Cryptocurrency: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Written and Edited

By Ashwin Geeni

Courtesy magine a world where there is only cryptocurrency, there is no stock market or cash, just bitcoin, ethereum, and other currencies. Would you consider this a decentralized utopia or an unregulated scamming financial dystopia? In this article I am weighing the pros and cons of cryptocurrency along with the past, present and future of the technology itself.

Because of the ASF, we already know about the technology of crypto being the Blockchain. To summarize it, the Blockchain is where you have a transaction, both people approve of the transaction, and that transaction is stored on a digital ledger as a block. Then multiple of these blocks make a blockchain. How was cryptocurrency even created? We don’t know the Identity or Identities that first created cryptocurrency, but their anonymous pseudonym was Satoshi Nakamoto. And the crypto currency that they created is called Bitcoin. First released on January 3, 2009, Bitcoin is one of the most recognizable crypto currencies, and when the public first saw it it changed the game.

As soon as Bitcoin was released, people started to make other currencies, resulting in an exponential increase of these digital currencies. But, it wasn’t all hunky dory, there are many opponents to this technology. I interviewed one of them and his name is Stephen Diehl. Mr. Diehl is a software engineer and avid crypto call logger. When questioned about his stance on crypto currency, he responded by saying, “I’m quite skeptical about it. In fact, I’m probably lot of it is fraudulent in its future and the claims that this is some sort of new investment or new type of money are effectively false. I think crypto is basically a form of gambling at its core”. When hearing his response I wondered about one of the more outspoken people in the software profession about cryptocurrency. My opinion is that it is not what it purports to be. A the biggest advantage of crypto. It being a fully digital currency. When I asked him about it he said, “that’s a misconception. Money is actually already digital. When you deposit money at a bank it goes on a digital ledger, which is stored by the bank. And for every $1 you have in your account, there isn’t actually usually a physical dollar anywhere. It’s actually stored in a very large database that the bank holds. And, when you transfer money from one bank account to another the banks basically just swap digits in their accounts. At least in most of the, Western world, money is pretty much already digital. So, crypto doesn’t really improve on that. It just reinvented it poorly”. But, there is also the advantage of the lack of government being involved .

Mr.Diehl explained, “The uses of it are only apparent in really extreme circumstances. Cases where you would want to evade government control because there’s a very corrupt regime. But, it’s a very niche sort of application and if you were to weigh the positives versus the negative, the negatives vastly outweigh the positives”.

Going into this interview with Mr.Diehl versus going out, my perspective was completely changed to a more negative one. Next, I interviewed Zach Wong, a Senior Analyst at a cryptocurrency company called Circle. Circle is a very innovative company producing a coin called USDC. He explained, ”So, Circle is an internet payments infrastructure company. We do a few things. The main thing that we do is we issue stable coins, which are currencies that circulate on public blockchain. So, the most famous stablecoin is US Dollar Coin, USDC. And, so that is a dollar that circulates on a blockchain, so it’s easier to use. You can program it for a number of different applications. And then we also issue a Euro stablecoin, which represents a Euro on a blockchain. And then we also have a number of APIs, which are tools that developers can use to build financial applications and so we also sell those.” explained Mr. Wong.

This was a revolutionary technology as it almost cancels out the volatility in crypto, but what really is the point of a stable coin or a practical use for it?

“So, for example, you know, maybe have a restaurant, a restaurant needs to get paid. And right now the really, like, the dominant way that they get paid is through credit cards, right? The credit cards come with a number of different problems. The first is that they take a long time to settle. So, even though you pay for the meal with your credit card, it might take two or three days for the merchant to actually get their money, even though they just sold their product, right? So, they should get their money right away. But, the existing systems we have have that built in delay. Second of all, it’s very expensive for the restaurant to take cards. So, for example, a typical credit card transaction will cost between two to 3% of that transaction. That doesn’t sound like a lot, two to 3%, but when you think about that kind of cut being taken out of every single transaction that the restaurant makes, every piece of food that the restaurant sells, then that adds up over time. With the blockchain, it’s both, it can be cheaper and faster. So, in general, payments made in USDC, they settle almost instantaneously within a few seconds. And so that’s a huge advantage for a merchant who wants their money right away. It’s also a frequently lower cost to the merchant. So, a lot of blockchain, a lot of USDC payments are made fearlessly and so that’s another huge advantage because the merchant, the restaurant/small business, can save money by taking payments in USDC.” said Mr.Wong. Now that we understand the positives and negatives of crypto right now and what is in it for the future, there are 2 schools of thought. The first one is positive, followed by Mr.Wong, with him describing the ambitions that Circle has going forward. “What we really want is for USDC to serve as our stablecoin to serve as the base currency for financial services. We’re trying to expand the, what we call the utility value, or the usefulness of USDC, right? Right now, the most demanding people in the world are using USDC and those are people who need money to move very quickly, so traders. When you’re in a restaurant for example, they can get better from USDC, but they don’t need it as much as a trader does. So what we’re trying to do is make USDC much more useful, much more ubiquitous. We’re trying to help consumers understand what USDC is so they’re comfortable with it, and so they understand it. And so more and more people will start using our stablecoin and that will help the benefits of blockchain spread to more people”.

Mr.Diehl had a more negative outlook on crypto’s future with him explaining how crypto will revert to its fundamental value which is based on the public’s view on it. “Crypto currencies don’t have any value to begin with. I think the future is the value of all zero. So unlike a stock or a bond like a financial, like a share of Apple stock for instance, like Apple as a company makes iPhones, people like the iPhones, they go off and sell those iPhones to the public and then make a profit. That profit flows back into the company and ultimately that profit goes, gets distributed to shareholders. So that’s called an income in the assets. Crypto doesn’t have anything like that. So fundamentally there’s no, like what’s called an intrinsic value, as economists would say it’s what’s called a greater fool scheme. And so I think most of these assets will revert back to their fundamental value at some point”.

From the 2 perspectives of Mr.Diehl and Mr.Wong, I understood that the future of crypto will probably be somewhere in between, so I consulted Will Lynch, a college student at UT Dallas who has mined and traded cryptocurrency in the past. He explained how the once in a lifetime technology can’t really disappear, “I mean the technology is insane, the level of technology behind it. Because traditional banking they have digital, where you can send money back and forth but it’s still backed with US dollars versus crypto where the value of the coin comes from people buying it. I think there’s probably room for it in the future. We just have to see where it goes cause now that crypto is there the government could always just come in and shut it down if they made it illegal to use crypto, they do have that power, but I don’t know if they would actually exercise it or not. Because, they could make their own crypto and then say this is the official crypto and no other cryptos were gonna be used anymore. So, I think crypto will still be there but will be government controlled”.

In essence, crypto currency will probably drop in price or become governmentally controlled, which could reduce popularity in those coins and crypto overall. In general we will need to wait to understand the full complexities of crypto, but it is safe to say that crypto will probably decline.

Are Self-Driving Cars Safe? Are Self-Driving Cars Safe?

This survey was asking people if they thought that self-driving cars were safe. These were the results to the questions.

“Most self-driving cars are fully intended and manufactured to be safe, so I don't think self-driving car manufacturers would put their customers at risk”

- Doruk B.

Surprisingly, no one wanted to change their answers after I provided them with more information. Andrew Lucchesi answered “No” to the survey, and said, “They are only safe when the majority of cars are self driving, traffic would be nonexistent with self driving cars but right now they are not totally safe”.

First Question Graph

72.2% No

27.8% Yes