The cryptocurrency mess

In a year of increasingly clashing extremes, few things have been more polarizing than cryptocurrencies.

While the potential of

remains a mystery to be solved, the facts of the speculative cryptocurrency market are becoming more and more concrete.

After a year marked by fraud, hyperbolic campaigns and the unfulfilled threat of regulation, only one possible conclusion remains: Investing in cryptocurrency remains highly risky for anyone, but it is decidedly ruinous business for the lay investor.

Three out of four people who invest in cryptocurrencies lose their money.

Says a report from the Bank for International Settlements that analyzes investment in cryptocurrency in 95 countries between 2015 and 2022. The research reveals how, as currencies inflated their price, small investors were buying while large investors or " whales” sold,

The explosive combination of financial inexperience and greed can do the rest.

A study by the Belgian company Cardify reveals that one in three users invests without understanding the most fundamental aspects of the financial market, nor the characteristics of

technology .

Their main source of information is

accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Discord and specialized Telegram groups: they basically promise easy money.

Investing apps that have slashed entry requirements to zero are designed like games where investing is casual, social, and carefree, but you lose real money.

The system has democratized access to the investment market, but strengthening the asymmetry in access to the most relevant information.

And yet the danger has not passed.

Bitcoin lost 60% of its value in 2022, ether 67%, and the usual mantra in investor forums is

(buy in the downturn).

New ad campaigns compare “crypto winter” to the end of the dot-com bubble to encourage skeptics to “get in” when the market is cheap.

Who wouldn't want to have bought shares in Google, Amazon or Apple in October 2002, when the price of the technology industry had fallen by 75%.

Only that the speculative market is not similar to the technological one.

Mainly because technology companies designed browsers, production lines, computers, operating systems, MP3 players.

Cryptocurrencies have only designed formulas to commit old financial frauds, dodging justice, burning vast amounts of energy in the process and leaving millions of unsuspecting users billed.

It is nothing more than an ecosystem designed to trap the unwary: