Binance Guilty Plea Shows What Crypto's Really About - WSJ - 0 views
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So it turns out that of the two largest crypto exchanges, one was a fraud and the other was a money launderer. Whoever could have guessed?
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Skeptics of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have had their prejudices reinforced. The two main use cases—fraud and crime—have been exposed to the public in dramatic fashion, so now all we have to do is sit back and wait for the inevitable collapse in value.
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Digital art: The latest fad in crypto is a bitcoin “ordinal,” digital art—or anything else—virtually inscribed on a fraction of a bitcoin in the digital ledger known as the blockchain.
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The sudden demand supports bitcoin’s value, in the same way that shopping in bitcoin would. I don’t understand why anyone would pay a cent, let alone real money, to inscribe art in the bitcoin blockchain, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
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The rise in small bitcoin transactions also shows just how useless it is as a currency, and why it’s nonsensical to think bitcoin could ever be used as real money. The median fee leapt to more than $5 over the past week, even as transaction sizes plunged, an insane cost to pay for something invented as a payment method.
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Crime: I was tempted a few years ago by the idea that the value of crypto could be underpinned by genuine transactions that need to avoid the financial system: buying illegal drugs; money laundering; avoiding sanctions; anonymous (but legal) pornography purchases; terrorist finance; and ransomware.
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Digital gold: When it became clear that bitcoin was useless as a currency, its backers switched to claiming that it is a store of value, with its maximum issuance offering protection against the money-printing tendencies of the Federal Reserve. The argument was tested to destruction over the past two years. Inflation was last below the Fed’s 2% target in February 2021, when one bitcoin cost close to $50,000. By the time inflation peaked in June last year the price had collapsed to $20,000, the opposite of what it should have done.
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There was a time when savers in countries with dodgy currencies and bad governments would buy bitcoin or other crypto to escape devaluation and avoid capital controls. But the rise of stablecoins allows these savers to buy digital dollars without the pain of trying to open offshore bank accounts, so they have no need for other cryptocurrencies
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Gambling: Crypto offers a store of volatility more than a store of value. Its volatility makes it an excellent way to bet, and the pretense that it is an investment asset gives speculators cover; it sounds much better to say you are a crypto trader than that you just bet $100,000 at the track.
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Basing the value of an asset on speculation is risky, because the value depends on everyone else betting that it has value. But so long as the merry-go-round continues, it looks like it has value, and decentralized finance, or DeFi, provides the infrastructure for speculation in the language of Wall Street.
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Bitcoin’s moves over the past three years have been much closer to the S&P 500 than to gold or inflation. But stocks are an investment in real assets that pay dividends, while bitcoin produces nothing.
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Lots of that was going on, and Binance has paid the price for helping. Bitcoin isn’t a particularly good way to hide from the cops, anyway, as repeated police busts have demonstrated. Crypto has to clean up its act, so basing its value on illegal transactions no longer makes sense.
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Bitcoin has failed to live up to its original promise of being cheap online cash, but crypto keeps on reinventing itself. It’s so technically satisfying that it must be the solution to something, but quite what remains a mystery.