"DeFi today is a circular speculative economy"

[Note, DeFi === Decentralized Finance: cryptocurrencies, NFTs, coins, etc.]

I think I did a pretty good rant analysis of "AI" BS, the newest unnecessary waste of energy, in my post "Bullshit All The Way Down".

I need to vent & do the same for crypto.

!!!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!!!

F#cking losers. Making $$$, so what, destroying the planet. Seriously, making $$$, providing 0 real value, wasting petajoules, either make it illegal or tax it out of existence.

What are my feelings about the immediately previous & ongoing bubble/grift, cryptocurrency?

Blockchain is an interesting technology. Bitcoin as a v0.5 POC (Proof Of Concept) for blockchain, maybe. But, we're 15 years in, this whole marketplace has not really found any useful applications. Bitcoin-based transactions are slow & expensive, & always will be. Ransoms, blackmail, criminal activities are currently their main use?

And NEVER FORGET, "proof of work"-based crypto systems are an environmental disaster. Sadly, McSweeney's had a parody PSA from the Department of Energy, thanking people for turning things off & down & savimg energy - to be squandered by AI & crypto.

I threatened promised this late July in a comment when I shared a Doctorow post on "The largest campaign finance violation in US history". This is Must-Read. Seriously, read the Doctorow article, give it a week to sink in, then come back & read my meager effort.

Welcome to the wild & woolie world of cryptocurrency! Spoiler alert! Largest campaign finance violator was Coinbase, a crypto exchange.

Vitalik Buterin, Mr. Ethereum, might be the only person in the crypto world that I kinda respect. The title of this post is a quote from Buterin. I think I read early summer where he said something similar. I am interpreting this to mean,

This whole BS DeFi is just us buying each others speculative virtual tokens & trying to figure out how to suck the general public into our scam.

He looks like a Dostoyevsky character, how can I not trust him?!?!? LOL!

[Note. I think my name may be on a patent, via Exstream Software, from ~2007, for Intelligent Documents, which I think is pretty much what the Smart Contracts (?) of Ethereum are. That patent would have passed from HP to OpenText.
I've thought about that since then, always concluded, smart => code => how confident are you in your testing of that code? You are sending it out into the cold, harsh world to represent your interests. I think the concept is fraught with peril.
LOL, I used that phrase, "fraught with peril", on some presentation on VAX/VMS system services I gave somewhere/early 80s, the attendees greatly liked the term ;->]

1 of my main sources of info is via my RSS Reader, NewsBlur - very reasonably priced. I am currently subscribed to 230 RSS feeds/blogs.

2-3 years agp, I subscribed to the feed of Coindesk. It is 1 of the biggest info hubs for crypto. It posts prolificly: I'd estimate 1-3 dozen stories/day. I seldom read stories, but, I scan headlines, every day, w/o fail. I will leave a random sample below in an appendix.

You kind of learn the cast of criminals. 1 or 2 women only. You recognize several recurring themes:

• Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency may or may not be correlated to outside economic factors.
• Whale investors must be carefully analyzed. Whaleomancy is a discipline fraught with peril!
• Fraudsters steal billions from gullible crypto investors.
• Cryptocurrency thought leaders love The Orange Turd, because he endorses them, because, grifters gonna grift.
• It is all pretty much completely speculative investing. Pump & dump, all that good stuff.
• Cryptocurrencies are going up & going down, hitting & missing targets, absolute & relative to each other. Bull & bear markets - so they have completely achieved a viable market - as long as they can keep pulling new suckers in.
  This type of finance is always to some extent a Ponzi scheme. I had a period when I was younger & ignorant when I invested in a lot of dividend stocks - which tended to be VCs. Every year or so, you would get hit up for an additional investment, to "keep the liquidity optimal".
• Sector leaders & founders are charged with fraud; go to jail; & get out of jail. I joked on twitter:

  The crypto industry is showing signs of maturity. The founders are starting to get out of prison.

One theme you don't see very often: somebody actually using this stuff to accomplish something useful! But, in the Appendix below, the CoinDesk headlines of Friday, Oct 11, there is actually such a post: "DePIN Promises Small Business Innovation in Emerging Markets"!

I think the whole thing is similar to derivative investiments. Ah, I found it - this post of mine references a study that states that the value of derivative investments is 5-10x all other forms of money put together. Man, all this stuff needs to be taxed at a 90% rate. No, 99%. It should be taxed out of existence. But, start at 50%, over 5-10 years raise to 99%. Let the grifters get some of their profits out, because ... ... ???

The tax rate should be determined by, how much did this transaction benefit the common wealth, versus being rent-seeking or some such other economic parasite. If I'm buying groceries, tax rate low or 0%. If I'm paying a "convenience fee" on my phone or whatever, tax rate 90% on the rentier.

As with all bubbles, it will pop. The question then is, as Doctorow examined in depth, what survives after the bubble pops? In the various web bubbles, lots of great web infrastructure & platforms were left behind. And bitcoin mining has created huge server farms, hopefully some of which were designed to minimize environmental impact. Already, as bitcoin mining becomes more expensive, miners are shifting their server farms to "AI" support. So "compute-intensive-grift-1" readily transforms into "compute-intensive-grift-2". Really sad. But, people are making money & growing the economy, so, it's all OK! Capitalism, FTL!

In David Graeber's "Debt: the 1st 5000 Years", Graeber posits that this eternal boom/bust cycle makes capitalism overall apocalyptic - the bubble will burst; Rome will fall. & with that, comes cynicism? nihilism?

No, it creates Moneyism: the only thing that matters is making money. Aka Financialization: the late stage capitalism insanity currently causing so many problems in the world, like the 'vacuum up, cash out, load w debt, sell off' VC-backed operations that are decimating so many small, medium, & large service industries. Doctorow has been all over this. This blog previously discussed financialization here, "Postcapitalism", by Paul Mason, a Brit.

Today, 2024-10-12, Doctorow teed off on crypto again. I should hurry up & get done here.

Meanwhile, f#cking crypto-bros are going all in for the Orange Turd for president, because, grifters hang together, &, grifters gonna grift. Great, yeah, there should be a federal cryptocurrency reserve. Holy f#ck, that is a Orange Turd level grift, you've conned the US of A into keeping a Scrooge McDuck treasure trove of your worthless Beanie Babies cryptocurrencies!

So, what happens next? Orange Turd reelection would greatly hearten the crypto-bros, including the sons, Beavis Fredo & Butt-Head Fredo, who now have their own crypto bank! Oooh, I smell a grift! How many months until it's bankrupt?

LOL, my wife just sent me this excellent article on Drumpft Crime Family crypto plans. Their visionary will be the youngest Drumpft brother, who, I am sadly really afraid, may be the grifter anti-christ. His dad is the greatest grifter in history - he grifted the POTUS job, FFS! & his mother is an incredible grifter, look at all the crap she has for sale!

Oof, I'm as bad as the xtians! I'm getting the youngest Drumpft bro as Mordred, & his mom Melanoma as Morgana, in "Excalibur". ?!?!?

Crap, he speaks fluent Slovenian w his mom & her parents. Orange Turd is only capable of grunting in Slovenian. Baby bro also speaks french. Je parle le francais aussi. :(

Phew! Gawd! Thinking about the Drumpfts wears me out! Enuf for now!

Meanwhile, (BLUE WAVE!!!), on the other hand, if rule-of-law prevails (BLUE WAVE!!!), I think the right thing to do would be to outlaw anything that exceeds an energy/transaction limit. Prolly won't happen, next up, tax the hell out of it. Start at 50%, work up to 99%.

I think the tax rate should be based on, how useful to everyone is this energy use? We all have to live with the externalities - pollution & climate change - we should all have a say in how the planets sustainable energy budget is allocated.

Is this a new concept? Voting weighted by how much each person is affected by an externality? In voting based on externalities, poor folk should get at least 10x the votes of rich folk. Rich folk can insulate themselves from the easy climate problems. Ecological "sacrifice zones" are almost always in "black & tan" neighborhoods. I certainly will vote 0% for crypto, & maybe 5% for "AI" (LLMs).

Appendix

Here are the headlines from the Coindesk RSS feed for yesterday, Friday, 2024-10-11. I highlighted 2 headlines.

1. 12:43am Trump-Themed PoliFi Tokens Buck Bitcoin Downtrend as China Stimulus Hopes Return
2. 05:24am Former FTX Customer Sues Hedge Fund, Says It Reneged on Bankruptcy Payout Deal
3. 05:54am Binance Executive Tigran Gambaryan Denied Bail in Nigeria
4. 06:41am Bitnomial Exchange Sues U.S. SEC, Alleging Regulatory Overreach
5. 07:13am Bitcoin on Track for Record Sideways Action, With Eyes on November Elections as Bullish Catalyst
6. 08:01am First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Trims Thursday's Inflation-Led Losses
7. 09:28am CoinDesk 20 Performance Update: RENDER jumps 6.5%, With All Index Constituents Rising
8. 10:27am DePIN Promises Small Business Innovation in Emerging Markets
9. 10:58am FTX's Salame Hoped Dog Bite Would Delay Prison, But Tucker Carlson Derailed Effort [LOL!}
10. 11:04am Mt. Gox Postpones Repayment Deadline to 2025, Allaying Concerns of Bitcoin Selling Pressure
11. 11:26am [Opinion] Has Ethereum Lost Its Way?
12. 12:13pm Scroll Airdrop Allocation Met With Dismay From Farmers
13. 01:12pm Arkham's Token Soars 16% on Report Sam Altman-Backed Crypto Firm Plans Derivatives Exchange
14. 02:48pm Trump-Supported World Liberty Financial Will Start Public Token Sale Next Week
15. 05:27pm Bitcoin Bounces 7% Above $63K as Crypto Traders Eye China Stimulus Statement

The 2 highlights:

1. #8, bolded - a claim to an sctual real world use!!! There are SO few of these.
2. #13, italicized - "Derivatives Exchange". They've got themselves a market ecosystem here, hell yeah, derivatives!!! Is the derivative of "worthless" "worthless"?

p.s. Beanie Babies! Beanie Babies! Beanie Babies! None of the crypto-bros look old enough to remember Beanie Babies! Better jump in, don't be left behind, fortunes are being made!

Well, at least you got cute little stuffed doggies, vs a # in a wallet on your phone, which hopefully won't get hacked & taken. Or maybe you got a fabulous NFT of a bored chimp! Kudos! [Sarcasm]

I'm definitely getting too old for such aggregious BS!