Cryptocurrency is built on blockchain. They aren’t exactly the same thing, but no blockchain, no bitcoin.
Actually cryptocurrency is not really money although it often acts like money. It’s software and economically, it’s property, just like real estate, art, and jewelry. And like gold which is property that acts like money and has been used as money and been subject to many scams. A one ounce gold eagle is demarked fifty dollars but no one would use it as money except in an emergency since it costs around two thousand dollars.
“It’s a scam” “It’s used by terrorists, and criminals.” heard on Dkos and out in much of the world. It’s a “hustle” as Elon Musk put it a couple months ago. (Tesla owns more than a billon dollars in bitcoin.)
Cryptocurrencies now number more than 10,000 examples. Many ARE scams, 9000 will eventually go to zero. But consider gold. How many robberies and scams throughout history surround gold. How much terror did the Spanish inflict on the Aztecs for their gold and property. But we don't take it out on gold. How many real estate deals went up in smoke in 2009, but we don’t stop buying houses.
So calling block chain cryptocurrency a scam is facile, reflexive and frankly ignorant.
It’s not really more subject to scams, than gold, fiat currency, real estate and other sorts of valuable property throughout history. The South Sea Bubble was a property scam that the most important Mathematician in five hundred years, Sir Issac Newton fell for.
Calling bitcoin a scam is like calling an orange...orange, the statement lacks understanding of what is actually happening. It’s a statement full of FUD (fear uncertainly and doubt).
“Bitcoin (₿) is a decentralized digital currency, without a central bank or single administrator, that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries.[7] Transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. The cryptocurrency was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto.[8] The currency began use in 2009[9] when its implementation was released as open source software.”
There are thousands and thousands of blockchain projects of which cryptocurrency is the financial arm being worked on and built to make the world a better place. It’s the most democratic, expansive and empowering economic technology to be presented in a hundred years.
The white paper that accompanies and defines bitcoin when it was released would almost certainly win a Nobel Prize in economics should Satoshi Nakamoto be unmasked.
In ten years your digital identity, your medical and educational records will all be in a cryptocurrency blockchain eco-system. It will bank the unbanked in the poor countries of the world. Voting rolls on blockchain will be secure and transparent. No more fucking fake audits. 70 central banks are looking at digital money. They want to centralize it and track it. When cash is eliminated every transaction is tracked. China is way ahead in this project and has its own digital Yuan. This is the road to a totalitarian surveillance state.
The essence of bitcoin and other crypto is decentralization and peer to peer.
Please consider opening your eyes to one of the most important initiatives now flowering and still in it’s infancy on the planet.
Michael Saylor’s Corporation Microstrategy owns more a billion in bitcoin. One of 100 million people who own bitcoin.
Charles Hoskinson one of the eight co-founders of Ethereum (cryptocurrency with a market cap of 200 billion dollars). As well as now being the founder of the Cardano blockchain eco system home to the Ada cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrencies helping the unbanked and the poor all over the world with NFT gaming. The first of thousands of play to earn games to come in the future.
Damien Hirst one of thousands of artists and athletes who can now securely own and profit from their own NFTs (non fungible tokens). Blockchain eliminates the art gatekeepers through disintermediation and peer to peer finance.
DeFi (decentralized finance based on cryptocurrency blockchain is a direct threat to Central banks, and big banks. It's going to be an interesting decade.