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It’s purely speculative asset. Lots of people are going to lose their money when the whales do their pump and dump.

crypto moves lockstep with the US stock market

people use ASICS for mining now as far as i know

It generates demand for US dollar.

Clearly investment in real productive sector is not fashionable these days, nor can many of the traditional American industries compete with other industrialized countries in the long run. Nobody wants to invest in actually realistic technology or industry that only pays dividends in 30 years. They want quick get rich scheme that promises good yield within a year, within a quarter even. AI and crypto (in the form of stablecoins that allow hard currencies to be swapped in and out easily) are the perfect avenues as fictitious speculative assets that can draw in billions and billions of investments from all over the world hoping to make a quick buck. This pumps up the dollar in the process as you’d need to obtain or exchange other currencies into dollars to make the investment.

It is also no coincidence that they just gave out 2 Nobel Prizes for AI. That’s going to generate a huge interest for investing in a technology that is more hyped than its actual utility.

Regarding crypto, Michael Hudson described the utility of crypto in relation to the dollar exchange rate as such, comparing it to how the US made itself as the tax haven for money laundering in the 1960s:

Today, as foreign countries de-dollarize their trade – for instance, when Russia and China trade for oil and industrial products in each others’ currencies – U.S. financial strategists worry about what this will mean for the dollar’s exchange rate.

Actually, transacting such foreign trade in non-dollar currencies has no effect on the U.S. balance of payments. It does not appear in the trade balance or even in foreign investment, although de-dollarization may deprive U.S. banks of currency-trading commissions to handle such transactions.

What does affect the demand for dollars is conversion of assets denominated in foreign currency into the dollar. This king of confidential banking is what pressed up the Swiss franc so much in the 1970s and ‘80s that it priced Swiss manufactures out of foreign markets. Companies like Ciba-Geigy had to move their production across the border to Germany to prevent the rising franc’s valuation from making them uncompetitive. (When that company brought me over in 1976, I found that the price of a coke was over $10, and a regular meal cost $100.)

The U.S. is seeking to protect the dollar’s high value, not lower it, so it sees acting as the destination for world’s tax avoiders, criminals and others as a positive national strategy. (“Kleptocracy is us.”) The plan is not to condemn tax crime and more violent criminal activities, but seeking to profit for being the banker for these functions. The logic is, “As the world’s leading free-market democracy, we’re providing a secure for the world’s capital, however it may be ‘earned’ or otherwise obtained.”