crypto reserve
Lately I've been watching the stock market very closely, and also the crypto market. In fact it started with the crypto market. I was wondering, what does a market in imaginary money have to do with anything?
Resistance to the national crypto reserve is interesting. My instinct is to say, the reason they want a big pile of crypto is so they can manipulate the market. It's a serious, even gigantic, version of the rug pull. You get everyone excited and buying in, then you get out quietly while it's at its highest, then when it comes down inevitably you're not around to suffer. The government is, but who cares about the taxpayers? Let the government buy all this play money - solano, ether, etc., whatever, and we'll have a big old tea party.
I think the serious crypto traders are beginning to really resent the way events tend to make crypto look like it's just a big techno-bro scam and basically we are widening the pool of victims because the taxpayers can always take the hit and half the time not even know it. But this time taxpayers are saying, hey wait a minute, you're turning our money into play money and doing what, letting it just sit there?
With the oil reserve, there are pretty well-established reasons to have a reserve. We bomb Saudi Arabia, or they bomb us, or Israel bombs both of us, we'd better have some oil sitting around or life as we know it will just stop. I don't think you can say that for crypto. The world is not relying on it to get to work in the morning.
Also, because it's
entirely online, it's
entirely accessible. That means that somebody with skills can get at it and swipe it at any given moment. This in fact just happened to what, about fifteen billion, in Abu Dhabi or someplace? By the North Koreans? And we never even found it, or tracked it down (?????). Does anyone care? Is there a geographical element
at all? Will North Koreans actually get some food, as a result of this little heist?
Once we have a reserve, we have a target. Anyone with skills can get at it. We also need a regulatory agency because hey, certain people are going to be doing rug pulls like, constantly. But we're not into regulation right so now the government is the number one rug-pull, crypto-bro, snake-oil salesman. Anyone want to buy a $Trump coin?
Labels: crypto
crypto & the hawk tuah
My more conservative friends would all say crypto is pure gambling; my ex-father-in-law says it's "suicide." My reading about it led me to the story about the Hawk Tuah Girl.
Let's go back a little further. My young sons always called my oldest daughter Josie
Doge. We called her
Doge igifor so many years that we felt like we owned the name. But, not being tuned in to memes and the online culture, the whole
Doge culture came and went and I barely even knew about it. Then there was a Dogecoin, competing with Bitcoin as onne of the more stable kinds of crypto. And
now crypto bros are working to make DOGE a government agancy. Appropriation! Travesty!
But back to crypto. Bitcoin is a stable one; Dogecoin is up there; but anyone can start one and see what happens. That's what the Hawk Tuah Girl did. She had a lot of fans on Instagram and she got them all to invest in her personal crypto. Thenn the price crashed and they all lost like millions. And needless to say they're mad and they're going to sue her.
It's not the first time this has happenned (it's called a soft rug-pull) - recently a 14-year-old kid started a crypto, got lots of investors, got out of it, made $20,000 in a day, and his parents got flooded with calls and had to disconnect their phone. It was legal what he did; what Hawk Tuah did was legal too. It's just pure gambling. You invest in crypto, it's only worth what someone will pay for it.
What's interesting is that some people blame the bots. Bots apparently can detect its rising value and buy, and then detect when it goes over the top and sell right away, and thus a $200 catastrophe becomes a 200 million catastrophe. The bots are all in there gambling too, and they're better than we are because they've seen it so much more often. They have it
programmed into them.
I was interested in crypto - not so much gambling on one coin or another, but starting my own. It would be cool to have your own crypto. But how could you keep the bots at bay? It seems like a dicey situation, having your coin out there on the open market. As far as I can tell, the Hawk Tuah Girl was trusting some agent to run her whole PR thing. Some agent didn't quite know when to take a bat to the bots. And now she's sorry.
There is already no restriction on crypto, no regulation. At the same time anyone can start a coin, any bot can jump in there and buy one, raising the value. The price has been jumping because people think the Trump era will be the crypto era. Well Hallelujiah. But easy come, easy go. I'm not touching it, at least for now.
Labels: crypto
