Why the Collapsing of the 'Crypto Infrastructure' Is Good News
Let the greedy jerks rethink their love of what could've been a great technology
The bill for the last top-shelf, crypto-sponsored party I attended was footed by the Tron people in San Francisco a few months before COVID shut the world down. I had a bizarre conversation with the oddball founder, Justin Sun, who acted like — and was treated like by the hangers-on at the party— a god because he came up with what was then considered a competitor to Ethereum (Spoiler alert: Tron is nothing like Ethereum and sit barely above scam).
The Tron coin, like many tech projects now focusing on the metaverse and AI, was nestled in all of the right marketing terms, and when you even read about it today, it’s easy to get excited and want to invest your fiat currencies in the smoke and mirrors of Tron. At day’s end, however, it’s a useless project that has added zero value to this world and probably resulted in losses for many.
However, Justin Sun has made a lot of money, which is probably why people consider him “god-like.” After all, isn’t making boatloads of money what this journey through life is all about?
Thankfully, no, but sadly, that is how too many people who were swept up in the crypto-madness regard cryptocurrencies. 99.9 percent of the existing cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic value and even less utility, yet billions of dollars worth of these empty ideas are traded daily. Over the last 24 hours, over $100 billion was traded on existing crypto exchanges. If we were to squeeze the value out of these projects in the way that I just squeezed the juice out of two dozen clementines for tomorrow’s palate cleanser (Thanksgiving) — I am making a clementine granita — the benefits to life from each “coin” would easily fit into a thimble.
There isn’t a crypto project in the world today that adds any benefit or value to humankind (I developed a project called “CityToken” that adds value to society, but it was never launched precisely because it “adds value”). All the existing coins represent projects solely for speculation and trading to make some people rich, and others feel like they will soon be rich. The “crypto” revolution is a bust. After being swarmed by greed and swindlers, the foundation is finally cracking: The massive exchanges are tumbling one by one, first FTX, which misappropriated $10 billion, and now Binance.
Binance was the cat’s meow
In the world of crypto, everyone wanted their coin (or token; there is a difference between the two) listed on Binance. Binance, however, has been hit with a massive penalty, and whether it will be able to survive or not is anyone’s guess.
Binance, the operator of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, pleaded guilty Tuesday to multiple financial crimes and agreed to pay about $4.3 billion, the Justice Department announced.
The company as well as its CEO and founder, Canadian national Changpeng Zhao, agreed they broke the law by failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program, according to the department. Binance also pleaded guilty to failing to register as a money-transmitting business and to violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and Zhao, who also goes by “CZ,” has resigned as CEO (Cryptocurrency Exchange Binance Pleads Guilty).
As I said, I am happy that these exchanges are collapsing. I wish more of these punks who have been conspicuously misappropriating other people’s money while flying in private jets for such frivolous trips as to go grocery shopping — it seems there was too much traffic to get to the store by car and faster to fly 30 minutes to another town — would end up jailed.
Blockchain technology, which powers cryptocurrencies, has the potential to change humankind if people actually considered such use cases. Instead, people, for the most part, come up with projects that make the wildest promises of revolutionizing the way people eat, drink, have sex, go to the bathroom, and then promise fortunes to those willing to close their eyes and jump into the project with by buying up the coins. Sure, there are now a lot of rules and regulations governing how and why someone can raise money, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out how to get around a lot of the SEC’s rules.
The frat-boy hyped parties and the whoopie-cushion hilarity of the “unique” gifts that each project team handed out — they call it “merch,” and everyone is trying to outdo each other with the unique shit to give away at conferences and on visits to their offices — created an eat-your-young-and-anyone-close-to-you mentality where everyone said what needed to be said and hyped what needed to be promoted to make quick kills on new projects. Put in a million, and two hours later, take out $10 million and move on to the next bullshit party. Many wanted to be permitted to be a part of that “two-hour window” when the ICO (initial coin offering) went live. That is why grown men, along with scantily-clad Chinese girls barely older than 20, were all hovering giddily around Justin when we chatted.
Justin’s project and the vast majority are not about deploying blockchain technology to reimagine, say, value in our society to mitigate the effects of income inequality. This is what my CityToken project does. I got kind of close to implementing CityToken in Roanoke, Virginia, but then the guy helping me lost his election, and the project disappeared from their radar.
When I spoke to a major investor in Palo Alto — one of the lead investors at Draper — about my project, his exact words were: This is the first blockchain project that could actually help people. That could mean something. But there is one problem: How do I make money if I invest? Helping people and changing how society perceives value is nice, but I need to ‘see the money for me.”
He said the part about “seeing the money” and smiled. “I just love that movie, you know.” He meant Jerry McGuire.
As I downed glasses of rare whiskey at Justin’s party, I took the whiskey menu back to my hotel with me. Drunkish, I sat at my computer and worked out how much the eight glasses of Sotchish and Japanese whiskeys would have cost me in that bar if Tron’s money wasn’t footing the bill: $780. The whiskey menu was one of a kind. I saw only one bottle of that stuff duty-free in Frankfurt, which cost $520! There were at least 300 people at the party, and a third were hitting the whiskey like me.
If I had the money that Tron wasted on whiskey that night to impress people to create a sense of FOMO — fear of missing out — I could have launched my CityToken in one community in Roanoke for a proof of concept.
I am no longer trying to change the world with CityToken. I gave up on that dream — hope, aspiration, lunacy. Now, I want to see those purple-haired thieves who used to go to investor meetings in bathing suits finally pay for their abuse of other people’s trust — and for ruining the promise of the blockchain.