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Bitcoin @ $100K: Is Crypto a Currency, an Investment, or a Scam?

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Featured Image credit: FREEPIK

During the 2024 US Presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump indicated strong support for cryptocurrencies, attended the annual Bitcoin Conference, and even theorized the US might help pay off its national debt with crypto. In the wake of Trump’s election to the Presidency, Bitcoin ($BTC) hit $100,000 per coin (current price here). As always, its sharp rise brought out two competing camps: cheerleaders/profiteers urging investors to “get in now,” and naysayers telling anyone who will listen to keep their (real) money in their pockets because crypto is a scam.

My own take on crypto also offers dual (and dueling) choices. I believe the crypto community can either [1] make Bitcoin or potentially another coin a global standard buyers and sellers can rely on to deliver and hold value in everyday transactions; or [2] continue pushing crypto as an investment vehicle/get-rich-quick scheme. [If you haven’t heard Nikki Glaser’s beyond-hilarious set on the Roast of Tom Brady on Netflix, including the bit of the night about Brady losing millions on crypto, enjoy that killer bit here.]

The first and often only rationale you’ll hear from crypto naysayers is, “It’s not backed by anything.” Reality check: all currencies not backed by a physical element such as gold — like, for example, the world’s currency of record, the USD, since the US took it off the gold standard in 1971 — have value only because people and markets agree they do. So “they’re not backed by anything” is a willfully uninformed reason to cast aspersions at Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

What does feel different to me about Bitcoin is that it seems way less about “being a currency” and way more about “I wanna get mega-rich on Bitcoin like the Winkelvoss twins” of Facebook fame/infamy. Having navigated the whole less-than-scrupulous mystery world of “You’d better get a digital wallet to protect your crypto, if not anyone including us can steal your crypto holdings from any crypto exchange, but wait that’s the wrong kind of wallet” makes it indeed feel like a scam. It also appears designed to discourage the critical mass of normal citizens and consumers from using it as, you know, a currency — TO PAY FOR goods and services.

Crypto has served solely as an investment vehicle for us thus far, a tiny fraction of our holdings, and I’m happy to keep it that way. In a recent year Coinbase stopped dealing in Bitcoin Cash (BCH). This was interesting because we never wanted any BCH, and the only reason we held any in our account was that Coinbase had previously converted another coin into BCH. In Coinbase-Manufactured Transaction #2 — where Coinbase made it impossible to move our BCH elsewhere, liquidated it, and converted it to yet something else — it took a sizable percentage of the proceeds from us for “fees.” I have a life to lead and it wasn’t life-changing money, so the documentation and screenshots lie dormant on file, ready for future action.

This kind of unsavory behavior from Coinbase, and similar conduct by Robinhood, firms that are supposedly safe harbors for non-criminal regular investors, make Theory #3, “Crypto is a Scam,” the leader in the clubhouse.

I’m a CMA Top 100 Influencer & Strategist

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So honored! I’m a CMA Top 100 Influencer & Strategist for 2024. Grateful to the amazing customers, partners, and colleagues who make it all possible! Thank you to everyone at Base (formerly Crowdvocate) for making this possible. Base’s mission is to maximize revenue through engagement by taking your customers and teams on a journey for higher retention, lifetime value, and advocacy.

I’m now at MongoDB!

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I am now a proud member of the Product Marketing team at MongoDB: the first database company to go public in more than two decades (NASDAQ: $MDB), its business growing at ~50% YoY, with the technology and vision to take on the multibillion-dollar incumbents as it disrupts and reshapes an entire industry. As an analyst I had forecast a total market opportunity of $67.89 billion in big data and analytics by 2019, growing to nearly $111 billion by 2022. I am excited to be at a truly global company capturing a sizable and growing share of that opportunity!

My role is Senior Solutions Marketing Manager, a core part of an energetic and globally distributed team reporting to the Senior Director, Products and Solutions, based in the UK. I am responsible for driving solutions marketing and GTM content positioning the UVP of our product/services portfolio to a senior audience.

If you are not already using MongoDB, let’s talk about what it can do for you and your organization. If you are, I’d like to hear how you are doing. You can find me at any contact point on the Connections page and I’ll be in touch soon.

WELCOME to a more competitive e-commerce market

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Attended the eTail West event two years running…placed two online orders during roughly the same period with a company I lovingly dub the Retail Death Star…had a deadline to meet for the IDG Infoworld blog…and it led to one of my most fun-to-write blog posts ever. The WELCOME mat above plays a pivotal role in the piece, but IDG wouldn’t run this photo because it doesn’t publish anything but its own internally approved pix. So here it is in all its boldly leaf-strewn glory, beckoning you to walk right over it and enjoy all the e-commerce action here.

Before I go: some of the arboreal wonders giving the mat that leafy look.

My pilgrimage to the musical motherland: U2

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…and other dispatches from Dublin during Management World 2011

Aye and Begorrah. The week I traveled to Ireland, President Obama did as well. Honestly not sure why he did not consult with me to sync up schedules…at any rate, the big news of the week for me professionally was attending an event-within-an-event, featuring the team I lead at Stratecast, at the world’s largest IT show for the communications industry. The Innovation Spotlight at Management World 2011 was built around the Rat Pack/10 to Watch report our team publishes each year identifying and analyzing the market’s hottest emerging companies. Check out some great videos from the event here.

Management World (MW) was chock-full of meetings each day plus working breakfasts and dinners, but in a few brief free moments I was able to snap a decent pictorial’s worth of pertinent pix. Continue reading

TM Forum publishes my “Let’s Make it a Good (Mobile and Web) Experience”

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Hello again. TM Forum, the world’s leading industry group/consortium on all things network management, published a little piece I did on what mobile and website operators (everyone from AT&T, Verizon and Telecom Italia Mobile to Amazon.com) are doing to see not just that their own networks and sites are “up” but what WE are experiencing as users, and how to fix it. The piece appears in the Forum’s Inside Leadership newsletter; invite you to read more if you like here. Continue reading

Is Facebook the new email?

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We’ve certainly discussed the pros, cons and security angles around Facebook here and here, and as promised we’ve been adding useful links to one of these, our Facebook Privacy page. Worth mentioning in passing but today I’m thinking more of another entry, Is Social Media Really Bankable, that cited examples of how some of the largest companies in the world—and maybe yours—are starting to leverage social media to build their businesses.

Bloggers normally look outward for suitable subject matter, but in this case my own tendencies have caused me to question whether we’re part of a larger trend. Continue reading

Mobile advertising is on the move

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This blog entry also appears here

Ty Wang, senior director of product marketing for service delivery solutions at Oracle, posted an entry on the Open Communication Blog at Billing & OSS World touting a Gartner forecast that mobile advertising will generate billions of dollars in revenue by the year 2013. Ty asked a great question, in effect, these figures sound great, but what if anything is really happening in the market? Who’s doing this? As the animated hologram told Will Smith’s character in the movie I, Robot: “THAT, detective, is the right question.” Some big (and small) players are making important things happen that are building the foundation for that promised market growth. Continue reading