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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.