The Real Crypto Scammers

Rare is the thing in this world that can be pronounced with absolute certainty as nonsense.

Drivel. Bilge. Claptrap.

But there are a few such things. And of one of them, we can be sure…

To be straight-up with you, I stole those first three paragraphs.

Copped ‘em right off the page… well, right off the internet.

They ran a few days ago in the San Jose Mercury News and other newspapers in the Southern California News Group. They led an opinion piece by an editor at one of the group’s newspapers. I won’t name him; no point in that.

But I lifted his lead so that I could turn around and apply it to his opinion piece. There is a point in that.

And this is the point: The opinion is 100% nonsense. Drivel. Bilge. And claptrap.

His topic: Cryptocurrency.

And his opinion:

…every time I hear of someone taking cryptocurrency seriously, I have to ask them: Don’t you realize it’s all bull?

Not a little bit on the baloney side of the ledger. Not just another gamble, or a fun fad, or a cool new investment, or an interesting alternative to that apparently deadly dull real thing that is money.

It doesn’t exist. It is a scam. It is a prank. It has no intrinsic value whatsoever.

Now, I truly do not care what this particular editor believes. People are entitled to be wrong. Many are—insufferably so—all the time.

But I do care that such opinions deliver inaccurate information to a newspaper’s readership.

See, most newspaper readers are older Americans. Last datapoint I saw showed that half of newspaper readers are over the age of 55. That is a cohort that didn’t grow up with digital bits and bobs, and because of that they don’t reflexively grasp crypto.

Instead, they form opinions based on what they read in the mainstream press. And when they read drivel, bilge, and claptrap from someone their own age (who clearly doesn’t understand crypto either) well, then, it’s the blind leading the blind.

And that’s just not fair to those who truly want to understand what cryptocurrency is and why those who do understand the game see so much opportunity.

To be clear, here, I am not talking about me (even though I am a 58-year-old Gen Xer who does understand the game).

No—I’m talking about JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Nike, Addidas, Churchill Downs (the Kentucky Derby folks), Walmart, Taco Bell, Microsoft, Apple, Ralph Lauren, Gucci, New York Life, Merck, Novartis, Facebook, Google, the United States government, the governments of China, Brazil, most of the European Union, the United Kingdom… I could go on for many, many more words reciting the names of companies and countries all over the world that are actively building on the blockchain—the technology that powers crypto.

Which, by definition, means they are all involved in crypto.

So, ipso facto, does that mean all those companies are involved in something that doesn’t exist?

Something that’s a scam?

A prank?

Has no intrinsic value?

Have they wasted, combined, billions of dollars on a lark?

The answer, of course, is no.

Asserting that crypto is a scam and a prank and has no intrinsic value is ludicrous.

Cringe-worthy, really, because it says you’re talking out-of-school, and it’s painfully obvious to those who know the truth.

Here’s just one example of a crypto-based company that’s changing an entire industry…

In recent months, a New York-based company called Parcl Labs began tracking residential real estate in several Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) such as New York, London, Los Angeles, Boston, Austin, Las Vegas, and others. It collects this data by way of something called an “oracle”—a crypto-based service in which analog, real-world data, like home sales and home price changes, are hoovered up and converted into digital data on the blockchain that so-called “smart-contracts” can access and rely on as being 100% accurate. And I mean that in the legal sense of “accurate,” given that some states now recognize smart-contracts as legally binding.

Parcl collects that data every single day, and publishes a price for each MSA, showing its rise or fall on a square-footage basis.

Every last bit of the process is on the blockchain, and Wall Street investors are wagering on individual real estate markets by way of what Parcl has created.

And here’s the thing: That service does not exist anywhere in the traditional world of finance. Outside of Parcl Labs, the closest you can get to an MSA’s real-time, overall market price change is Case-Shiller and its various indices… which are three months old, at best.

Parcl’s blockchain approach to real estate investment opportunities isn’t evolutionary.

It’s the definition of revolutionary.

No different than the iPhone revolutionizing the mobile phone.

And I’ll reemphasize the fact that this is crypto. On the blockchain.

Audited.

Not a scam or a prank in sight.  Not a “fun fad.”

Plenty of intrinsic value, too, if you put any worth in the fact that investors (not just crypto traders) have put nearly a quarter-billion dollars into Parcl Labs so far.

People not involved in crypto—like, say, our opinion writer at the Southern California News Group—wouldn’t know that because, well, they’re not involved in crypto. Their knowledge base is as deep as a puddle after a light sprinkling of summer rain.

I know bupkis about string theory—which hasn’t been definitively proven. So does that mean my opinion holds value if I say that, because it hasn’t been proven, string theory is a scam and a prank and has no intrinsic value? Would those who know string theory say, “Yeh, he’s a got a point”?

Or would they call me out for leading my readers astray by sharing with them an opinion based on absolutely no knowledge of the subject?

And here is the message of today’s dispatch: Be careful about who you put your faith in when reading about crypto.

You can tell those who are knowledgeable by how deeply they know the subject—good, bad, and ugly.

And you can tell those who are subject-illiterates by the fact that they admit they’ve never owned crypto and that they don’t understand it.

But they’re going to tell you anyway why it’s a scam and a prank…?

Rare is the thing in this world that can be pronounced with absolute certainty as nonsense.

And non-crypto experts opining on the intrinsic value of crypto… well, that’s definitely nonsensical drivel, bilge, and claptrap.