I'm nowhere near expert on any of the things below, but:
My gut tells me if an exchange makes as much money as you suggest, people involved in that exchange are making even more profit from the said exchange, otherwise they wouldn't engage. The whole thing being literally money out of thin air, it feels like a huge bubble that should inevitably burst bringing down _ a lot _ of collaterals with it.
Note that Coinbase (like most exchanges) charges retail clients outrageously high fees (orders of magnitude more than you would pay at a competitive FX or equity broker), but institutional and whales that trade a lot very small fees.
Yet another way crypto moves money from poor suckers to insiders.
Try to become an insider at one of these exchanges even with a couple million dollars. See how it goes.
This is like Coke ONLY giving discounts to Costco instead of anywhere else so that Costco can reap the rewards. Walmart, Target, they can all pay full price.
The convenience store spends more money to package individual items. A crypto transaction is the difference of a keystroke. They are not comparable on many fronts.
From a capitalist economic perspective, it makes logical sense to maximize your profits and entice wealthier customers with quantity discounts.
From a societal impact perspective, it adds transactions that may not have happened otherwise, but these are mostly isolated effects from what I can tell. This can spur the economy with spending, and be more efficient. Ultimately however, it ensures that those with more money and the ability to buy in bulk lose less money than the tired masses. This should lead to wealth inequality over time.
Without knowing what impact each of these individual variables has in isolation, it’s difficult to define metrics for “net benefit” to society with any real certainty, let alone begin to measure them.
You might be interested in reading Warren Buffett's reasoning for not investing in crypto. Basically he says crypto produces no goods, products or services, and it's only value comes from finding a "bigger fool" to pay a higher price than you did for it.
It's value is from speculation assuming future speculation will assume more future speculation
It's easy to agree with this position if you deliberately ignore that the "service" crypto provides is a decentralized, censorship-resistent, self-contained, global system of finance that is designed specifically for the modern internet age and which does not need to be under the control of any particular nation-state or company in order to function.
Otherwise, it is clear where the value comes from.
Yeah yeah yeah, then why everyone is losing their shit when the amount of worthless, centralized dollars they can buy per one Bitcoin decreases? Hmmm...
Yeah, as a layman this MSTR explainer was an "aha" moment for me:
No, what is likely happening with all the convertible bond issues is that MicroStrategy prices the bonds in a manner to attract market neutral hedge fonds, meaning arbitrageurs. Saylor has briefly mentioned these firms, as opposed to firms seeking actual Bitcoin exposure. For issue after issue, they can be spotted as the largest bond holders by anyone with a Bloomberg terminal. By buying the bonds, even when conversion price is at a large premium, and by simultaneously shorting the shares, these arbitrage funds can lock in close to risk-free profits. Due to the convex nature of the value of the convertible bonds, the hedge funds attempt to profit no matter whether MicroStrategy shares rise or decline
Like, a broker profiting off PFOF in the stock market makes sense because there's an underlying asset generating real cashflow that people are buying into. But where is the money in crypto actually coming from? You have to pay miners, brokers, rugpulls/thefts/etc and there's barely any cashflow from the underlying assets (dApps?). But if it really is ~just a casino, with retail gamblers as the only real source of cash, it can still be profitable for smart money to pour billions in and use their PhDs to trade the vol. It goes up, it goes down, overall retail is bleeding huge amounts of cash on a sort of 5 dimensional pyramid scheme but enough gamblers go viral winning the slots/blackjack that the casino doesn't run out of customers.
Can this continue indefinitely? Maybe / probably? Seems similar to sports betting, Polymarket, retail now ~70% of options trading. The west and especially America becoming a gambling culture. The "bubble" may burst and reinflate over and over.
> Due to the convex nature of the value of the convertible bonds, the hedge funds attempt to profit no matter whether MicroStrategy shares rise or decline.
This sounds exactly like the rationale for the box spreads incident on WSB a couple years ago.
> But where is the money in crypto actually coming from?
Where does the valuation of a payment processor come from?
Or is the objection that no one is actually using them to process payments, only to gamble? If so I'd ask for citations regarding the exact market breakdown.
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