I definitely don’t have a problem with you investing in it because you get it. If you lose everything you at least knew the score. That makes you one in a thousand. Many people don’t know anything but the cheerleading, to the moon, were all gonna be billionaires, bullshit they are fed all day long on this forum. If they lose all their money betting on a rigged game we are to blame because we never tried to tell them the truth. Instead we told them lies constantly to keep them investing their extra money until they lose it all.
yeah, that happens in all markets, though. maybe it's a bit more exaggerated in cryptocurrencies, but i think that's more a function of the times we live in (the internet, social media, etc). i remember when the yahoo finance forums were rife with similar get-rich-quick cheerleading for penny stocks. hell, they probably still are.
regarding the "rigged game": the truth is, i just don't know what will happen. when bitfinex and tether first lost banking capabilities, a big premium developed. i actually lost a bunch of coins (equivalent) because i had been holding some USD on bitfinex and USDT on tether. i exited those exchanges, fearing the worst. then i further miscalculated, expecting that the market would read further into these fundamental events.
instead, it seemed like traders began reacting to the unnatural price increases on bitfinex and poloniex. technical breakouts occurred on the charts. everyone simply forgot (or didn't care) about bitfinex's problems and prices kept pumping. it was really hard for me emotionally to overcome my old mindset. "what are you idiots doing? people are just buying because they are desperate to escape bitfinex/tether USD liabilities!" i lost a lot of coins and missed a lot of action keeping that mindset.
at some point it dawned on me that even if the willy bot was real, and USDT was naked manipulation, that this is just how markets work. at some point, feedback loops develop, and the manipulation doesn't even matter anymore to the market. price drives price. fomo takes on a life of its own. fundamental events tend just to catalyze and accelerate market trends.
I guess you’re right, bitcoin is no different than any world market or Wall Street long con. I guess I just expected too much from bitcoin. I wanted it to be something more than that. My bad.
it can be. but these are transitional times. these markets are incredibly inefficient. the ecosystem has horrible infrastructure, and no public blockchain (including BTC) is scalable as is. as they say, rome wasn't built in a day.
so we have these shitty, manipulated centralized exchanges. the gateways. the hope is that as adoption becomes mainstream, so will P2P usage. after all, it's a
network.