> There is a somewhat coherent proposition that crypto assets are effectively unregistered securities contracts, basically like stock in an empty company that doesn’t do anything except promote the sale of its own stock.
I sometimes think that when anthropologists from the future look back at today, the primary lessons they'll draw from us won't have to do with our technological cleverness, but rather our financial imagination. Greed is at work in the world, and it is a strong force of propulsion in terms of how the world we are living in is changing. Perhaps dramatically more so than technology, in a given period of time.
The willingness to speculate in a manner that is completely unhinged from reality: that is the dark heart of cryptocurrencies. It is rent-seeking behavior taken to its brutally logical conclusion. And it is not unique to crypto. Look at people's behavior in the stock market, or the housing market. It isn't that these assets are actually appreciating that much in the real world, so much as investors are simply trying to find a place to put their money and get a return.
In that sense, the speculative utility that <meme stonks/Vancouver condos/cryptocoins> provide, as a store of financial value, has become orthogonal to reality. In some markets, I'd argue that we're even seeing a weird parasitic effect, where the host is kept alive simply to serve as a form of blue sky contract by the force of our collective willingness to play Russian Roulette speculative games with each other. GameStop is a good example.
I sometimes think that when anthropologists from the future look back at today, the primary lessons they'll draw from us won't have to do with our technological cleverness, but rather our financial imagination. Greed is at work in the world, and it is a strong force of propulsion in terms of how the world we are living in is changing. Perhaps dramatically more so than technology, in a given period of time.
The willingness to speculate in a manner that is completely unhinged from reality: that is the dark heart of cryptocurrencies. It is rent-seeking behavior taken to its brutally logical conclusion. And it is not unique to crypto. Look at people's behavior in the stock market, or the housing market. It isn't that these assets are actually appreciating that much in the real world, so much as investors are simply trying to find a place to put their money and get a return.
In that sense, the speculative utility that <meme stonks/Vancouver condos/cryptocoins> provide, as a store of financial value, has become orthogonal to reality. In some markets, I'd argue that we're even seeing a weird parasitic effect, where the host is kept alive simply to serve as a form of blue sky contract by the force of our collective willingness to play Russian Roulette speculative games with each other. GameStop is a good example.