Personally I liked the post a lot. I figured MMM would be a big BTC enthusiast since it seems right in his wheelhouse: a gimmicky high-tech boondoggle for obsessives to wonk out over that claims to help people disconnect from The System and be more independent. But instead he made a bunch of great points. To recap a few (and add a few of my own):
- It's been said often, but can't be said often enough: cryptos are just tulips without the tulips (which at least smell nice). They are invisible, intangible tokens with no function whatsoever except being speculated on. They do not represent ownership of any underlying asset, they cannot be used to buy goods and services, and they don't even have a stable value. That's not just a Ponzi scheme, it's almost the Platonic ideal of a Ponzi scheme.
- The built-in limit on the number of bitcoins is not a true protection against inflation, since any idiot can (and does) launch their own crypto and increase the effective supply, since most cryptos are effectively identical in how they work.
- Cryptos are not true currency. They are not a stable store of value, they are not a useful medium of exchange, and they are not a practical unit of account. THEY ARE NOT A TRUE CURRENCY.
- Probably MMM's best point is that zero-sum speculation like this is a stupid waste of time even as a hobby. It's really just glorified gambling, which any Mustachian should know is one of the dumbest, most toxic things you can do with your money. It causes wild emotional swings and makes people focus on things not under their control. Investments should be in enterprises with real economic substance capable of generating good returns over time.
- To the small extent cryptos are actually used for transactions, much of it is related to crime. People who speculatively drive up the price of cryptos are helping to enrich cybercriminals, pornographers, terrorist groups, and rogue regimes. Thanks!
- Cryptos have a COLOSSAL carbon footprint. Nobody who owns a bitcoin has any right to complain about seeing Hummers driving down the road or criticizing the wastefulness of huge McMansions. BTC alone uses more electricity than many small countries, and that's with only a tiny level of adoption. Meanwhile say what you will about the dollar, it doesn't require hyper-intensive GPU farms just to buy a candy bar at the grocery store.
- Blockchain will probably prove to be a useful technology for various purposes, but it's very unlikely that a global decentralized currency will be one of them (countries won't give up control of their currencies, and they definitely do have the power to prevent cryptos from going mainstream).
My only complaints about the post are the rather lame cheerleading for the Federal Reserve (which indisputably played a major role in causing the Great Depression, the 2008 financial crisis, and the current bond/stock/RE bubble. Some "adult supervision"!), and the ignorance about the role of gold as a historical currency, which worked phenomenally well for thousands of years right up until the US abandoned it in 1971, setting off massive inflation and the financialization of the US economy that we are still coping with today.