Bitcoin Beanie Baby | Ethereum Tether Binance Dogecoin (DOGE) SCAM Track

Cryptocurrency is not merely a bad investment or speculative bubble. It’s worse than that: it’s a full-on fraud. Cryptocurrency is a scam. All of it, full stop — not just the latest pump-and-dump “shitcoin” schemes, in which fraudsters hype a little-known cryptocurrency before dumping it in unison, or “rug pulls,” in which a new cryptocurrency’s developers abandon the project and run off with investor funds.

Given that cryptocurrencies don’t produce anything of material value, this enormous waste of resources renders the whole enterprise a negative-sum game. Investors can only cash out by selling their coins to other investors — but only after the miners and various cryptocurrency service providers take the house’s rake. In other words, investors cannot — in the aggregate — cash out for even what they put in, as cryptocurrencies are inefficient by design.

This makes them a poor and costly form of currency and absolutely ludicrous as a long-term investment. We could dismiss them as a doomed experiment in the “greater fool” theory of investing, in which investors attempt to profit on overvalued or even worthless assets by selling them on to the next “greater fool” — think of it as gambling on a high-stakes game of musical chairs — if the rising price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were simply a function of demand.

This isn’t the case. Price manipulation plays as much or more of a role than demand in driving prices higher.