FTX Plummets, Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Loses ~95% of Wealth
No numbers in this post – I just want to vent a little bit about cryptocurrency. I’m far from an expert on the matter, so take this with a grain of salt. While the industry may have been built on an honest desire to correct the wrongs enacted by our ancestors, it has clearly spun out of control and is starting to hurt more people than it ever helped.
The idea of a decentralized currency is very attractive. The fiat US Dollar, which was hijacked in 1913 by the Federal Reserve Act, loses value every single day through inflation by design. The money you spend your entire life saving will lose a significant percentage of its value by the time you’re legally able to use it – this is no accident, and is simply a characteristic of how the hamster wheel we’re on was designed.
Perhaps cryptocurrency WILL be the best answer one day – I do see a number of benefits to blockchain technology. However, this era in which dozens (if not hundreds or thousands) of cryptocurrencies are attempting to thrive is a very dangerous one for investors. A relatively small percentage of investors have actually built any real wealth by simply investing into crypto, and those who have likely lost a lot of it over the past year and a half.
There’s a lot that really bothers me about what’s going on with crypto. Chalk it up to jealousy if you’d like – that’s fine. It does kind of suck knowing that I could have simply spent a couple of hundred dollars on BTC ten years ago, cashed out last year, and retired. But even if I had done that – would it be right?
I’m all for the idea of retiring young if you earned it. I have no issue with someone in their 20’s getting paid millions of dollars if they built the right type of software that enough people found useful. I have no problem with a basketball player signing a $100 million contract just a couple years after college, because there are enough people buying tickets and enough advertisers signing on to make that work economically.
Watching 20- and 30-something’s grow into millionaires and billionaires on the simple hope that their technology will be the one to snap us out of the IMF’s control is a bit troubling. They haven’t designed a useful new product. They haven’t provided anything of any value to anyone, except for the small percentage of investors who were able to make money without producing anything themselves. They haven’t pushed society forward, nor have they made anyone smarter. They’ve simply fattened their pockets on false hope and in some cases, outright lies.
So why am I going through all of this effort to make a post without any numbers in it? Back in March of this year, my cousin tragically lost his son to suicide at the age of 24. In the aftermath of the news, I learned that prior to shooting himself, he had amassed a large amount of wealth in cryptocurrency – wealth that was rapidly declining with BTC’s drop over the past 20+ months.
Getting rich in crypto isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Profits you make in a calendar year are now taxed, and if you lose a significant amount of that crypto in the next calendar year, you might actually just be building a massive debt with the IRS. “Mo’ money, mo’ problems” has perhaps never resonated with the youth so well until this generation of crypto chasers.
So here he was in his early 20’s, with few marketable skills, no real education in money management, sitting on top of hundreds of thousands of dollars because he simply moved his money into the right spot at the right time. Commendable, perhaps, but is it really right for someone so young to have more cash than what most families make in over a decade?
A lot of people think this is perfectly just. People have been getting rich off investments in the stock market for a long time, so what’s the difference in getting rich off investments in crypto? The problem is that crypto is a futures market based only in speculation. Outside of a small handful at the top, it’s backed by nothing more than people’s hopes and dreams. Money made in the stock market is generally due to actual goods or services being traded – substance that crypto lacks.
Perhaps this idea that we can all get rich simply by putting our money in the right spot, rather than learning a valuable skill and adding value to the economy, is actually an attack on our minds. I often think of this when it comes to using gematria to bet on sports – people like the pipe dream of just sitting on your ass, doing nothing, and collecting money for it because you have basic pattern recognition skills. It’s not that I disagree with the idea you can make money by gambling on sports – but to put all of your focus into it and think it can be your sole income isn’t far from complete foolishness.
The reward system in our brains simply isn’t wired up for this. We are meant to draw happiness from eating well, exercising, helping others, and spreading love – things that align well with a life of hard work and service of those around us. Wealth accrued from good gambles provides security, but little else for peace of mind.
I hate to sound like I’m advocating for the Federal Reserve and its idea of currency – I think it’s a wildly corrupt and terrible system for the vast majority of people, as the odds are highly-stacked against anyone starting from the bottom to build any real wealth. I strongly believe a society should be built outside of it; I’m just still very skeptical that cryptocurrency in its present form should have anything to do with it.
What do you think? Am I missing something that would change by point of view? Check out the Cryptocurrency channel on the Gematrinator Discord: https://discord.com/channels/346748317855645698/808520015484944444