From Nouriel Roubini in his testimony (
https://www.banking.senate.gov/download/roubini-testimony-10-11-18 ):
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies represent the mother of all bubbles.
Blockchain is the most over-hyped – and least useful - technology in human history: in practice it is nothing better than a glorified spreadsheet or database.
To be a currency, Bitcoin – or any crypto-currencies - should be a serviceable unit of account, means of payments, and a stable store of value. It is none of those things. No one prices anything in Bitcoin. And it is a poor store of value, because its price can fluctuate by 20-30% in a single day.
It is so energy-intensive (and thus environmentally toxic) to produce, and carries such high transaction costs, that even Bitcoin conferences do not accept it as a valid form of payment.
Until now, Bitcoin’s only real use has been to facilitate illegal activities such as drug transactions, tax evasion, avoidance of capital controls, or money laundering.
Since the invention of money thousands of years ago, there has never been a monetary system with hundreds of different currencies operating alongside one another.
The idea that hundreds of cryptocurrencies could viably operate together not only contradicts the very concept of money with a single numeraire that can be used for the price discovery of the relative price of thousands of good; it is utterly idiotic as the use of multiple numeraires is like the stone age of barter before money was created.
Cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic value, whereas fiat currencies certainly do, because they can be used to pay taxes.
Instead 99.9% all crypto-currencies instead have no backing whatsoever of any sort and have no intrinsic value of any sort; and even the so-called “stable coins” have only partial backing at best with true US dollars reserves or, like Tether, most likely no backing at all as there has never been a proper audit of their accounts.
Bitcoin has a steady-state supply of 21 million units, so it cannot be debased like fiat currencies. But that claim is clearly fraudulent, considering that it has already forked off into several branches and spin-offs: Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold.
Moreover, hundreds of other cryptocurrencies are invented every day, alongside scams known as “initial coin offerings,” which are mostly designed to skirt securities laws. And their supply is created and debased every day by pure fiat and in the most arbitrary way. So crypto-currencies are creating crypto money supply and debasing it at a much faster pace than any major central bank ever has.
And the biggest scam of all is the case of “stable coins” – starting with Tether – that claimed to be pegged one to one to the US dollar but are not fully collateralized by an equal backing of true US dollars.
The financial-services industry has been undergoing a revolution. But the driving force is not overhyped blockchain applications such as Bitcoin. It is a revolution built on artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things.
As Vitalik Buterin correctly wrote a while ago there is a fundamental “inconsistent trinity” in blockchain: you cannot have at the same time scalability, decentralization and security.
Blockchain’s ideology is politically born out of the same mentality as libertarian right wing conspiracies or extreme left anarchism: all governments, central banks, moneys, institutions, banks, corporations, entities with reputation and credibility build over centuries are evil centralized concentrations of power that literally need to be destroyed.
Decentralization is a myth. The reality is one of a massive centralization of power among miners, exchanges, developers and wealth holders, the total opposite of the lie of a decentralized system.
Everything that this study argues about the nefarious impact of China on Bitcoin can be said and applied to any other crypto-currency and to the role of Russia in the crypto eco-system.
Thus it is little wonder that, according to the ICO advisory firm Satis Group, 81% of ICOs are scams created by con artists, charlatans, and swindlers looking to take your money and run.
There is now massive evidence – from serious press investigations and academic studies – that the entire crypto-land is subject to massive, systematic and widespread price manipulation of every sort known in the annals of criminal manipulation: pump and dump schemes, washtrading, spoofing, front-running, serious conflicts of interest between exchanges and their customers, vast insider trading, creation of pseudo stable coins that are rather fiat crypto-currencies that are used only to prop up Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies.
The only think that Crypto/Blockchain is DAPPS or Distributed Apps. But recent studies show that 75% of the highly illiquid and bared used DAPPS are Krypto-Kitties, Pyramid and Ponzi schemes and Casino games.
