What if it's All Just One Big Scam
Freebitcoin, a Bitcoin faucet, went down a couple of times recently. From that little revelation, I posted on noise.app, "Well, this is interesting. It appears the freebitcoin site is down and has been for a bit now. It would be just my luck if the whole thing just went bankrupt and all my coins have vanished into thin air."
Nothing would surprise me right now with Luna in my hindsight, FTX, Celsius and all the other little (huge) hiccups crypto has been faced with a not so long time ago.
What if freebitcoin did go kaput? Null and void? Defacto? Unsprung? Bereft of life? No longer of this world?
Suddenly I am reminded of that very funny skit from Monty Python as John Cleese banged his clearly dead parrot on the counter of the pet store where he got it from with Michael Palin very insistent it was still quite among the living.
But what I am here to chime in on is a comment I received on that post from someone I will leave unnamed, simply because I am admittedly going to run off the deep end a bit with what he said.
Beyond telling me he thought crypto faucets are a waste of time, he went on to further comment when I said I was essentially getting free money, "If there is anything for free, you have to ask yourself why? Usually nothing is for free. You always pay for it with something."
You know. I actually agree with that statement. I have said this my entire life. "There is no such thing as free. There is a cost to everything in this world." And I still absolutely believe that.
You see, I don't just write non-fiction, or editorials and commentary which is my mainstay in a place like this. I have a bit of an imagination, and rather fantastical thoughts can run through my head at times.
My genre is horror after all. You have to really believe the extraordinary is possible if you want your readers to suspend their disbelief along with you for the ride.
Beyond faucets, of course, there are all sort of ways to earn free crypto. Through airdrops and by earning interest, staking, lending, and all sorts of other things I probably don't know about or am otherwise unaware of.
Beyond that, it gets the juices flowing or the interests up, however you want to look at it. It makes some of us willing to take some of our fiat and turn it into crypto, and many of us do exactly that.
There is a receiving end of course. Somewhere, in one form or another. Either to the people who mine it, or the people who exchange it, or anyone else who may be in the loop downstream of the real money that goes into all of this.
And don't take me the wrong way when I say "real" money. You all know what I mean by that.
It is profitable to some people is what I am saying, to be involved in this whole idea of "new money." And some people are raking in bucket loads of "cash" in the process, the recent bear market notwithstanding.
In fact, while pump and dumps are nothing new. It happens quite frequently in say, the OTC markets in the U.S., it has always seemed quite a bit more prevalent in the crypto world.
But what if the whole thing was just one big pump and dump? I mean, the entire crypto market. What if it is just one giant pump and dump a handful of people will profit massively from?
Pump the whole market up, get a bunch of people pouring "real" money into it, get nations to dump their own currencies and adopt crypto as their national currencies—essentially pouring trillions of dollars into the whole thing...
And then pull the plug. The whole kit and kaboodle. Right down the drain it goes and the only ones left standing in the aftermath are those who held the plug. In other words, like my title asks, what if the whole thing is just one big scam? The heist of a lifetime? A massive draining of the world's coffers?
Ultimately, a taking over of the world itself. Because money is of course power, and if you have all of it, or most of it, you can control in any way you want anyone who needs some of it.
Of course this is just a fun thought and not at all the way I think about crypto. It is not happening, and won't happen. But what if it was a scam? What if it did happen? Would we see it coming? Would we know before all hell broke loose it was coming? Could we stop it?
Perhaps when I started to think about this, I drank too much coffee or perhaps I had too many beers the night before. Or perhaps it is the constant cynic in me, imagining the possibilities however impossible they might be.
Because, you know, that horror thing. In that world monsters are real and fantastical happenings happen.
Granted, even in horror, good always overcomes evil. But that's fiction, of course. In the real world sometimes evil actually wins out no matter what good is launched to root it out. History can provide a multitude of examples of this.
Is crypto a scam of the highest order? Nah. I don't think so. I am just messing around with an idea. Because nothing is free. And I do have to question what price I will ultimately pay for it all.
No doubt about it. We face scams here and everywhere, including from the so-called saint genres of cryptocurrency founders!
(1) The governments are generating multiple scams, including financial, political, entrepreneurial, health, social, religious, ... the list is limitless!
(2) The big tech corporations and the pharma mafia are scammy too!
(3) The threat to global citizens comes from WHO and WEF, unofficial mouthpieces of totalitarian governments, the pharma mafia, and the big techs.
(5) The mainstream news media promote all these scams via sponsored news.
(6) We, the common mass, indirectly or directly support all of the above scams by remaining passive and accepting them!