(01-24-2022, 05:13 AM)Labster Wrote: Oh I understand them fully. People want a way to make digital assets, which can be copied for a virtually nil marginal cost, to become scarce so money can be made selling it. So they invent artificial scarcity for digital assets using mathematics, except the original asset still has a nil copying cost unless everyone pretends it doesn't. Only the mathematics is scarce.
Cryptocurrency is exactly the same. Everyone agrees the math is scarce and there is only one of each coin. Unless... you copy all the coins. And then you get forks of Bitcoins like Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin SV (all of these are real). And now you have two copies of the same mathematical asset that both have some value. A totally scarce asset unless you can convince enough people to fork, and now you have more assets. But with the invisible hand of the market, wouldn't the net value be the same, because the utility is split? Nope. Not if the utility is market speculation.
Like I've always believed, cryptocurrency is simply a digital gold standard, only worse, because gold is tangible and does have real-world uses.