Wood’s ARK funds have fallen 50% or more from their February 2021 highs along with the price of bitcoin, from an all-time high of $68,700 in November 2021 to a recent low of $32,900, uncomfortably close to MicroStrategy’s break-even price of $30,200.
Tesla sold some of its bitcoin, and since Musk’s 2021 announcement, zero Teslas have been purchased with BTC.
The crypto revolution felt well underway.įast forward to today. Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies were similarly making new all-time highs. The market was rife with whispers of an Amazon announcement. Michael Saylor was borrowing billions of dollars to buy BTC as an investment for his company, MicroStrategy. Cathy Wood, the all-star growth manager with a large bitcoin position in her flagship fund, was predicting more companies would be adding bitcoin to their balance sheets along with nations’ adopting it as legal tender. Elon Musk announced Tesla had bought $1.5 billion bitcoin for its balance sheet and would soon be accepting BTC for vehicle payment.
Unherd of memes full#
Rewind the clock to a year ago when bitcoin mania was in full swing and disruption seemed inevitable. These new industries are dominated by speculation and memes. Blockchain technology has created new industries that coexist with established industries, including traditional finance. Undoubtedly, the blockchain technology that underpins cryptocurrencies has been innovative-but simply being innovative does not mean it will be disruptive. Unless otherwise noted, the term cryptocurrency refers to volatile tokens, such as BTC and ETH, and specifically excludes stablecoins, such as USDT and USDC, although they are technically cryptocurrencies as well. Here, I will use meme to refer to a statement of belief that spreads through a community or society, such as “Bitcoin is the future” and “Crypto will disrupt traditional finance.” These memes, along with countless others, function as word-of-mouth marketing 1 to entice speculative cryptocurrency investment. The Oxford English Dictionary ( Oxford) defines meme as “an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.” We have all seen popular visual memes, pictures with white text over them shared on social media. In this article I argue that the idea of cryptocurrencies’ disrupting the juggernaut of traditional finance is a meme, not a certainty. They claim that blockchain technology offers a disruptive, decentralized solution to problems with centralized, traditional finance. Yet, the chorus of cryptocurrency proponents' singing the song of decentralized alternatives has continued to grow louder.
These centralized institutions are more effective and efficient at providing financial products and services than any other system thus far proposed, and as a result, they have amassed immense corporate and political power. Borrowing, lending, saving, investing, and transacting are all accomplished through infrastructure made possible by traditional financial institutions, namely, banks and central banks. Traditional finance has been the backbone of the world economy for centuries.
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