this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Plus, banks actually serve an important economic role. When you put money in a savings account, the bank can lend it out to someone else as an investment, allowing enterprising individuals access to startup capital to build productive businesses or even just mortgages to buy homes, while also providing a quite safe means of storing your savings. Essentially, they connect those who have spare capital with those who need capital. And sure, there's a lot of tomfoolery that goes on in the industry, but the core idea of banking is good.
That is true, but technically speaking crypto does the same, just in a really dumb way.
When you buy crypto, you essentially give away real money for something worthless, so the real money is free, while you have nothing except the expectation that some bigger idiot will give you real money for your worthless coins.
But contrary to banks, there is no check whether it's useful to give the money to that person (e.g. checking whether the investment is sound) and there are no guarantees at all that you'll ever see that money again, as the owners of bored apes can attest.