“Cryptocurrencies”‘ inherent illogic illustrated

May we point, as a quick reminder of how impor­tant it is to train – and pos­si­bly force – one­self to think log­i­cal­ly espe­cial­ly in mat­ters of finan­cial sig­nif­i­cance, to this find with respect to a gen­tle­man named Joe Rogan, often referred to as the world’s most suc­cess­ful pod­cast­er, or more specif­i­cal­ly, to anoth­er gen­tle­man “explain­ing” Bitcoin to said podcaster:

“The dif­fer­ence between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that in Bitcoin there will only be 21 mil­lion, it can­not be changed,” Curry explained. “It can­not be inflat­ed, and you can­not say the same for Ethereum.”

We have, thus, an asser­tion that Bitcoin be scarce and there­fore valu­able, in the same sen­tence that acknowl­edges that, with Ethereum as an exam­ple, there are already more than one so-called “cryp­tocur­ren­cies” in exis­tence, which can quite appar­ent­ly be cre­at­ed at will, if so desired also with more or less the same char­ac­ter­is­tics as Bitcoin itself, so that the sen­tence, when ana­lyzed, destroys the very sense it aims to convey.

The sim­ple syl­lo­gism is, of course:

1. “Cryptocurrencies” as an “asset class” are not scarce because any sort and num­ber of them can be cre­at­ed by any­one at any time.
2. Bitcoin belongs to the “asset class” of “cryp­tocur­ren­cies”.
3. Therefore, Bitcoin is not scarce.

We have dis­cussed this before, but we found it astound­ing that the world’s most suc­cess­ful pod­cast­er, who should be expect­ed to com­mand sig­nif­i­cant­ly above-aver­age intel­li­gence, appears to “swal­low” such a self-destruc­tive state­ment with­out objection.

We are remind­ed by the cryp­to craze of the time-proven wis­dom say­ing “Don’t fight the FED”, yet in the sense that while the FED is cer­tain­ly a pow­er­ful insti­tu­tion, even it can nev­er be as pow­er­ful as log­ic itself, being the core of every­thing in exis­tence includ­ing the FED, which leads to an even more imper­a­tive moni­tion to not fight log­ic hop­ing even remote­ly that one may pre­vail in the long run, as at least in the long run every­one test­ing his luck will lose this fight with­out exception.

An in-depth analy­sis of why “cryp­tocur­ren­cies” may well be “cryp­to-” but by no means qual­i­fy as cur­ren­cies in the mean­ing of mon­ey we shall leave to a sep­a­rate arti­cle. A grat­i­fy­ing­ly lucid and con­cise analy­sis of “cryp­tocur­ren­cy” fal­lac­i­es by a (shall we say: very) high­ly promi­nent (actu­al) econ­o­mist, an analy­sis with an expectably marked econo­met­ric lean­ing, can be found here in the meantime.