I’ve heard young people talking about crypto. Is really worth getting into as a vocation? An opinion piece in The Atlantic makes some cautionary points.
Main point: “Crypto was built on the idea that you shouldn’t have to trust banks with your money, that people should be able to hold it themselves, hopefully somewhere a little more secure than a mattress. And though you can still technically do that, there’s no guarantee that the value of your tokens won’t someday plummet to zero, thanks to the actions of a few rogue billionaires with outsize effects on the market. This is, transparently, a terrible deal, and a seeming betrayal of that dream of crypto utopianism—the vision of a future without shady intermediaries.”
More about it:
- “Crypto collapses have become par for the course.”
- “…crypto feels less ready for the mainstream than it has in years.”
- “…what looked like a winter is starting to feel more like an ice age.”
- “Centralized exchanges like FTX—supposedly the easiest way for retail investors to find their way into crypto—still come with an enormous amount of risk. When these companies go under, as they now seem to every other month, they’re taking your money with them.”
Why it matters:
- “’We’re so early,’ goes one popular crypto mantra, the idea being that despite the ricketiness of the whole system, despite the constant feeling that everything might fall apart at any moment, there will come a time when crypto really arrives.”
- “…it’s hard to imagine a near- or even a medium-term future where crypto has a fraction of the influence it did six months ago.”
- “…the future of crypto as an institution—as something that might one day destabilize the big banks, or at least operate in parallel—has never been less certain.”