The Rhodes Scholar and liberal media commentator said in a segment that aired Thursday, March 6, that cryptocurrency is a scam. She also slammed the White House for \u201cplaying this game.\u201d<\/p>\n
MSNBC Host Rachel Maddow calls Trump\u2019s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve a \u2018deeply old-fashioned simple scam.\u2019<\/p>\n
She draws a striking comparison between crypto and Beanie Babies, saying, \u201cCryptos operate on the same idea. They have no inherent value at all, but people speculate, hoping\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/KnJrRWRnDd<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Coin Bureau (@coinbureau) March 8, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n\n President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier that day establishing a national digital asset reserve.<\/p>\n White House crypto czar David Sacks said<\/a>, \u201cThe US will not sell any Bitcoin deposited into the Reserve. It will be kept as a store of value. The Reserve is like a digital Fort Knox for the cryptocurrency, often called \u2018digital gold.’\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s worth looking at this crypto thing a little bit,\u201d Maddow said on her show. \u201cOnly because it is a deeply, deeply old-fashioned simple scam. At this point, which points right to the White House.\u201d<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what Maddow said about Bitcoin and what she got wrong.<\/p>\n \u201cHelpfully, the broad strokes of crypto trading are not complicated,\u201d Maddow said. \u201cIt\u2019s like when there was the Beanie Baby craze in the late 1990s.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a Beanie Baby trading bubble,\u201d she explained. \u201cOther than some emotional value if you had one as a child, Beanie Babies did not have much inherent value.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut it was worth buying up a bunch of them because there was speculation on the premise that as collectibles, maybe one day your Beanie Babies collection could be worth a lot of money.\u201d<\/p>\n There is, however, a key difference between Bitcoin and Beanie Babies.\u00a0While Beanie Babies debuted in 1993 at the World Toy Fair in New York City, this toy fad reached its<\/a> height six years later in 1999.<\/p>\n Following the dot com crash in 2000, the auction price frenzy for Babies never recovered to those levels again.<\/p>\n To get a realistic idea of the aftermarket value of stuffed toys, one need only study a local thrift store in their city. But unlike Beanie Babies, Bitcoin\u2019s price has been going up ever since it launched on Jan. 3, 2009.<\/p>\n That\u2019s 16 years of growth in daily exchange rate for the dollar that dwarves comparable ROIs from the highest- flying tech stocks in the stock market\u2019s entire history.<\/p>\n During its periodic bear markets, which have so far occurred on a fairly predictable 4-year cycle, critics have repeatedly called Bitcoin a fad and declared it dead.<\/p>\n But every time the skeptics have turned out<\/a> wrong when the price sets new all-time high records within four years. When it comes to historical records, there is no sensible comparison between Beanie Babies and Bitcoin.<\/p>\n While the toy collectibles peaked in 1999 and never recovered, Bitcoin created 84,000 new crypto millionaires in 2024, according <\/a>to a report on CNBC.<\/p>\n \u201cCryptocurrencies operate on the same idea,\u201d Maddow went on in her segment to say.<\/p>\n \u201cThey have no inherent value at all. The only value they have is that if you have some reason to believe that somebody else might want to buy them from you in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat that means in very practical terms is that convincing other people that your crypto is popular and in demand\u2014 that is key to actually making money.\u201d<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not true that cryptocurrencies operate on the same idea as toy and fashion manias or that assets like Bitcoin have no inherent value.<\/p>\n Beanie Babies are not a financial product and do not bear qualities that would make them suitable for use as one. It is not as easy as sending an email to exchange a truckload of toy plushies, but it is very nearly that easy to exchange Bitcoin.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also unfeasible to keep track of how many Beanie Babies are in the market and post up-to-the-minute daily trading data about each one.<\/p>\n It is not only feasible with Bitcoin and other cryptos like the ones going in<\/a> the national reserve\u2014 computer developers engineered them that way.<\/p>\n That\u2019s part of the value they provide that makes it possible to use these digital commodities as financial products and investment vehicles: liquidity and transparency.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Beanie Babies are not durable and fungible like cryptocurrencies. Who wants someone else\u2019s stuffed toy that they\u2019ve been blowing their nose on and rubbing Cheeto grease into?<\/p>\n These inventories have market values that are highly sensitive to wear and tear, and the products are very vulnerable to deteriorating into a condition with a resale value marked well below retail.<\/p>\n Even when maintained in mint condition, after-market values for toy collectibles are more like the market for used automobiles. After being driven off the lot, they immediately and sharply depreciate.<\/p>\n The inventors of crypto assets\u00a0BTC, on the other hand, paid careful attention to designing their economics or \u201ctokenomics\u201d to optimize them for resale value over time and for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n Cryptocurrencies like the two mentioned above have supply limits that introduce scarcity economics. They are also not subject to deteriorating physical condition.<\/p>\n In fact, any unit of Bitcoin is always equal to any other equivalent unit in market value. This is called fungibility, and it is a system requirement for an asset to function as a currency.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea of hyping cryptocurrency is that people should buy in soon, right?\u201d Maddow continued on her show.<\/p>\n \u201cGet in on the ground floor while it\u2019s cheap because it\u2019s about to go way up in value because there\u2019s so much interest in it. If you get in on the ground floor now, then you\u2019ll make a bundle. It\u2019s the whole hype. It\u2019s the whole scam.\u201d<\/p>\n While it is true that participants in crypto markets may engage in inauthentic, hyped-up marketing tactics, that doesn\u2019t make the underlying assets a scam.<\/p>\n Nor does it mean there aren\u2019t more intelligent reasons why financial geniuses like BlackRock\u2019s Larry Fink<\/a>, Shark Tank panelist Kevin O\u2019Leary<\/a>, or Strategy\u2019s Michael Saylor<\/a> believe investing in Bitcoin and the blockchain is not only not a scam\u2014 but the next phase of developing the Internet and human civilization.<\/p>\n After making all these mistakes in her broadcast, Maddow finally undid her own case completely with her closing thoughts on this segment.<\/p>\n \u201cImagine Trump had just announced that the US government was going to buy up tons of Beanie Babies,\u201d the MSNBC host said. \u201cWe are going to establish a federal government reserve of billions of Beanie Babies.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat do you think would happen to the value of Beanie Babies? Turns out there\u2019s a huge guaranteed buyer for these things. They\u2019re buying billions of them.\u201d<\/p>\n The answer to her question is: Their value would probably go up like most analysts expect of Bitcoin. Since there\u2019s a huge guaranteed buyer and that buyer is the US government.<\/p>\n Not bad for a scam.<\/p>\n The post Maddow Slams Trump and Calls Bitcoin \u2018Scam\u2019 \u2013 She Got These 5 Facts Wrong<\/a> appeared first on CryptoPotato<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Rhodes Scholar and liberal media commentator said in a segment that aired Thursday, March 6, that cryptocurrency is a scam. She also slammed the White House for \u201cplaying this game.\u201d MSNBC Host Rachel Maddow calls Trump\u2019s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve a \u2018deeply old-fashioned simple scam.\u2019 She draws a striking comparison between crypto and Beanie Babies, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":52147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-discovery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52146"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/52147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}1. Unlike Beanies, Bitcoin\u2019s Price Goes Up<\/h2>\n
2. Beanie Babies Markets Are Not Liquid or Transparent<\/h2>\n
3. Beanie Babies Are Not Durable and Fungible Like Crypto<\/h2>\n
4. Beanie Babies Are Not Scarce Like Bitcoin<\/h2>\n
5. Bitcoin Commands Real Demand, Not Just Hype<\/h2>\n