, but crypto has taken it to the next level.
> My point is without actually spending time conducting deeper research and really understanding the technology(topic), this is will happen to anyone(amateurs).
I don't know if that's true. Most amateurs I know who invested in the stock market are relatively okay. They didn't i) put their entire life savings into it cause they didn't believe it was going to be the future of the world due to some weird cult-like behavior and ii) stocks didn't collapse 99% or whatever a lot of these shitcoins did. Most amateurs don't make money in stocks but they aren't wiped out either.
Well, sure humans are like that. But at least with stocks there’s some societal benefits (e.g., the money Google has raised via equity sales has been used to make the worlds best search engine).
With crypto, people are wasting their time in things that don’t help the real economy so it stings a little bit more.
It's not even a crash yet. Last time, it was from $19600 to less than $3000. We have to go to less than $10500 for 1 BTC to reproduce what have happened last time (and it can be even worse this time, why not).
I don't care. We don't build crypto for speculation by amateur investors.
Let's hope that the same repeated responses on every crypto-related post do not pollute this one. I hope not, but we'll see.
But this is yet another rinse and repeat story about retail once again holding the bag as they throw away their life savings on crypto. The same old story which retail always loses. every. time. on the hype and mania.
The crash was inevitable and was going to happen anyway. The signs was in November [0] as I said and even before that with crypto. I warned them [1] when Bitcoin reached over $60K and they still didn't listen. One was willing to bet that DOGE would go over $1 by September 2021 and he lost as I warned them again [2]. The same had happened with stocks like Cloudflare rocketing all the way up and warned many to sell. [2] They just held on as it crashed later.
So tell me, how was it a surprise that it all had to crash (especially crypto) in 2022? [4]
> Price doesn't matter for any crypto specific use cases.
Exactly! Ransomware groups, drug dealers, and money launderers don’t mind the volatility or transaction fees since their funds are illegally obtained. It’s just a tax they pay to launder or steal money.
I’m not aware of any other specific use cases for crypto aside from speculation and the ones I listed in the previous paragraph.
The actors change, but it's the same play over and over again. Roughly once every four years. People with addiction problems and their influencer-enablers find "crypto" and go absolutely apeshit over it. Even after the inevitable crash, those who lose everything are mainly concerned with how to make it back.