Why is is that every time cryptocurrency advocates reach for a real-world use case, they end up talking about Venezuela?
Oh, I remember: it's because it took the near-total collapse of civil society and the rule of law, combined with an economic meltdown that's virtually impossible for any country in the world without oil, to make bitcoin seem like an attractive option as a currency. And even then, trading volumes within Venezuela are running at about USD 5m a week, or about 0.1% of economic activity in Venezuela.
So you're saying that the failure of a state backed currency created a situation where the population is finding btc useful for both store of value against hyperinflation, and ability to make purchases that would be otherwise impossible. I don't think we are in disagreement.
But sure, keep telling yourself that cryptocurrency skeptical aren't educating themselves sufficiently on the big picture to make high quality decisions.
I'm skeptical, and I hope others are too.
Your word choice indicates that you have mentally written off the entire crypto space and have a healthy amount of condescension for those who find potential in it. That's okay.
I edited this like 30 times. I'm putting way too much effort into this. Here's my waste of an hour trying to explain my POV:
crypto raises difficult and sometimes painful ideas about the nature of money in general and how to handle potential future economic disasters. This can interfere with people's ability to evaluate data effectively.
Maybe it's just a side effect of a career evaluating risk and assigning effective probabilities, but the idea of 0% and 100% are only theoretical concepts to me when dealing with such complex entities as economies and currencies. Statements such as "the stock market always goes up" or "crypto is guaranteed to fail" have no semantic content as they are mathematically indefensible.
Low probability events such as a global impact of transformative fintech like btc, or a major economic depression / debt bubble pop of a major country can have tremendous consequences. It behooves us to try and accurately assess those small differences and use the data we have available to plan for those low probability events in some fashion.
Preparedness does not guarantee solvency. But head-in-the-sand approaches maximize failure rates when faced with large scale outlier events.
BTC is asymmetrical risk coupled with a potential hedge/recourse against negative outlier events.
Arguments such as Bill Gates says it's bad! and Exchanges got hacked! utterly miss the big picture. There's a long line of talking heads decrying it, and others exhorting it. They're all speculating about future scenarios through the filter of their own biases.
Exchanges have been hacked - this indicates regulation is needed, and is the same problem JP Morgan faced when it got hacked. It's an argument that blockchain has a valid use case, that centralized financial entities are disproportionately vulnerable.
I'm going to keep socking my retirement money into VTSAX. I read JCollin's stuff, it's great. I also read many anti-stock market analyses as well. I have no illusions about 100% success rates, but it's a good bet and tax incentives are robust, it's the best way to play the game. I am also doing my best to be prepared in the event that the rules of the game change, that another game(btc) turns out to be more profitable, or the game breaks altogether.