A huge chunk of the new money that the Fed is injecting into the system is going straight into the financial sector and some of it is going directly into cryptocurrencies.
People have started to figure out that hard work doesn't pay. To earn money, you just need to get close to the massive stream of money that the Fed is constantly dumping into the economy.
The whole financial system is an over-engineered mess; packed with technical debt and vulnerabilities. If it was a software system, it would have been rewritten decades ago.
The market cap of all stock markets is on the order of $100T. Total bond market cap is of similar scale. The total market cap of cryptocurrencies is $200B (and shrinking).
Cryptocurrencies could be 10 bigger than what they are today and they'd still be a rounding error compared to the overall financial markets.
The only thing proven by cryptocurrencies is that, at a global scale, the long tail provides enough opportunities for niches to exist.
Exactly.
How many times have you heard the argument that cryptocurrencies will never completely replace national currencies, so they should be worthless?
Or that because it's harder to buy a coffee with Bitcoin than Euros, that Bitcoin is a fraud.
It's not either-or. It isn't all or nothing.
Cryptocurrencies can co-exist with national currencies and do just fine.
Like all of the software that runs power plants, defense systems, medical records? You make a good point, accidentally, that no, in fact most systems that become large and complex aren't re-written.
The fin. system is working fine. A lot of crypto is speculation, which has always existed in one form or another.
I hear this all the time, as if the Fed creates money out of thin air and gives it directly to crony capitalists.
But I never hear about the actual mechanism that's used.
Since this story rarely gets specific enough to really understand what's going on, I tend to think it's a fairy tale.
Can you describe how this massive money stream works?
Do rich people check their bank balance and there are mystery billions from nowhere?
And just how massive is massive? Are we talking billions of dollars a day or what?
What central banks are doing is buying bonds and other assets from the private sector, and paying for them by creating new money. In the past they might have created new money by ordering a truckload of new $100 bills to be printed, but now they can do it simply by changing the central bank balance of whoever they are buying the bonds from.
Oh wait...
Are you thinking of Billy Markus? He's in the article. He's lower-profile than Jackson Palmer but his involvement is by no means a secret: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/jp5x3d/dogecoins-... . It seems that Markus did all the actual initial software, having begun work on it before Palmer independently came up with the (rather brilliant) Dogecoin name and marketing strategy.
(The other essential piece of journalism on the history of Dogecoin seems to be https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78xqxb/the-guy-wh... )
I'm a little skeptical about Palmer's ongoing Dogecoin apology tour. Partly that's because it looks like another marketing operation to me. That's not to say that what he's saying is simply insincere. But I do get the impression that when he saw the marketing opportunity to be the founder of a far-out, headline-generating cryptocurrency he seized on that; and now that he sees the opportunity to be the remorseful crypto-skeptic, delivering what-have-I-wrought confessions to a media that's mostly soured on cryptocash and is now highly receptive to that message, he's pouncing on that opportunity too.
> When I asked about the recent Coinbase rumor, he answered, albeit hesitantly. “There’s no way of submitting all the legal documentation that Coinbase requires. It’s by no means likely that they’ll get it.”
This does seem to be accurate https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/9j1yuf/dogecoin_d... https://twitter.com/langer_hans/status/1051943757715820545 but the reason why is hardly something that reflects only badly on Dogecoin. Evidently the Coinbase application process is designed for VC-funded startups, while Dogecoin is closer to a community-run open source project, led by people who have day jobs in tech and aren't gambling on a big ICO bonanza.
I think the lesson is that jokes wear off quickly and anything money-like hooks people the same way.
