Trump: Cryptocurrency ‘a Very Dangerous Thing’ — ‘I Like to Have the Dollar’
(www.breitbart.com)
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Central banks like the Federal Reserve can, at any time, print money to steal its value from you. And they do exactly that. Crypto's primary benefit is making that type of theft impossible.
But can't the developers just mint more coins or rugpull?
Depends on what coin you're talking about. Bitcoin has a cap of 21 million coins with about 18.9 million mined to date.
So far, certain stablecoins are operating exactly like the fed. Tether is the worst offender, printing BILLIONS of tokens at a time. Tether tries to maintain a 1-to-1 ratio with USD. This makes for easy manipulation of the cryptomarkets.
To answer the earlier question, cryptos are all digital, so in that aspect it's cashless. On the other hand, a lot of cryptos provide some kind of utility and are used to power Web 3.0(decentralized internet). Crytpo tech can be used for good or for bad, so we have to be vigilant about it and make sure our lawmakers avoid passing legislation that pushes it towards that cashless system.
Public blockchain-based cryptos certainly have a lot of their own problems, but not those problems. They aren't like numbers stored in a few privately owned computers. The ledger, transactions, and minting/mining process is transparent to everyone. You can't mint more or change the minting process without everyone else knowing and agreeing to it, you can't shut it down because multiple copies of blockchains are distributed over multiple nodes owned by anyone who cares to run a node, and you can't counterfeit the history because each link in the chain is uniquely bound to each previous link by the basic laws of math itself. The only feasible attack is to try to secretly take over the majority of the nodes (incredibly hard to do when everything is already so public), because if enough people are wise to your shenanigans then they can just reject your nodes if you're the minority, and if you're the majority they can hard fork the blockchain (ie: copy the original ledger only up to a certain date) and then continue on from there without your nodes interfering anymore.
They are designed to make that impossible, which is why they have gotten as much trust as they have. Obviously use discernment.
Depends on the coin and how it's coded, most are designed to be deflationary.