To be fair, and i disagree with Maher 97% of the time, but he's not wrong.
Bitcoin and all the rest are worth $0.00. Absolutely nothing to back it as it has zero intrinsic value. I think the crypto market is fine for gamble plays, but as a serious investment, I'll stick to the sidelines. I will be happy for those who make bank off of it, but if the bubble pops, a fuck load of people are going to be standing around dumbfounded asking why their precious little math problem isn't worth shit and probably cause some 1930's level suicides.
Just my crazy 2 cents...
He's absolutely wrong. He's as ignorant and shortsighted as David Letterman was in that clip I posted from 1995 where he tries to explain to Bill Gates why the Internet is pointless.
Cryptocurrency doesn't just
use blockchain tech, it represents the
monetization of blockchain tech. And blockchain tech is the fabric from which the next iteration of the Internet is being built as we speak. Blockchain gives the digital world several things it sorely lacks at present: decentralization, transparency, verifiability, authenticity, and veracity. It allows for universal, lightning-fast trustless digital exchanges. Think about what that means for a second. Think about what that's
going to mean when it is universally adopted- and it will be.
What we are witnessing with the rise of cryptocurrency isn't just a paradigm shift for currency, it's a paradigm shift for the entire digital world. The first version of the Internet did not have a native currency. There was no built in "money of the Internet." Well, the next version of the Internet
does have a native currency, and it's called cryptocurrency.
The reason you can't stop cryptocurrency is because you can't stop the evolution of the digital world into a form that relies on cryptocurrency to operate. The hilarious truth is that cryptocurrency doesn't
have to replace fiat in some dramatic fashion. There will be no sudden revolution where people become suddenly enlightened and drop dollars for bitcoins. What's going to happen is that people will begin to find that more and more of the things they want to buy, the services they want to use, operate exclusively on crypto. For a while, people will convert their dollars to crypto in order to access the goods and services they want, but as more and more institutions adopt crypto, there will be less and less of a need to bother with dollars at all.
Fiat isn't going to die with a bang, it's going to die with a whimper. It won't be suddenly usurped, it will be slowly abandoned. I'm sure some people will use fiat for years and years to come, just like some people still wait to get their news from the newspaper. But most of the world will move on to crypto once it becomes apparent that it's faster, better, and more convenient.