President-elect Trump launched his own cryptocurrency overnight and swiftly appeared to make more than $25 billion on paper for himself and his companies.
Why it matters: The stunning launch of $TRUMP caught the entire industry off-guard, and speaks to both his personal influence and the ascendancy of cryptocurrency in his administration.
- It also speaks to the nature of the crypto industry that someone could have $25 billion worth of something that literally did not exist 24 hours previously.
the value of a cryptocurrency is based on its perceived value. Perceived value is based on market activity. If I keep sending money to myself it just shows up as market activity, with nobody being able to tell i sent money to myself.
gdp works this way too btw. I sell you $1 worth of stuff, you sell me $1 of stuff, nobody is any richer but gdp went up by $2. Except we can filter this kind of abuse out because it’s not anonymous.
But GDP is not the price of an asset, it’s a metric to measure the economic activity.
Is it really that hard to understand? The price is dictated by markets… Like with stock and other speculative assets. It’s a little bit wilder, possibly due to anonymity and wild promotion on various platforms (like youtube) etc. But in it’s essence it’s still a market…
the price of an asset (when the asset is the currency itself) is based on its economic activity. You said so yourself. The price is dictated by markets. By how much is bought and sold on markets. That is the definition of economic activity. Which part of that do you not understand?
Well you brought GDP as argument, which just doesn’t have anything to do with the price of an asset. If you sell a lot and buy a lot GDP grows, but the price of that asset can still be the same at the end.
Getting back to your initial argument:
This is just plain wrong, as I could just make myself rich according to that logic… I still need to have that FIAT-money, need to exchange it (in which case I have driven the price up), but now I have less FIAT, so either I have more FIAT to further drive the price, or well I need to cash out in which case I’ll drive the price down. If I just send crypto from one (anonymous) account to another it just does… nothing to the price…
people don’t use bitcoin to pay for other stuff. people buy and sell bitcoin itself. The currency is the asset.
That isn’t true, it is used albeit of course more for speculation, than FIAT.
Guess what, FIAT money like the dollar and euro are also assets, and the same is true for that as well. Though Inflation is usually controlled by central banks.