“A big population of people have willingly self-identified that they have substantial disposable income, poor judgment, low social literacy, a high tolerance for nonsensical risk, and are highly persuadable.”
– Dan “FoldableHuman” Olson¹⁾

A cryptocurrency, or crypto, is a digital, decentralized, encrypted asset meant to be used as a medium of exchange, yet most 'investors' in crypto are actually holding and speculating,²⁾ so you get desperate articles and scams insisting that people will eventually 'use' it someday.

“The Times 03/Jan/2009
Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”³⁾
– Bitcoin's genesis block

In the late 2000s, the U.S. housing bubble burst, sparking the Great Recession, and the banks simply took a controversial bailout. The anti-capitalists would famously lead Occupy Wall Street, while the hyper-capitalists believed government intervention was the issue, opposed to letting their economy crash, and began to conceptualize a decentralized currency that was meant to be 'unregulatable'.

Later that year, Bitcoin went live and etched these events into the 'genesis block',⁴⁾ but it remained niche amongst ideology-driven libertarians for most of the early 2010s. The first surge occurred in the mid-2010s when Etherium helped propel crypto into the general populace, causing Bitcoin to peak at $19K in 2017.⁵⁾ It subsequently crashed,⁶⁾ but much of the community would congregate at Twitter.⁷⁾

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the media would fuss over NFT sales and celebrity endorsements, causing Bitcoin peak at $68K in 2021,⁸⁾ then it crashed⁹⁾ after war breaks out, while the community was awash with bankruptcies^10)11)12) and U.S. SEC lawsuits.¹³⁾¹⁴⁾ It eventually recovered, didn't, blah blah blah… I'm not going to catalog every 'hype rally' and 'market correction' that this damn thing goes on. Come on.

Why are the good GPUs out of stock?
I'm just trying to build a new PC here...
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　　　　　 ∧＿∧ 　　（´<_｀ 　）　Fucking crypto miners.
　　　　　（　´_ゝ`）　　 /　　⌒i
￣＼　 ／　　 /￣￣￣￣/|　|
￣￣| /　　　./　NZXT　/　|　|
￣|　|（__ﾆつ/＿＿＿＿/ 　|　|＿＿＿＿
田|　|　＼＿＿＿））＼　￣（u　⊃
ﾉ|||　|　　　　　　 ⌒￣

The blockchain is a decentralized activity log, being this public distributed ledger using a consensus mechanism, typically proof of work (PoW) or proof of stake (PoS), which are both equally inefficient. Proof of work is inherently wasteful by design as all miners waste electricity^15)16)17) solving the same problem, while proof of stake is a complex, inefficient, unbalanced lottery with less waste.^18)19)20)

As for mining, it simply requires a good processor,²¹⁾ a mining pool, and a wallet to take your cut, but this isn't the early 2010s anymore, so you would probably just spike your electric bill and increase the price of electricity for low-income families in your area. The billionaires have already tried to exploit countries that have cheap electricity, but most of them have wisened up by now.

“We had problems when we started accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment option. 50% of those transactions were fraudulent, which is a mind-boggling number.”
– Gabe Newell²²⁾

There are many types of wallets for cryptocurrency, each with their own level of implied 'security'. Most of the wallets that get advertised are typically custodial wallets, but there are wallets where you can actually 'use' your wallet to exchange goods, transfer money, or take advantage of a wallet's initial anonymity and conduct a wash trade (i.e. send money to yourself). That said, the main four wallet types are:

• Custodial wallet - A dormant wallet that acts like a stock portfolio, but carries some risk since you let a third-party handle them. Popular examples are Cash App, Coinbase, Robinhood, etc.
• Desktop wallet - A wallet that keeps your wallet's keys on your desktop. Some popular examples are Atomic,²³⁾ Electrum, Exodus, Sparrow, Specter, Wasabi, and so forth.
• Hardware wallet - These are secure, physical flash drive wallets, but they cost around $60 to $200, so you have to be invested. Examples include Coldcard, Jade, Ledger, and Trezor.
• Paper wallet - It's a piece of paper with your keys written down or a QR code. As secure as it sounds. You can generate a paper wallet using Bitaddress or WalletGenerator.

Some crypto exchanges, despite the risk of hackers,²⁴⁾²⁵⁾ have prevailed like Coinbase or Binance, and many Bitcoin ATMs now exist. However, the more successful exchanges usually ask for your personal information, due to anti-money laundering KYC guidelines, which risks the de-anonymization of your wallet. From there, you find a contradiction with the blockchain: “everything is public, nothing is private.”

In addition, cryprocurrency just has extremely limited usability in the real world, so you probably won't use it to pay for anything important or tangible (e.g. clothing, food, gas, rent, transit, etc.) unless you're willing to deal with highly volatile transaction fees,²⁶⁾ often billionaires with nothing to lose. Due to this limited usability, we've ended up with the NFTs phenomenon to double the speculation.

In the 2010s, there were increased reports of people encountering ransomware, a type of malware that's designed to hold the victim's computer hostage for a ransom fee. These types of attacks would ask for gift cards or MoneyPak as payment, but following the success of CryptoLocker in 2013,²⁷⁾²⁸⁾ more modern ransomware like WannaCry and Petya have begun asking for cryptocurrency as payment.

Furthermore, telemarketing scams, including refund scams and tech support scams, will ask victims to purchase an unusual amount of gift cards. However, these scams are more thoroughly documented, so it's known these cards get laundered over a crypto exchange, losing almost half of the value.²⁹⁾ So if you wonder why India has a 30% tax on crypto,³⁰⁾ it's probably meant to combat cybercrime.

The cryptocurrency community generally alternates between two mindsets, which gets extremely old quick, and it generally irks me when the community keeps circling back to inventing pretentious, sesquipedalian words to make themselves sound smarter than they actually are because you'd quickly realize how much of it is a Ponzi scheme when you break all of this bullshit down in words that are easier to understand.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is a term for blockchain-based ledgers that aims to remove all the third-party intermediaries (e.g. banks) from financial transactions, relying on a decentralized application (dApp) to execute smart contracts which record transactions on the blockchain and, in theory, that money would be sent over. It intends to remove third-party service fees, but fees and interests rates may still apply.

Once again, the blockchain is public, so we still have that “everything is public, nothing is private” issue, and these systems become a natural target for hackers and fraudsters.³¹⁾³²⁾ In addition, while this terminology supposedly encompass all theoretical 'non-crypto' projects, the term 'DeFi' is pretty much exclusively used by cryptocurrency circles, so not a lot of options.

A 'non-fungible(interchangable) token' (NFT) is an encrypted URL given 'artificially scarce collectable' status. These went viral in early 2021 after high-profile sales allegedly occurred,³³⁾ but memes are finite³⁴⁾³⁵⁾ so the market died out within three months,³⁶⁾³⁷⁾ forcing the grift to shift its focus onto… bearded lions, lazy pixel artwork, suspiciously racist monkeys,³⁸⁾³⁹⁾ and out-of-touch memes that stemmed from Reddit.

Due to the copious amounts of misinformation on the subject matter, it should be noted that you, technically, won't 'own' what it represents,^40)41)42)43) the asset can vanish,⁴⁴⁾⁴⁵⁾ and anybody can just 'steal' them.⁴⁶⁾ Furthermore, most NFTs sell for under $100 with outrageous fees between 72.5% to 157.5%,⁴⁷⁾ the market is notoriously known for art theft,^48)49)50)51) and it has fraud and spam issues.⁵²⁾

Since the initial Bitcoin boom, a plethora of new cryprocurrencies or 'altcoins' have emerged, trying to ride on their success. However, there's 10,000,000+ of these damn things, and most of them are 'shitcoins' or 'meme coins' that aren't worth mentioning, so this section will only cover notable ones that have probably been in the media to some degree or cryptocurrencies that are relevant to subjects that I've written about.

Cryptocurrency		Release	Status	Notes and remarks
Bitcoin	BTC	2009-01-09		The big one. Many talk about replacing it, but this has yet to happen.
Litecoin	LTC	2011-10-07		The first potential alternative, though it has struggled to maintain relevance.
Dogecoin	DOGE	2013-12-06		Named after Doge. Began as a joke,53) then TikTok54) and Musk happened. It's still not on the moon yet!55)56)
Monacoin	MONA	2013-12		Named after Mona. An actual Japanese57) coin, but it's otherwise not relevant.
Monero	XMR	2014-04-18		The most unique one, noted for its privacy. Probably illegal in some jurisdictions.
Tether	USDT	2014-10-06		Bitfinex's stablecoin. $1 USD ≈ 1 USDT. One of the largest stablecoins so far.
Ethereum	ETH	2015-06-30		The second big one. Best for AMD mining.
Bitconnect	BCC	2016-02-15	Discontinued.	A verified Ponzi scheme,58)59) died 2018.
Cardano	ADA	2017-09-24		The first major proof-of-stake coin.
Susucoin	SUSU	2018-06-26	Not being tracked.	Named after Susukino. A very sad project by Ron Watkins, most notably has a dead board on 2channel.
USD Coin	USDC	2018-09		Circle's stablecoin. $1 USD ≈ 1 USDC. Typically second largest to Tether.
Solana	SOL	2020-03-16		The largest proof-of-stake coin, often said to be an Ethereum alternative.
Shiba Inu	SHIB	2020-08		The so-called “Dogecoin killer” which saw very aggressive advertising on Twitter.
Libra/Diem		Cancelled	Cancelled.	Facebook's own attempt at cryptocurrency, died 202260)61) for many reasons.

In short, I'm really tired of hearing about cryptocurrency in general. The trend has overstayed its welcome⁶²⁾ and the ideal times to enter, specificially the early 2010s or the 2020 Dogecoin TikTok,⁶³⁾ has long passed. Below is a short recap of how insane 'crypto mania' was during the COVID-19 pandemic, prior to Big Tech pivoting to AI, since I've wasted a lot of hours hearing about it.

• Twitter isn't real life. When the website is home to a community,⁶⁴⁾ past owners embraced it,^65)66)67) and an exchange chipped in 1.13% of the acquisition.⁶⁸⁾ It stops being a 'neutral' source.
• Gorillaz never sold those NFTs. This was huge 'news' when the fad was starting up,⁶⁹⁾ but it's rarely reported that they got so much backlash⁷⁰⁾⁷¹⁾ and silently canceled them.⁷²⁾
• Discord founder Jason Citron presented cryptocurrency integration as a proof of concept,⁷³⁾ and people fucking hated it.^74)75)76) Also, MEE6 is one of the worst Discord bots,^77)78)79) but that isn't new.
• Square Enix attempted an NFT pivot,^80)81)82) selling off several IPs,⁸³⁾⁸⁴⁾ then ousted Matsuda.⁸⁵⁾ For the record, Final Fantasy XIV was never affected during all of this.⁸⁶⁾
• The Mozilla Corporation used to accept crypto donations from 2014⁸⁷⁾ until 2022, when they chose to shelve the method indefinitely^88)89)90) as the reputation of crypto had worsened.
• Gumroad started hinting at an NFT pivot,⁹¹⁾⁹²⁾ but it got backlash and the company went into very unprofessional damage control.⁹³⁾ Many alternatives rejected NFTs in response.⁹⁴⁾⁹⁵⁾

• This is not financial advice. This is merely an educational and informative article.
• All that aside, if you are actually serious, the most important things that you probably need to know is:
  1. The market runs on hype and speculation. Don't fall for the most basic investment scams.
  2. If you must 'buy', identify the support level. Don't be the greater fool who buy at the top, even if you are getting that fear of missing out (FOMO) feeling.
  3. Know when to quit. These community are highly susceptible to groupthink, reduces all criticism and logic to FUD, and will make embarrassing self-affirming 'holier-than-thou' speeches.
• In the Japanese language, the alleged Bitcoin founder 'Satoshi Nakamoto' (サトシ・ナカモト) is often rendered in katakana, but some use 'Nakamoto Satoshi' (中本哲史, lit. 'central origin, wise history').
  • It has also been speculated that 'Satoshi Nakamoto' means CIA because one possible reading of Satoshi is 'intelligence', thus 'central origin intelligence'.
• Personally, I think any crypto investor that uses 'gm' (good morning) is in too deep, but I'm also old. If you bring this to me, I'll joke about general manager, gamemaster, General Motors, etc.
• By the way, the Shiba Inu, Kabosu (Doge)⁹⁶⁾⁹⁷⁾ and Balltze (Cheems),⁹⁸⁾ have promoted NFTs, and their respective owners eventually met up after their dogs had died.

• Stock market
• Web3 - “The internet, decentralized!” (Doesn't elaborate further.)

• Coin360 - Cryptocurrency heat map. Similar to the stock market heat map.
• Fear & Greed Index - An ominous gauge calculating the general mood around cryptocurrency.
• Web3 is going just great - News feed on the “future of the internet” that some claim.