WallStreetBets is blowing up pretty much everywhere, nowhere is exempt.
Yay for crypto!
I want to see more people get into that.
Crypto advice; don't do it.
Crypto nowadays is purely a criminal currency. The things that make it unusable for regular transactions happen to be exactly the things criminals don't care about: high transport fees, global transaction speed limit and extreme ease of money washing.
Furthermore, the currencies are extremely unstable and prone to pump and dump schemes, which are finance fraud. It also is extremely bad for nature, with the current energy usage of cryptominers being more than that of the nation of Ireland.
So yeah, don't get into crypto.
Note; IANAL + not involved with finances.
I think rather than "extreme ease of money washing" you could just simply call it "anonymous", which is something everyone can benefit from.
Transfer fees are high on BTC, sure. It was not designed to reach these kind of insane values and the fee (in BTC) stays the same even if the value goes up, so the higher the value, the higher the transfer fees. But there are other cryptocurrencies designed to avoid this issue. BTC as a currency is pretty much a failed experiment, but others picked up the pieces and improved on the areas in which BTC failed. All of them have yet to succeed as a currency, and that will not be an easy thing to make happen. I believe that with the current system of governments and banks, cryptocurrency won't be allowed to succeed as a currency because they can't control it, and that scares them. So some major change has to happen in the way the world is run but if that happens, cryptocurrency could take over as our primary form of making payments and even replace traditional fiat currency. Until then, it's going to stay pretty niche. But there's definitely potential there for something great.
Honestly, criminal or not, nobody likes the high transfer fees, but people deal with them because BTC is still the most widely accepted cryptocurrency, so you don't really have any other choices when it comes to paying in crypto.
Agreed on the point about the energy usage thing - cryptocurrencies are starting to move away from proof of work (which uses raw computing power) to proof of stake (where you hold at least a minimum amount in a wallet and "stake" it to receive dividends), it's not as appealing as far as "get rich quick" schemes go though. But for cryptocurrency to be sustainable long term that is the way things have to head.
Finance fraud, eh? What makes it different from what the whales do to stock prices every day? Look at GME for a prime example. Not only cryptocurrency is vulnerable to this, but it's especially vulnerable because *most* of them aren't backed by real monetary value. Still, there are companies/projects funded by cryptocurrency and token sales where the tokens act sort of like stocks and are actually dependant on the success of a company, much like actual stocks generally are. And there are a whole bunch of stablecoins that are backed by real physical monetary value (such as gold). One aiming to be more akin to stocks and the other aiming more to be like real currency. So far though the primary value in cryptocurrency is investing in it. The profits that can be made by investing at the right time are insane, and you don't have to be some genius to earn anything, after this long you start seeing patterns.
