It may be the latest political and financial obsession, but cryptocurrencies remain something with no inherent value, says the Financial Times' Jemima Kelly.
LONDON: I keep on being told that it’s time I took crypto seriously. Crypto, goes the refrain, has “gone mainstream” – from BlackRock to UBS, every major investor is at the very least “exploring” it these days, while the big firms have tens of millions of retail investors each.
And yet, try as I might to take it seriously, I keep on coming up against new ways to find crypto absurd.Recently, the comedy came courtesy of the nominatively determined Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO and founder of crypto exchange FTX, a company recently valued at US$32 billion. You might think therefore that Bankman-Fried, whose platform offers this very thing, might try to dress it up as a grown-up financial product.
Bloomberg’s Matt Levine, clearly rather stunned, pointed out that Bankman-Fried seems to be saying something along the lines of: “Well, I’m in the Ponzi business, and it’s pretty good.”Bankman-Fried’s comments have been widely mocked, and they are indeed risible, but what is perhaps funnier is that what he is describing can be applied to the rest of crypto, too. I have long compared crypto to a Ponzi scheme, though there are some differences, such as the lack of a central administrator.
But still, there’s always the “crypto is just like the Internet in the early 90s” argument, right? Aside from comparing crypto to the biggest technological breakthrough of the past century purely on the grounds that nobody understood the Internet at the start either, it feels like a bit of a non sequitur. The early 90s seem to be dragging on a bit.
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