mathbabe

I have deeply disliked crypto ever since, way back in Occupy, we at Alternative Banking had a visit from some Bitcoin evangelists who were claiming that Bitcoin and the blockchain would somehow make banking more fair and democratic.

They couldn’t explain their reasoning, though, and just tried to get us all to sign up and start harvesting coins, which at the time, probably 2012, was kind of easy. But I wouldn’t do it, on the principle that it was a useless thing of no intrinsic value, and a huge waste of energy to boot. Come back when you can get rewarded for saving energy instead of wasting it, I remember saying.

I looked at the news this morning and realized that I was interested in back then, and why I joined Occupy in the first place, has come full circle to crypto.

Namely, the idea that the government (at the time, the Obama administration) was propping up a market (the mortgage securities specifically and the stock market more generally) for political reasons, which meant that the folks who should have been out of their jobs and possibly charged with crimes were getting off with their multimillion dollar year-end bonuses.

It seemed outrageous that nobody was losing their shirt except for the victims of the whole scam, because it was political suicide to allow the markets to collapse. And this was especially true because so many people had been convinced to invest their retirement in the stock market. As pensions were replaced by stock portfolios, it became a requirement to never allow stocks to dip too low for too long. And the result was truly non-natural and perverted.

I wasn’t the only one to be outraged, of course. The Tea Party was founded on the notion that somehow the borrowers for these loans – especially folks of color, for some mysterious reason – were somehow to blame.

Well here we are, back at the apex of a bubble, this time in cryptocurrency instead of weird hyper-inflated mortgage securities. But this time it’s not just that “Americans won’t be happy” if the bubble bursts, because they were convinced to put their retirement into that bubble. This time it’s Trump and his actual family that is so heavily invested in crypto that they personally stand to lose billions of dollars if and when the bubble bursts.

Which leads me to wonder, what will they end up doing to prevent this particular bubble from bursting? I don’t know, but I’m guessing it will be really gross.