The goal was to print out an X amount of crypto and that's it. Just like having a finite amount of gold. Compared to being able to print out money on the fly. Since everyone and their mom is making a new type of currency, at some point, it's going to be just as worthless as cash unless a culling of currencies happen.
A lot of people will lose out on crypto, others will get rich. Some cryptos have a reason you would use them, or hold them. Some of them have a limited number of coins that will come into existence, others don't. Some of them offer privacy for financial transactions, others don't. Even among the ones that are supposed to offer privacy, some of the ways they were setup are better than others.
There are a few cryptos I think will really prosper because they have a finite amount of coins that will be made, and because at least for the time being theoretically it's extremely difficult to trace financial transactions, which is a quality that is useful for some. I'm not heavily invested in crypto because I don't feel that I have the time or the expertise to really get into the details, and because I'm biased for various reasons into more conventional investments. I probably could make more money short term, and maybe even long term if I picked a crypto currency that had a better use case than others and invested in it. I am very risk averse, and so my tendency is to go into something more like stocks, and ones that have a long track record of performance, and pay a dividend. I'm pretty big on utilities, even though there is little reason to think that the gains will be particularly impressive. I'd rather get something consistent, than wake up one day and find out that I was in a horse race and backed the wrong horse.
A good portion of the cryptos being made from my perspective are basically scams. They don't have a unique use case, some of them don't have a limit on how many coins will be made, that seems by definition inflationary. If there are going to be twice as many coins next year, or some completely undetermined amount, and there isn't anything special about that particular coin, my expectation would be that at some point the coin wouldn't be worth much compared just about anything else you could have bought.
Edit:
I still think governments will crack down on crypto at some point. They will use the electricity usage as the reason.
There is a crackdown underway. It has more to do with the fact that crypto is used to pay ransom. Below is an article about a person that I believe is one of the early people that the government is going after because they help facilitate transactions that are hard to trace. The way I believe the government operates with these kinds of things is they need a few test cases where they go after someone, and then see what happens in the court to find out what kinds of facts are actually really important when you try to prosecute a case.
CONCORD — Free-Keene leader Ian Freeman has accessed $1.66 million worth of Bitcoins and had $178,000 in cash in his safe when his house was raided by federal authorities this
www.unionleader.com
One of my previous employers was advised at a cyber security conference to buy bitcoin in case their systems were hacked and ransom was demanded to gain access back to their systems. The CEO told me about this because he thought the story was interesting, but more than anything he seem interested in the fact that he had missed out, that bitcoin had gone up so much that if he had bought a bunch for ransom, the value would have gone up far more than anything else he was involved in (He told me this story I believe shortly after it reached 10k).
www.bbc.com
