Visa and Mastercard have surged over the past two decades, reaching a combined $1 trillion market cap. That has attracted unwanted attention from regulators.
At least from my past experience observing the media sphere and demographics regarding crypto, it tends to just be newbies that are investing primarily due to the seeking of gains, but not for any sort of ideological reason, as opposed to the people who initially invested in crypto for its other freedom-preserving qualities.
For instance, I had originally mined some Bitcoin years and years ago when I initially just thought the concept of a stateless, distributed-control monetary unit was an interesting concept. I held that bitcoin in a non-custodial (i.e. not on an exchange/company) wallet, because I believed in the actual values prescribed to Bitcoin at the time.
Later, when my father wanted to try investing in crypto because he also thought it was interesting, he invested through an exchange, but refused to withdraw his money because he wasn’t that interested. It was just general intrigue, but not enough to overcome his apathy.
In the Mt Gox days, it was just so early, and Bitcoin was generally so new as a concept, that people didn’t understand the point of self-custody as much. With FTX, it was the masses who downloaded their app simply because they saw it during the Super Bowl and wanted to give it a shot as an investment vehicle, but not because they had any clue what the original values were underpinning the technology.
The people putting their money in the hands of these companies never cared about the ideological reasons for holding crypto (which I believe have now been totally overtaken by greed and wealthy VC firms), they just wanted to see if they could be the next person to get rich.
In my eyes, that’s an ideology problem, not a problem with the technology, but I do see how we could very well disagree on this.
At least from my past experience observing the media sphere and demographics regarding crypto, it tends to just be newbies that are investing primarily due to the seeking of gains, but not for any sort of ideological reason, as opposed to the people who initially invested in crypto for its other freedom-preserving qualities.
For instance, I had originally mined some Bitcoin years and years ago when I initially just thought the concept of a stateless, distributed-control monetary unit was an interesting concept. I held that bitcoin in a non-custodial (i.e. not on an exchange/company) wallet, because I believed in the actual values prescribed to Bitcoin at the time.
Later, when my father wanted to try investing in crypto because he also thought it was interesting, he invested through an exchange, but refused to withdraw his money because he wasn’t that interested. It was just general intrigue, but not enough to overcome his apathy.
In the Mt Gox days, it was just so early, and Bitcoin was generally so new as a concept, that people didn’t understand the point of self-custody as much. With FTX, it was the masses who downloaded their app simply because they saw it during the Super Bowl and wanted to give it a shot as an investment vehicle, but not because they had any clue what the original values were underpinning the technology.
The people putting their money in the hands of these companies never cared about the ideological reasons for holding crypto (which I believe have now been totally overtaken by greed and wealthy VC firms), they just wanted to see if they could be the next person to get rich.
In my eyes, that’s an ideology problem, not a problem with the technology, but I do see how we could very well disagree on this.