By Chris Black
Many millennials and gen-z’ers are so completely brainwashed and/or ignorant on basic economic issues, that they believe bitcoin to be a store of value, a commodity like silver, gold, diamonds, or whatever, instead of a Ponzi/pump-and-dump scheme with zero intrinsic value.
But that doesn’t matter.
As long as people believe in fairytales and there is money to be made, nobody really cares, and that’s fine with me.
The thing is, bitcoin just dropped 15% a on Saturday evening, and throughout the night, just a few days after hitting new all-time highs following the Coinbase IPO, reaching $51,707.51 in Asia and $53,400 as of 8:0 a.m. in New York on Sunday. Ethereum suffered the same faith, dropping 18%.
This wasn’t a herd move, it was a whale move. Some smart dudes cashed out. Still got to wait a bit for the herd to stampede, but it’s coming.
By the way, Coinbase is a complete and total criminal enterprise, but so is all of Wall Street. If you think you actually own the crypto you buy on Coinbase, you are absolutely wrong.
You own an IOU. They need to go public to get the funds to make the institutional holders whole, when they cash out. Everyone else will hold an empty bag.
Anyway, this means absolutely nothing in the big scheme of things. If Elon Musk goes on Twitter tomorrow and praises bitcoin, dogecoin or whatever stupid thing, we will obviously see a rally, to the moon and back, you know the drill.
What is going on in the investing world is the same thing that happened to fashion and product development. The millennials and gen-z’ers are so schizophrenic, that you can’t plan ahead for anything. They move from trend to trend so fast, that things pop and drop before you can react.
They don’t know anything, or care about anything other than following a crowd.
Let this sink in: Dogecoin was up over 300 percent in the past 7 days and has a market cap of $40 BILLION. It’s laughable.
Check out what people have invested 40 BILLION in: Dogecoin.
I know a lot of people that have been absolutely burned, trying to make money off millennials. The day after they see an idiot rapper or moron YouTuber wear something, they all want it. For one week the product gets hot and every piece in inventory gets sold. The stores think they have a hot seller, and place huge orders. The problem is production takes time. By the time the inventory shows up, the trend is over and they can’t give it away.
If you are trying to figure out why a stock gets hot, there is no reason other than some idiot decided it should be a hot stock. There will never be a business rationale behind it.
Speaking of the new gold, aka bitcoin, the ledger is currently 340 GB in size, without being used for anything close to 1% of the average daily transactions of just VISA.
If Bitcoin were used for 10% of daily global transactions, the ledger would grow by terabytes every day.
There is nothing hardware can do to solve that.
After ten years, everyone was using the internet and it was inseparable from society. In fact, it reached that point in less than five years.
Bitcoin has been around for twelve years, and still has no utility for 99.9% of people on the planet.
Here’s a cool story to tell your friends:
What is inflation? Popularly said, you have too much money on the market courtesy of the Federal Reserve and fractional banking. Inflation normally leads to a general rise in prices (which happened to a degree but no one seems to notice or care).
Currently, about 90% of the issuance of money by central banks has gone to the stock market, meaning the money is parked in the stock market and stuff like that.
How to solve the inflation problem? The old school method would be to withdraw money from the market by increasing the reference interest rate, etc. So, there would be monetary instruments for such a thing, but they are slow and time seems to have no patience anymore.
Can you do it another way?
Think carefully about the following scheme: you invent an absolutely imaginary asset, which you own and whose price increases aberrantly. The growth is given both by suckers trying to get rich quick without effort, but also due to the powerful financial propaganda apparatus that you also own.
Everything develops on a “stable” basis, and then the madness begins, until even the hairdressers talk about the new El Dorado.
Huge amounts of money go into the asset that you sell at a slow pace, thus creating a sense of scarcity, and, at the right time, you collapse everything via panic selling, legislation or whatever method.
That money is now “lost” and you destroy it. Thus, with a lot of money coming out of the system “naturally”, the prices remain the same, and the “fiat” money again is in demand because it is scarce (deflation).
You know, usually speaking episodes of hyperinflation are solved by so-called monetary stabilization. The last (masked) monetary stabilization you (probably) witnessed was the launch of the Euro.
If you study the phenomenon, you will notice how – in the case of monetary stabilization – those who pay the price are the peasants. Do you want proof? All the countries that switched to Euro saw the main effect of doubling prices for everything.
So who suffered if not the peasants? Guess who will suffer now.