I was trying to do some stuff with a crypto account I have. I was trying to download “trading history”. It actually wasn’t “trading”. It was just the day some worthless crypto, a meme coin, was deposited into my account, and when I sent it to a couple of people.
I had all kinds of trouble finding the keystrokes to try and download a report. I wound up getting scammed and sending a bunch of worthless meme coin crypto to a scammer. The scammer is going to try and sell it thinking they are billionaires and they are going to find out it’s a worthless meme coin. Joke is on them.
Here is my take on crypto.
I used to be bullish. I believed that there was something there. Programmable currency is cool. It solves a lot of problems for different things.
I got involved in Helium early. At one point, my account was worth a lot of money. But, Helium became a pump and dump. The founders of Helium dumped all their tokens at the high and so did many of the venture capitalists. No one was transparent about it and they still haven’t been. It would be nice of the venture capitalists to be upfront about the number of tokens they were issued for their investment, and how many they still have on their books. Absent that, they are participating in the pump and dump.
Now, Helium is requiring you to transfer to a “Helium” wallet. Good luck trying. I tried a few times and it wouldn’t accept the transfer.
One thing that has soured me on crypto is the fact that the apps themselves are unusable. Not only that, there is no way to get a “person” on the line to help you when you have issues. It’s built by engineers, for engineers. Apps and wallets aren’t intuitive. Since this is real money, not having customer support is a big deal.
I can sign up for Twitter and it’s easy for me to figure out how to use it. I can sign up for Linkedin, and it’s easy. Facebook easy. Salesforce is easy. Crypto is not easy. We are at least ten years if not more of it becoming easy.
Another issue is that all the geeks and crypto bros that are “building web 3.0” haven’t seemed to build shit yet. There is a lot of talk and people coding but there isn’t a lot of anyone using anything. Apes in the zoo could build a Tinker Toy set faster than these people could get anything usable to market. All hype and no there there. That’s a big problem with crypto.
The last thing is it is rife with fraud. Massive amounts of fraudsters. Everywhere you turn the next person is a scammer.
I sold out all my crypto and converted it to US Dollars. Funny thing, to verify my identity I had to upload a state ID.
My guess is that most of the venture funds that have invested in crypto-focused companies will lose money. They will have as much success in crypto as they will in global warming investments. The ones that made money on Coinbase made the most “surplus”, but most of this other stuff will go kaput.
However, you can see with apps like ChatGPT and artificial intelligence that you do need to verify that someone who says they did the work, or that they are who they are are really on the level. Crypto might eventually be able to do that. In the meantime, we have state-issued IDs. Would be great to use a state ID in a voting booth.
Overall, all this is just an indicator that there is a demand for something not tied to the government. Crypto may or may not be it, but a lot of people are looking for something.
Completely agree! Scam city.