alt Hacker NewsI never got the whole larger "crypto" economy. The number of meaningless alt coins. That come and go most of the time, build on zero any type but speculative value. Worse than any fiat.
And then stable coins. Fancy IOUs of fiat. Which might or might not have actual assets backing them. Which you might or might not be able to redeem. Say if Russian government had a billion in whatever stable coin. Could they redeem them and get real dollars transferred to some account they own?
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I think the second line is touching on something. The implication is that there may be a kind of legal cross-nation counterfeiting happening. Stablecoins likely play a part. When I worked in crypto back in 2017, all the successful people would tell me that they thought there was something really wrong with Tether and they all believed it was propping up Bitcoin. They expected it to collapse any day... But here we are 8 years later.
Ideally, countries should only be allowed to issue their own currency. It's not hard to see why a country being able to print another country's currency would pose a problem... With all money being digital and stored on thousands of distinct bank ledgers which basically don't have consensus, it would be very difficult to track with manual audits and with the current incentives in place. It would be trivial to hide these transactions under legitimate names as various forms of international payments.
What is there to get? Do you get sports betting or lotteries? People play games. They invent arbitrary rules with real consequences and try to "win".
Back in school we used to do things like "dare" people to do something or bet on a coin toss or something with the stakes being a snack or a desirable bit of stationery. I feel like everyone believes there is some clear boundary where things suddenly become "grown up" and "real". Do you remember when you became "grown up"? No? Nobody does. The secret is it never happens. The only difference is children have no "real" assets to play with.
What makes some derivative traded on Wall Street, like a "synthetic CDO", any more or less meaningful than alt coins?