Thought I’d start another thread on this as things seem to be picking up after the massive sell-off at the end of last year.
Anyone got any ripple they can lend us?
A cryptocurrency is a form of digital asset or money that can be exchanged in a similar way to normal currency. There’s no physical money attached to a cryptocurrency, so there are no coins or notes, only a digital record of the transaction.
Cryptocurrencies come in many forms, but the best known is Bitcoin.
Buying and storing a cryptocurrency is quite technically demanding and it’s easy for things to go wrong.
Cryptocurrency prices tend to be very unstable; if you’re investing with the hope of making money, it’s very easy to lose some or all your original investment.
Cryptocurrency investors are increasingly targeted by fraudsters, while cryptocurrency exchanges have also been subject to cyberattacks.
The complexity of some cryptocurrency products can make it hard for investors to understand the risks.
There is no guarantee that crypto-assets can be converted back into cash. Being able to do this requires a level of demand and supply that can’t be guaranteed.
The lack of regulation means that seeking compensation or making complaints is very difficult - investors are unlikely to have recourse to either the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) or the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS).
Signed up to Coinbase whilst bored over Xmas but still waiting for them to verify my identity. But I realised that if idiots like me are jumping onboard who don’t even fully understand what a bitcoin is (it’s like a load of old fossilised PDF files, right?) then the ship has probably sailed long ago.
I did read an interesting thing about how these and normal financial transactions are produced by existing servers doing complex equation “work” to generate “value” to the coins themselves. And that this will contribute to environmental oblivion by using so much electricity.
I think decentralized currency does have some emancipatory potential.
There are plenty of anti-government/libertarians conspiracy theorists involved at this point as well unfortunately and bitcoin mining is for sure too energy intensive to be sustainable.