Cryptocurrency is tough to understand, and struggling with image

10 February 2022

in DOT

Reading Time: 4 mins read

When considering cryptocurrency, I wonder how I can be so fascinated by something I don’t understand. But then maybe women have the same feeling pertaining to men.

Crypto is nothing but an idea, and if a lot of other people have the same idea, you’re in luck. But, like Peter walking on the water, if those same people begin to doubt the idea then you’re sunk.

So basically you are betting on your fellow humans to be calm, rational, unemotional and self-controlled. If you want a piece of that pie, be my guest.

Look, maybe there’s no difference between crypto and companies like Rhythms, e1040, Epidemic, OnMoney and a dozen other dot-coms whose names you no longer remember because they went bust about 30 seconds after their Super Bowl ads assured us that they could make you rich.

Maybe it’s no different than Lehman Brothers. Maybe it’s no different than gold — except you can’t make bitcoin into earrings. Buying cryptocurrency is investing in hope, and as any child at Christmas can tell you, hope can get you riding high for a while, but most of the time you wind up getting crushed.

Still, plenty of people had the same feeling about the greenback — it’s just paper, after all. A lot of people felt we had just driven off the edge of the financial earth when we abandoned the gold standard, but that worked out OK.

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Maybe, as Matt Damon says, fortune does favor the crazy, er brave. He’s taking a lot of heat for being the “brand ambassador” for some crypto-hawking joint — as if millions of Americans get up in the morning and set their watch to Matt Damon.

He’s an actor, for heaven’s sake. After “Ocean’s Eleven,” nobody criticized him for being a thief. True, maybe instead of walking through a hall of astronauts and mountain climbers he should be walking past slot machines and blackjack dealers, but still. He’s Matt Damon. Not Ben Bernake, Matt Damon.

Critics say he’s preying in particular on young men with the “what are you, a man or a mouse?” script that basically accuses them of being a chicken, or worse, unmanly, if they fail to throw their money into an unknowable abyss.

There is, I admit, something dark and dystopian about the ad, especially compared to the happy-go-lucky Caesar who wants you to throw your money into the unknowable abyss of sports betting. But Caesar and the Manning family are funny. If you lose everything, at least you got a couple of laughs out of it.

A good gauge of snake oil is by watching how insanely angry the defenders of snake oil get when you question their position. When Apple stock was selling at $3 a share, no one got mad at you for not buying it. But if you have the temerity to point out that there’s nothing you can do with crypto that you can’t do with Venmo, watch out.

But legitimate or not, crypto is going through an image problem, and as another “brand ambassador,” Andre Agassi once said, “Image is everything.” It’s getting joined at the hip with such financial luminaries as Odell Beckham Jr., Kim Kardashian and Melania Trump. It’s getting connected with drug cartels, sex trafficking and ultimately worthless snippets of computerized mist known as non fungible tokens.

I’m aware that this could be a nonissue. If you’re using a worthless currency to buy a worthless product, what’s the harm? No one wept when Melania got burned by insisting she be paid in crypto when auctioning off her White House garb.

But the bad news keeps coming. Hackers holding American businesses hostage traffic in bitcoin. Crypto’s value crashed. Now we hear that a husband and wife had been arrested for trying to launder $4.5 billion in stolen bitcoin. They “embraced the moment,” as Matt Damon says. Good for them. But in their case, at least, fortune didn’t favor the corrupt.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.