Complex Numbers

Revisited: "Cryptonite"

Today is the day for me to delve into the past to see what I was up to then and how things might have changed.

The RNG took me all the way back to September of 2021 this time, so let's see what I had to say in "Cryptonite" ...

...a controversial and divisive topic, one that has been known to destroy friendships, end marriages, and divide siblings. Yes, I'm talking about... cryptocurrency.

So not much has changed.

Unsurprisingly, the original article link,   from Cracked, is still there.

It's almost inevitable that I've picked up a few things in the year and a half or so since I wrote the entry, but I still won't touch crypto, not even with someone else's pole.

If I remember the timeline correctly (and I probably don't), it was the following February that crypto was pushed heavily during the big sportsball game commercials. Not that I saw them, but it's hard to avoid hearing people talk about them. After that, the price of the leading cryptocurrency, bitcoin, crashed.

So, not trusting my own memory, I looked up this chart,   which tracks btc vs usd for the last 2 years.

Such are the perils of hindsight (and my memory). Someone could easily have come up to me a month after I wrote that September entry and crowed, "You're an idiot. The value of bitcoin has skyrocketed!" Because it had. And then I could have come back pretty much any time after that and said, "No, you're the idiot," because it never again reached the stratospheric level of October 2021 prices. Or even September.

Thing is, though, that whatever the value of it, the fact that it's quoted in US dollars doesn't say much about the intrinsic value of Bitcoin, but it says a lot about the intrinsic value of the USD.

It's basically a gamble. Not that I think there's anything inherently wrong with gambling; I do it, myself—on an occasional basis, and always with a self-imposed limit that is so low that it's basically my entertainment budget. Other people go to sporting events or rock concerts or Broadway plays; I sometimes go to casinos. So it would be hypocritical of me to dismiss it just because it's gambling.

"But the stock market is also a gamble, Waltz!"

Well, no. I mean, it can be, if you focus on short-term trading, which is what I think most people do because you're always hearing about day traders and the Robinhood app or whatever. But there's a big difference between investing—that is, long-term buy and hold, much less sexy than the adrenaline rush of day trading—and gambling.

A stock generally has some intrinsic value (which is almost always lower than the share price). This is because it represents partial ownership in a company, which will ideally have assets and a semi-reliable income stream, putting a floor on its valuation. Sure, sometimes individual companies get caught cooking the books (Enron, e.g.) or their income stream dries up, or they take on more debt than they have assets, and the share price falls to near zero. But more often, they have an interest in keeping on making money, which drives up the share price because people think it'll be more valuable in the future (this is a gross oversimplification, I know). Overall, the latter outnumber the former, which is why investment advisors harp on about diversification: the wins tend to more than make up for the losses.

There's still risk. But the analogy I like to make is that speculation and short-term trading are like playing in a casino, while long-term investing is like owning the casino. You can still fail, but you have the house edge.

But what's the actual inherent value of crypto? From what I can tell, it's pure speculation.

Still, no, it's not the gambling aspect that keeps me away. It's the same reason I shy away from gold trading: advertising. Also, to a lesser degree, not knowing the odds.

It's not just my inherent hatred of ads, either. Consider: if someone pays a premium for a 30-second spot during Big Sportsball Game, that means that they: a) want your fiat currency more than they want whatever they're selling; and b) think that they can make enough fiat currency to offset the high cost of said commercial. Now, to be fair, sometimes what they're promoting isn't the crypto itself, but a new way to store it. Like banks, which run commercials all the time. Since I wrote that original article, at least some of those crypto exchanges have utterly failed, the most public of which was the very well-covered fall of FTX. Still, even in that case, point b above applies.

So if someone is promoting, say, Dogecoin on TV, they're already giving away their game, which is "I'd rather hold dollars than dogecoins." If dollars are more valuable to them, taking into account the cost of advertising, why shouldn't they be more valuable to you?

I'll never ding someone just for wanting to gamble, because, like I said, I do it myself. Though I have an awareness of the odds, and I don't treat it as a get-rich-quick scheme.

But hey, there's at least one actual, legitimate, and valuable use of Bitcoin: Last time I checked, which was around December, WDC is taking it as payment for membership.