Tulips, Myths, and Cryptocurrencies
Bitcoins are different than tulips or homes with subprime mortgages or dot com companies in 1999 in that they are completely useless.  They have no value whatsoever.  Usually bubbles are built on something real.  Even Ponzi&#x27;s international reply coupons had some underlying value.  Bitcoins are completely worthless.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of ferment for them, but then there were Casey Serin&#x27;s making big money in 2007 on subprime loans, or Pets.com superbowl commercials, or Dutch tulip bulbs.  It always feels heady during the times people are publishing books with titles like &quot;Dow 36000&quot;.  It&#x27;s almost always right before the crash.<p>As Bitcoins are worthless, people go casting about for something else which they consider worthless.  They come up with the dollar bill, and say the Bitcoin is just like the dollar bill, but electronic and untied to government.<p>This is pretty silly for a whole host of reasons.  It would take too long to go into fully, and pointless to those who&#x27;ve already drunk the kool-aid.  The USA has the world&#x27;s largest GNI by some measures, it holds thousands of tons gold in Fort Knox and other places.  In 1971 the dollar was an abstraction of its gold reserves, since then its been an abstraction of that abstraction, something akin to class B non-voting shares of a large stock.  If it were possible for states to run the printing presses and create value, you&#x27;d wonder why that innovation was discovered in the past century.  Any how, the Bitcoin scam claimed a magic wand could create value, so unsurprisingly other scams arose - Ethereum, Ripple, NEM etc. all currently have billion dollar market caps.<p>It&#x27;s illustrative of how these cons work.  I mean I don&#x27;t know how much more blatantly it can be spelled out to you its a scam - Bitcoin was not created by a Ponzi, but by some criminal who has kept their identity completely secret.  If this doesn&#x27;t wake you up to the con, I don&#x27;t know what will.  Except its inevitable crash to becoming worthless, just like &quot;Flooz&quot; and &quot;Beanz&quot; did 17 years ago.  And those were electronic currencies created by VC backed firms.