LAS VEGAS — “We often talk about baseball games as a metric for where we are, and we’re literally in the first inning,” one of the Winklevoss twins gloats. “And this game’s going to overtime.” It’s the first day of Bitcoin 2025, industry day here at the largest cryptocurrency conference in the world. This Winklevoss…
strongly recommend giving this one a read to the end
none of this was new to me as a long time crypto gawker, but it was still tied together in a nice package which drew some particularly apt connections. I can’t help but believe that the bitcoin thesis is fundamentally flawed. Being superimposed on the structure of financial capitalism itself, it seems to me that bitcoin and cryptocurrency are leveraged bets in the stability of the system. we haven’t seen how crypto will function during a serious recession yet. I’m not a professional prognosticator by any means, but i have a hard time believing that it will go well for them, and a very easy time believing that it will go worse for them than the rest of the economy, broadly speaking. I hope that people in texas and other crypto-humping locales that host bitcoin “mines” take the opportunity to do something extremely Cool when that does happen.
I agree. Look at the flash crash a few weeks ago when Trump talked shit about China Friday evening and Bitcoin dropped by 10%. Bitcoin is so entangled with traditional markets that it rises and falls with them.
And honestly, I suspect Bitcoin relies so much on Tether and other dollar-backed stable coins that if the dollar crashes Tether may drag Bitcoin down with it.
Which is just a painful irony, given what Bitcoin was created to do. But the fact that Bitcoin now grovels for the patronage of the corrupt billionaires and powerful political figures who control traditional finance is so much more ironic that it doesn’t really register.
none of this was new to me as a long time crypto gawker, but it was still tied together in a nice package which drew some particularly apt connections. I can’t help but believe that the bitcoin thesis is fundamentally flawed. Being superimposed on the structure of financial capitalism itself, it seems to me that bitcoin and cryptocurrency are leveraged bets in the stability of the system. we haven’t seen how crypto will function during a serious recession yet. I’m not a professional prognosticator by any means, but i have a hard time believing that it will go well for them, and a very easy time believing that it will go worse for them than the rest of the economy, broadly speaking. I hope that people in texas and other crypto-humping locales that host bitcoin “mines” take the opportunity to do something extremely Cool when that does happen.
I agree. Look at the flash crash a few weeks ago when Trump talked shit about China Friday evening and Bitcoin dropped by 10%. Bitcoin is so entangled with traditional markets that it rises and falls with them.
And honestly, I suspect Bitcoin relies so much on Tether and other dollar-backed stable coins that if the dollar crashes Tether may drag Bitcoin down with it.
Which is just a painful irony, given what Bitcoin was created to do. But the fact that Bitcoin now grovels for the patronage of the corrupt billionaires and powerful political figures who control traditional finance is so much more ironic that it doesn’t really register.