On Crypto - Ibraheem Saleem

Assalaamu Alaykum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakaatuhu.

Jazakallahu kahiran for deciding to read this, I really do appreciate it.

INTRODUCTION

This document is the product of many thoughts.

Too many thoughts. Thoughts on cryptocurrencies, thoughts on psychology, thoughts on society, politics, economics, Islam, the human experience… yh a lot of things.

These are my thoughts.

Although I have done, I would say, a decent amount of research before/while writing this, it is still my perspective on this issue (Links for all research materials are at the bottom of the document). I do not expect you to agree with everything I say here, only that you try and understand why I said it. I will try my utmost to give evidence for all points I make, but inevitably opinions will have to be shared. I would highly recommend you look at the links for more information on topics if you find what I mention unsatisfactory.

This is not a simple topic, and it took me 5 weeks of writing and research to understand that. It ties into so many things that I find interesting that even if I started out this project trying to understand and find justifications for my own thoughts and feelings on crypto, I soon found that this is beyond the minute details of certain coins or markets. It really goes to the core of our modern society, and that’s what I find so fascinating.

So, if you made it this far, let’s get into it.

PART ONE: THE PROBLEMS

I’ll say it plainly. This is the section where I address as many issues around cryptocurrencies, the markets, and the technologies as I can, whether that be refutation or clarification. If there is a section here to be triggered by and argue with me about, it’s this one, so get your notepads ready

I

Since most of the conversations to do with crypto typically revolve around trading and markets, I thought it would be good to start off with nicely defining what these “coins/tokens” actually are. Turns out, erm… they’re nothing. Bitcoin and crypto currencies are circular non-entities that cannot justify their own existence in anything but is related to their political/sociological standing. Their value comes entirely from its position as a tradable “something”. But what sort of something are they?

They cannot be commodities since usefulness cannot be derived from them, in the way flour can be turned into bread and the bread consumed for nutrition which we humans value. This untethering from intrinsic value turns it into a vehicle of speculation which, like Pokémon cards, relies on an infinite pool of fools passing the hot potato down the chain, until inevitably value vanishes into thin air and the person last holding the potato is left in the mud.

They cannot be a form of security contract because their future cashflows amount to precisely zero and so their current value must also be precisely zero. At least, on some level, stocks depend on the productivity and success of the firm to generate cash flows by paying dividends on their revenue or buying back their own stock.

Some people claim they are art, and I’m not going to bother discounting that.

Finally, the only classification left is that they are a form of currency, a medium of exchange. But this fails as well in the pure and obvious sense that when was the last time you used crypto to purchase any goods not in a crypto market. An alternative explanation is that the traditional desirable traits of an actual currency are that they can be influenced by a central bank’s policy in order to regulate the economy, such as monetary policy. A nations currency depends on stability, to collect taxes and long-term cashflows on things like mortgages or other loans. The extreme volatility of cryptocurrencies in general disallow value to be derived, from requirements to pay taxes and recognition by courts to settle debts. Deflationary crypto currencies in fact encourage hoarding without centralised inflation targets, and no one in their right mind would price their mortgage in something that could drop 80% in value if Mr Musk tweeted the wrong emojis. And so, we find the crypto is, quite literally, good for nothing. The only value it has is its ability to trade more crypto.

Now before you begin pointing at other examples with similar properties, I want to remind you that this is focused on Crypto in particular. Fiat currencies could, you would be right to point out, fit the same lack of description. However, there is the small note that these currencies are distributed and managed by a central government and are used throughout the economy for pretty much everything. This is not the same as a decentralised “asset” that is mostly used as an investment in basically a separate pseudo economy and not as a medium of exchange. Check this paper for data and evidence. It’s pretty absurd when you think about this. Like really step back. How is it that something with no value whatsoever, like at all, not even artistically or being used for something else, a few electrical signals in a computer, able to be treated in such a way that it can seemingly make people millionaires? It would be hilarious if it didn’t sound so much like a dystopia.

II

The blockchain is really just a fancy notebook that records transactions.

The fun spin on this version though, is the idea that it is immutable and that it is decentralised. Immutable, as in, once a record is made, it cannot be deleted or altered in anyway. This works using hash functions and is where the “crypto” part of the name comes from, since hashing is used primarily in cryptography-related fields such as encryption. And decentralised as in there is no single place where the notebook, or ledger, is held. Everyone on the blockchain has a copy of the ledger. This immediately strips any central authority out of the equation, but now truth has to be determined some way, otherwise if a person recorded someone giving them a million pounds, there’d be no way to show that it never happened; it’s just your word against his. In a centralised system, it would be the government or bank who decides, but here something else is needed.

So, the hash function comes in: It ensures that every new transaction’s hash references every previous transaction, in a sort of signature, and so if a change is made nefariously, everyone can check their own version of the ledger and realise that the hashes don’t match up, and so flag the illegitimate transaction. New transactions are recorded in nodes or blocks and are transmitted to other people over a peer-to-peer network, which are then linked using the hash functions into the blockchain. To add new nodes to the chain, we again need a way of verifying that the added nodes are correct or truthful.

The most widely adopted method is Proof of Work. In essence, trust is placed in the block that has the most work put into it. The most common implementation of this is to get every machine on the blockchain to race to solve a cryptographic puzzle, such as find a number that once hashed will start with a certain number of zeroes. Once a machine solves this guessing game after millions or billions of guesses, it’s easy for everyone else to verify, since they can all use that number to check it gives the right hash. This new block is then said to have been mined or minted, and in order to incentivise people to make their computers race to solve the puzzles and maintain the crypto economy, the winner is given a certain amount of the coin or token as a reward. And then the race starts all over again for the next block, ad until the total number of the coin’s blocks are mined, which for bitcoin is capped at 21 million and is scheduled to run out around 2140. This introduces artificial scarcity into the system and plays into the value of the tokens.

We then have smart contracts that act as a layer above the blockchain and allow interaction with it. They are code agreements between accounts that manage and “enforce” transactions on the blockchain, to put it simply. The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin noted that he regrets adopting the term “smart contracts” and thought that something more “boring and technical” like “persistent scripts” should have been used. This probably has something to do with the fact that they are neither smart nor are they contracts. They are in fact riddled with risks, given the fact that one wrong command could result in a data being published on a blockchain that can then never be taken down. They are code, and are so by definition entirely at the mercy of the human programmer. Any bugs, errors, or malicious actors could trigger undesirable effects that could literally cripple the chain, and because they are code, users are often barely aware of these risks and logic governing the contracts. Gartner, a tech consultant firm, recommends to only use them if absolutely necessary and that in most cases a centralised database would work perfectly well if there’s no requirement for a shared, immutable record system. Sounds a bit fishy.

Now that we have the really technical stuff out of the way, we can get into the fun stuff. What are the problems that all this causes?

III

Straight away, at number 1, is the environment.

This simply cannot be ignored in any fair discussion of the crypto economy. It is a financial network that, because of Proof of Work (PoW), uses more energy than Argentina to create numbers in a machine, of which probably 99.9% is absolutely and completely wasted. Cryptos are designed such that the difficulty of mining increases over time, and as more machines enter the system, because the relative rate of mining coins remains relatively stable (around 1 block every 10 minutes for bitcoin). The problem here is that crypto depends on the coins being harder to make in the future to maintain financial return. Scarcity has to be artificially constructed to maintain value, and so the wastefulness of today becomes a good investment for tomorrow. And so, if people want to gain an advantage, or even keep up with everyone else, they must invest in technology to solve the puzzles faster, which means throwing more computing power at it, which means using more energy. The work in PoW is the energy you are expending. The value of cryptocurrencies is directly derived from the energy that is put in to create them, because if the price of electricity rises higher than return miners could maybe make, via the mining reward system, it would no longer be worth it to mine, and so the whole system would collapse as no new transactions would be able to be added to the ledger. We are all familiar with the images of racks of GPU’s, lines of power cables like spaghetti, air conditioning units needed to keep things cool, etc etc etc, this is the price to enter the rat race to maintain this system. And with over a million people estimated to mine Bitcoin, that’s a lot of energy.

But people don’t see the effects. Most people are not miners, we’re traders, so we don’t need to worry about it. The pollution from the energy plants burning the coal won’t affect us, we’ll be nice and safe here in our protected cities. Yh… a study by the University of New Mexico concluded that, in America, for every $1 of Bitcoin, $0.49 in health costs is borne by people who will never benefit from this economy. And don’t assume cos we’re in the UK, its somehow not going to affect us. This is a global effect, no one escapes unscathed.

It is a proven fact that cryptos effect on the climate has, is, and will continue to be nothing short of ecological murder. Worse, it is completely unjustified, and could even be classified as a crime against humanity simply due to its gleeful wastefulness.

But, I hear you say, “Don’t worry! Things are changing! We’re going green! We can get rid of Proof of Work and all its waste!” Yes, this is true. The most prominent alternative is called Proof of Stake and gives authority to the person with the most tokens, or biggest stake, in the economy. If that sounds like the epitome of capitalism you would be right, concentrating power in the hands of the wealthy. But maybe it would be worth it if we save the environment? Well if sometime around the year 4000 when the earth has been reduced to a scorched wasteland with no hint of green or blue, humanity in their underground bunkers receives the news that the Ethereum network, which consumes 24.43 Tera Watt hours of electricity (roughly equivalent to the entirety of Ecuador), has successfully switched to green energy, I’m confident that the Earths tears of relief will refill the oceans and all the vegetation will jump for joy out of the soil. In other words, PoS is nice bait for advocates to say that “look, the cure is just over hill!” when in reality the hill is a pile of dead trees, and you can’t see past your own hand anyway because of the smoke.

An argument I have heard is that it depends on your perspective, if you think the benefits of crypto outweigh the harms. Personally, I think that thought process is barking mad considering the size of the harms, but we’ll get to the potential benefits in a bit.

IV

Next let’s talk about the technology itself. The blockchain concept has a very specific use case: to keep an unchangeable record. Leaving the point that it has no business trying to be shoe-horned into everything under the sun to the side, let’s see if its use as a financial tool is justified, outside of trading it. And we find that apart from global money transfer applications, it seems that it is very poor technology.

It is slow and inefficient. Compared to visas 1.7 thousand transactions a second, bitcoin can only manage a pitiful 4.6 transactions a second due to methods of finding consensus. Ethereum is a bit better at 30 transactions a second. But come on. At the moment, many coins work as ledgers simply because they are not popular. They don’t need to wait for thousands or millions of people on the network to verify a transaction before it can be recorded. But trying to use any relatively popular coin for actual transactions is very not clever, as it is by nature incapable of scaling. This is because of hardcoded caps to the size of blocks (around 1mb), and the slow process of broadcasting the creation of a new block (roughly every 10 minutes) to all nodes on the network via peer-to-peer.

Solutions to this problem, such as increasing base node size or reducing block generation time all end up in scenarios that compromise security, mostly because of the possibility of accidental branches in the blockchain, which sort of create an alternate reality within the economy. Other solutions include high performance blockchains such as EOS which use Proof of Stake (will be discussed in a bit) and lightning networks (which have a bunch of requirements and only work on Bitcoin-based blockchains). Batch processing is interesting, but again breaches privacy as you cannot put multiple people’s transactions together when they’re visible to everyone.

But I think we’re missing the point here a bit. All these “solutions” have come about because of something inherently broken with the blockchain model. This is a model where the entire point is that no one trusts anyone else. There is no central bank that we can “depend” on (used extremely loosely) to mediate or monitor the chain; everything is left entirely to everyone on the chain. And so fancy solutions such as PoW were needed to work around this problem. And because of this, we have another even more crucial flaw. Reality has the very real possibility of being altered, controlled, or rigged.

Blockchains depend on a consensus among users to determine truth about what transactions should or shouldn’t be written into the ledger. But the consensus may not to be true, because you know since when has the consensus ever been inclined to truth, and so leaves the door wide open for manipulation to end up causing real harm to people. Your entire life savings are wiped out because “the consensus”, or the person with most tokens in PoS, decides your branch, which says you have money, doesn’t actually exist and the branch that says you doesn’t, does exist. This is not exactly secure. We just need to look to the case of Ethereum. In 2016, a hacker exploited a problem with the code of an “organisation” called The DAO (will touch on DAOs later) and started to drain it of ether (that had been crowdfunded). In response to the attack, proposals were made to “fork”, or branch, the Ethereum blockchain to in effect undo the illegal transactions and make it as if no ether had been transferred anywhere. This is possible since nothing actually goes anywhere on the blockchain, people just agree in the ledger that things have gone somewhere. No agreement, and nothing has gone anywhere.

Which goes back to my point about trust. There isn’t any. And in this situation Ethereum was forked, forming a defunct blockchain called Ethereum Classic. Someone who was locked onto the wrong chain may have woken up to find that their life savings had disappeared. You might argue that, since this was because of a hack, you were affected in the same way as if your bank account was hacked. However, there is a crucial distinction. There you have an authority to appeal to. There are processes, someone to contact, safety nets. With crypto, there is none of that. Its (supposed to be) decentralised. And so, we have an unregulated wild west of an economy which does not guarantee security or offer any fall-back options.

Fun side note, the price of Ethereum Classic (the defunct zombie blockchain) sky-rocketed from $12 to over $130 in March/May 2021 due to someone tweeting misinformation that Eth and Eth Classic were actually the same, and Classic was just Eth but cheaper, tricking retail traders into thinking they were pulling off an arbitrage. So, I have to ask, what really is the difference between something stupid and something genuinely important? Or does it even matter? You can become rich either way, just as long as you bet on the right number going up…

V

You really don’t need to look hard for evidence when talking about crime in crypto. It seems like every second article, when not making bold “predictions” about markets, is reporting on some grand new hack or fraud in which millions of dollars of something has disappeared into thin air. Scams and fraud are so common you could replace the word crypto with “Scams and Fraud” in any sentence and nothing would be amiss.

Let’s take just one example: Tether. Tether is the most prominent member of a family of cryptocurrencies called StableCoins. The idea with these coins is that they are pegged to the value of an external entity in order to remove the wild speculation that drives the value of most coins and allow them to be used as a medium of exchange. According to Tether, this means that every Tether issued by Tether Holdings Ltd. was supposedly backed by 1 dollar that the company holds. This allows Tether to act as a medium of exchange between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies: You can give your dollars to Tether and in return your digital wallet would be credited with an equal amount of Tether, that can then be used to *cough*bet on*cough* trade other coins on crypto exchanges. Tether holds onto the dollars so that people can, in effect, cash out their Tether (probably converted from some other crypto currency) and get the equivalent in dollars back. (Let’s ignore that this sounds suspiciously like betting chips in a casino for the moment) And in July 2021, it had gotten so large that it was threatening the U.S. financial system. It had begun to pump out huge amounts of digital coins so that in October 2021 over 69 billion Tethers were in circulation. Being a Stable Coin, this should mean that Tether Holdings Ltd holds over $69 billion, which would make it one of the top 50 biggest banks in America, if it were a bank and not an unregulated offshore company.

But how or even if Tether is truly backed has always been a mystery. For years critics have argued that it doesn’t have enough assets to maintain the 1-1 exchange rate, and so would mean the coin is essentially a fraud.

Crime is centre stage here. A Chinese Tether-trader was arrested and is serving 3 years for using Tether to launder $480 million for illegal casinos. The founder of another proto-StableCoin called Liberty Reserve pled guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy charge and is now serving 20 years in a Florida Federal prison. He said that “The U.S. will come after Tether in due time”. In March 2017 when Tether was becoming large enough to be taken notice of, the Taiwanese banks that Tether and Bitfinex were using closed their accounts, and apparently executives were so desperate, they considered chartering a private jet and flying pallets of cash out of the country. Tethers website has long held up the pledge that “Every Tether is always backed 1-to-1, by traditional currency held in our reserves.”

In February 2019, after much behind the scenes chaos that included accusations of stealing from the fund to make risky investments that threatened customers’ accounts and also to spend on luxury hotels and private jets, banks failing and refusing to transfer money that could have set off a bank run (Who were later found out to be being prosecuted in Poland accused for laundering money for Columbian Drug Cartels), and Bitfinex being insolvent, Tether revised their pledge to read: “Every Tether is always 100% backed by our reserves, which include traditional currency and cash equivalents and, from time to time, may include other assets and receivables from loans made by Tether to third parties, which may include affiliated entities.” Tether was lending from its reserves, but no one noticed until New York sued, seeking Tether to be forced to turn over documents (Which it then settled by paying $18.5 million but refused to admit to wrongdoing or turn over documents). Other investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice are ongoing.

The whole story is really long, and goes everywhere from the Bahamas to Puerto Rico, but you really don’t need to know the details to get the gist. The whole thing is shot through with dubious characters, shady deals, disappearing money, and generally all-round nastiness. Here’s the whole thing if you want to read.

I need to take a moment to emphasise just how big a deal this is. An organisation that is supposed to have more money than the entire annual GDP of Oman, with which 70% of Bitcoin transactions are executed, and who’s transaction volumes exceed $100 billion on some days, could be a total farce. And in 2021 Tether executives were the subject of U.S. criminal investigations for bank fraud. Like what on earth??!! How??!! And if that wasn’t enough, if enough traders asked for dollars back at once, the liquidation of the companies’ assets could have cascaded into regulated financial systems and crashed credit markets. As CNBC Host Jim Cramer told viewers:

“If Tether collapsed, well then, it’s going to gut the whole crypto ecosystem”

and probably the fiat economy as well. You simply cannot dismiss this as an anomaly. It’s too big. And if this is what’s going on at the top, I don’t want to imagine what happens in the murky depths.

There are so many other crime-related problems with crypto. The perfect anonymity that blockchain technologies have offer themselves perfectly to every type of financial crime imaginable. Before bitcoin was used as a tradable asset, guess what its biggest use was. To buy illegal substances off the website Silk Road before the FBI shut it down. I don’t think I could have come up with a better metaphor. In 2019 cryptocurrency losses due to crime amounted to $4.5 billion. That’s enough to house every homeless person in the U.S. for a year. In 2021 this had dropped to $681 million, but that’s still a lot of money.

Whenever you read social media posts or join Discord Servers about cryptocurrency, you are always barraged with warnings about being aware of scams, don’t answer dms, etc etc. Scams and crypto are two sides of the same coin.

I can’t begin to cover everything out there, so here’s a more detailed list of issues. Suffice to say, it’s not a small problem.

P.S. If Tether wasn’t enough for you, here’s how a company that plants trees with your left over cash is missing $1.8 billion… I wonder where it went

VI

I don’t really want to spend much time on this section, but since it’s probably the thing you read this for, I suppose I have to address it. I hope by now you’ve picked up that I don’t like crypto. My opinion on trading it follows directly from the fact that I don’t like it. Since I’m not going to get into crypto, I’m not going to trade it. But since I don’t want to feel like I joined and monitored 4 separate crypto Discord servers for no reason (r/CryptoCurrency – 87.8k members, Axion Crypto-Community – 36,034 members, Wolves of Alt Street – 13,879 members, Crypto&NFT Realm – 9,963 members), I may as well write my thoughts here.

Trading communities have a feeling to them that is impossible to grasp without being in them. It’s an entire subculture of memes, abbreviations, technical analyses, wild ventures, and an overall spirit of being in for the ride with a healthy dose of get-rich-quick. Seasoned veterans will pore over charts and offer their predictions about which coins to hold or sell, always accompanied with the obligatory “Not financial advice”. Beginner chats are full of people asking for advice on where to put there $100 or $5000 and promptly being told to do your own research, if they weren’t first spammed with toad gifs. There are always chats dedicated to promoting new ventures, (often hopefuls airdropping free crypto in order to jumpstart their coins, no matter that they’ll probably join the mass grave of dead coins, currently at 2,397 entries).

But there is an undeniable comradery. People spotting and pulling off trades that could yield 20x returns are celebrated and congratulated. Market sentiment spreads like wildfire, with traders largely falling into either “bearish” or “bullish” categories based on their mentality; bears trade expecting the market to go down, bulls trade expecting it to go up. Unfortunately, things often devolve into crude expressions about people’s feelings about the market or floods of memes mocking people’s decisions to hold or sell. Bears are largely lambasted as pessimists, and the general sentiment is to encourage positivity that often borders on recklessness and toxicity. Just pay a visit to r/Wallstreetbets, the subreddit with 11.6 million “degenerates” [their title for members] that managed to make hedge funds lose $5 billion dollars in in Feb 2021 in the GameStop fiasco, and you’ll be greeted with posts by people being deluged in awards for YOLOing thousands of dollars in crazy trades and losing it all. The overall trading community has a strange atmosphere, varying along a gradient between professional analysis & risk calculation, and outright lunacy.

An important point to mention is that obviously there are exceptions to these rules, and I’m sure there are crypto communities that are professional and take things seriously. However, my point is that the servers I mentioned are places average people looking to get into crypto have a high likelihood of entering, simply because I found them how they would find them, by googling. I am only summing up what I had seen personally, and for people just getting in, what I saw is, more than likely, what they’ll see. So in this situation, the most honest representation is the most prevalent one.

It is my belief that trading crypto in almost any capacity is no different from gambling. The extreme volatility of the asset coupled with its inherent worthlessness just doesn’t seem to be something that I would want to put into money into. But don’t take my word for it. In the r/CryptoCurrency discord server, which at the time of writing has 87.8k members, and who’s sister subreddit has 4.5 million members, a moderator posted 2 of his own videos in locked mod-only chat called market outlook, while apologising for a double post but it was an “important topic”. The first video was called Is Crypto Trading Gambling?, and in it the mod said quote:

“A Trader is akin to a professional poker player… The pro poker player knows exactly the probability they have of winning any given combination of cards… This comparison is really apt”

I, erm, don’t think poker gambling has become halal recently tbh. (The second video was about $3.5 billion being recovered from a hacker btw )

I just know people are going to ignore everything else I said in the entire document and focus only here, and call me out and argue with me about definitions and some coins being better than others, and trading practices to minimise losses and asking for proof of volatility, etc etc etc. For those people, I say I can’t argue with you if you refuse to even consider that you might be wrong. I for one will say that I probably am wrong in many respects. I cannot consider or read or check everything, there are perspectives I’m missing out, evidence that I haven’t seen. But I have tried. These opinions of mine come from my research. I have nothing to defend or a vested interest in being right. I have tried to keep things factual, but in these matters where money gets involved and people have positions and personal credibility to defend, factual evidence is easily ignored. I just ask that you please open your mind to possibilities. Jazakallah khair.

PART 2: THE OTHER SIDE

This document would not be fair without addressing the positives of crypto. I’m not denying that there are positives. The problem is how much emphasis and weight we give them, and whether they outweigh the negatives.

At the moment, the biggest legitimate use of crypto that I can see is money transfer. Crypto allows for much faster and much cheaper international money transfer than traditional channels, via a bank, because it strips out the middleman. The transaction occurs in minutes or seconds between 2 secure networks, without the need for brokers or payment gateways, and so making the transactions cheaper. This has immediate benefits for people who need to send money to family in a different country and is definitely a good thing. It could also be argued that crypto is more secure than traditional channels, such a debit cards, due to the use of public private keys (although the crime section does seem to throw a spanner in that idea) It’s also suggested they provide protection against inflation, due to the finite number of coins that are allowed to be produced.

Out of this list of 7 points, 4 are most relevant to money transfer, 2 we’ve already debunked, and the last was mentioned above.

The only other thing I found was a paper by LSE on blockchains possible use in journalism. The general conclusion was that there would be benefits in an immutable place to put articles and opinions which would offer protection against censorship and would also level the playing field to allow smaller journalistic institutions to own their own identities and data instead of bowing to media companies and internet giants. However, they then balanced this out with major concerns about web3, security, and the general crypto ecosystem that we’ll discuss in the next part.

Aaaand, that really is pretty much all I found in this section tbh…

PART 3: THE POLITICS

I

When my friends first started getting into crypto, I had two feelings that I have not, until now, been able to understand. The first is a deep-seated feeling that the whole thing was stupid, a scam at best and fraud at worst, something that purely represents everything I despise about our modern economy and society. The second is a feeling of confusion, of intrigue bordering on concern, about how and why people were buying into this. So far, I’ve sort of laid out a base of points for my first thought.

The thing is though, is that as I started to dig into the subject recently, and explore different aspects of it, I’ve begun to realise that crypto is symptom more than it is an independent, self-contained new issue. It’s a symptom of the society we live in, a thread in the ghastly web of capitalism, consumerism, and individualism that has reduced our society to a fashionable dystopia that worships billionaire meme-lords. And it is a serious thread at that, even if it looks like hyper-fad, dressed up with fairy lights and a momentous-sounding premise. The more I began to think and write down notes on this topic, the more I realised that it is so much more than small arguments over whether certain trading practices are moral or even count as business or getting stuck into the abbreviations and terms and endless cycles of debates. All those discussions simply miss the point: there are much bigger concerns, and everything ties together.

So then. Going back to the 2 thoughts I had at the beginning of this section. I realised that it was the second one that was truly important. The first was simply a by-product, but the second, if understood properly, will reveal all.

And this requires going back to the beginning. (This is the part that I actually wanted to write about, so sorry for taking so long to get here lol)

What is the psychology of crypto? How did this new technology get catapulted from the pages of scientific theory to become the new gold rush? The answer can be found in understanding the society into which it was created.

The story begins in October 2008 when a paper entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” was posted to a cryptography mailing list. A year later the same author released an open-source code implantation of the system. This timing is significant, for it was in 2008 that the global economy functionally disintegrated.

The Financial Crisis is a fascinating event in history, and not just because we are still living in its shockwaves. It seems to be perfect story of corrupt institutions being brought to their knees by their own greed. It would be a fitting thing to make a fable out of, were it not for the ruin and misery it unleashed upon countless people and were it not for the people who actively became millionaires out of it. A detailed explanation of everything that happened would be a bit too excessive for my purposes, so you can watch from 00:01:12 to 00:07:09 in this video to get that if you want (A video I would highly recommend you to watch for a holistic view of this subject anyway).

Here’s a semi-detailed summary, you can skip it (in italics) if you want. But essentially, speculation in the subprime mortgage market, using bonds formed from many mortgages which were traded, lead to a price bubble as hundreds of thousands of houses were built specifically out of the price range of most people, bought by speculators and left vacant in order to create more bonds on the mortgage. Intuitively, this huge increase in supply should have reduced prices, but it didn’t, due to houses being bought up by the speculators intending to sell later on. This artificial demand actually increased the price and was an intention of the system of banks that wanted more mortgages to turn into bonds and make a profit on by selling to hedge funds and pension funds. More speculators buying increases demand increases price, attracts more speculators increases demand increases price, etc etc. Normal people got caught up in this, and when the price bubble inevitably burst and the market was flooded by speculators dumping stock, they got locked into paying the original mortgage but couldn’t afford to pay the monthly payments. Owners began to default on the mortgages. This eventually led to the bonds, the whole point of this particular system, failing, which then impacts all those people who bought the bonds and depended on them as a security, such as Hedge funds etc, but it also affects all financial products that took their value from the bond. This led to a knock-on effect throughout the financial sector, causing huge institutions to fail, such as the Lehman brothers, and ultimately causing a recession.

Voila: The Great Recession. A period of mass unemployment, homelessness and misery. It was the middle and lower classes who suffered, squeezed by mass layoffs and rent hikes, while the rich who, while maybe affected in some respects, were insulated behind their massive fortunes.

The banks issuing the bonds also issued the mortgages, regulatory bodies were hamstrung by budget cuts, ratings agencies were rubber stamping every bond they got to curry favour with the banks, and people from regulation were using their position to get jobs in industry.

This event, in the minds of the middle and lower classes, painfully cemented a worldview that had been growing throughout the 20^th century: the current implementation of the capitalist system was broken. Either this event was an inevitable symptom of the systems ingrained flaws, said the anti-capitalists, or this wasn’t real capitalism, there’s too much bureaucracy and regulation said the hyper-capitalists. I think we can dismiss the latter for obvious reasons.

So. Capitalism, the foundation of our modern economy was broken. Our leaders and institutions that we trust to run our countries fairly and in the interests of the public were openly shown to be corrupt and fraudsters. Even worse people were getting rich because of this. We needed a new system.

Enter that little known article from 2008.

Bitcoin. Promises of “decentralisation”, of “transparency”, of “immutability” gave an alternative to the rot of decrepit crumbling institutions. Instead of fallible human agents, a system of logic would govern everything. Truth would become what was recorded in an unchangeable record. These ideas seem all well and good (on the surface at least), but how did we go from that to memecoins and diamondhands?

The decentralisation myth is centre to all this. Just to reiterate, bitcoin and crypto was meant to be an antidote to corrupt institutions, in effect giving power to the people, and theoretically making it impossible for any single entity to gain control of the entire system. This is the foundation of crypto.

But it is a myth. Take, for instance, the example of Ethereum Classic we mentioned a few pages back (the defunct zombie blockchain that exploded). In attempting to rectify the hackers damage, by carrying out the fork to erase the fraudulent transactions, the people behind Ethereum clearly and obviously showed that they do have the power to influence the chain, no different to the despised central bank closing down a crooks account and returning the money, and so by extension, there is really no such thing as a totally open blockchain. When a choice between freedom and security is made, people choose security. This may seem like a small thing, after all justice was done right? Yes, but in doing so it compromised the very principles the entire system was built on. And this has vast implications once you consider that cryptocurrencies are not the only thing being pushed by advocates…

II

There was an idea.

Not to bring together a group of remarkable people, nor to fight the battles that we never could. Although I’m sure the imaginator did have such dreams.

No, this idea was to build a web. An internet free of the conglomeration of services into the shackles of mega-corporations. A web of perfect anonymity, perfectly uncontrollable. Web3. Truth would no longer be left to the whims of stupid, irrational, selfish human beings. Truth would be intrusted to Logic. Code would trump emotion. And then we could have a utopia.

-Violin strings break-

Yeah that never happened. And if advocates get what they want, web3 could make web2.0 look like an anime sunrise.

Web2.0, btw, refers to the internet in its current state, where platforms such as Facebook/YouTube/Reddit are the places where people most often use communicate. It marked the disappearance of an internet where hobbyists and web designers were the bulk of users, where most content was personal blogs or websites, and towards the appearance of the aforementioned platforms. It was this transition, from a global network of freethinking individuals each free to create and express how they deemed fit, into a constricted privatised corporate mass that spawned the movement to an idealistic web based on those original principles. Blockchains, and the technology on which they were based, seemed like a very interesting and futuristic solution, but there were probably many different motivations, from investors looking for new investment opportunities, artists trying to find new ways of living off their work, blockchain innovators looking for a place to use the tech to prove its value beyond doubt, to people who just want to be part of the future of the internet.

If immediately it seems there’s a conflict of interest between the people who want the corporations gone from the internet and the investors who were invested in those corporations investing in this new idea, you’d be right.

We’re now going to introduce two new technologies to the scene. Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, and an organisational structure called a DAO. These are integral to points going forward.

NFTs are tokens in the same way a bitcoin is a token, but with a crucial difference. Although they are now mostly associated with artworks, they are just a token and could be used for anything. They are “non-fungible” meaning that each token is specifically unique, as opposed to bitcoin which is “fungible”, meaning every token is like every other token, and they can be used in place of each other. NFT’s offer costless reproducibility and allow instant verification if something is unique on the blockchain, since an NFT of some content is unique, and even if another NFT is made from the same content, they’re not interchangeable. Fakes are instantly visible. But otherwise, they are like any other token on the blockchain, and can be moved be moved between accounts according to smart contracts.

DAO is an abbreviation for Decentralised Autonomous Organisation. They are basically smart contracts with a specific objective that make decisions about something based on information and events. Real life human organisations normally have a common goal, some set of rules that govern operations, and maybe a hierarchical power structure to make common decisions. DAO’s aim to take the human out of the equation and implement a “Code is Law” ideology. Remember web3. One common example is to write code that automatically decides when and where to invest money/tokens that people give to the DAO, which bases its decisions according to the contract.

Going back to web3. Here’s an attempt at describing it:

“Web3 is a blockchain-based backend and infrastructure layer on top of existing network technologies that aims at restructuring the internet in a radically decentralized and individual way. Services required for individuals to be able to act within that new infrastructure (like identity management, content storage, etc.) are provided by decentralized smart contracts or services built on them. While frontends to use the Web3 Internet still look similar to current ones (browser-based apps) they no longer get their content from centralized servers but from blockchain-based content providers giving individuals enforceable ownership of the data and content they create or buy”

Web3 does not need you to throw your browser away; it affects the underlying mechanics of the web, but the top interface layer remains largely the same. Identity, ownership and freedom are the 3 core ideologies of this movement, and they all utilise blockchain technologies to implement them.

Identity is important, not in the legal ID way, but in a “you have a set of identities, and have tokens attached to them” because tokens need owners to be useful. But you can have as many identities as you want, and each have different tokens. This is enabled by the transparency that blockchains afford, as anyone can see anything on the blockchain, and what’s recorded there is “truth”. There is no room for debate and no hidden information. It’s supposed to protect people and the webs integrity.

Ownership follows from this. Web3 is very interested in turning everything into a token. Domains should be tokens, blog posts should be tokens, tweets should be tokens. It does this because ownership of the tokens is what this web is built on. There’s a dispute over who owns a domain? Well, it’d be the person who holds the token obviously. Who can delete or modify content? The person with the right token.

And lastly, we get to the underlying reasoning behind everything. Freedom. Web3 implements a negative definition of freedom that casts the whole conversation in the light of freedom from censorship. Web3 and cryptocurrencies are a direct result of the mindset that The Financial Crisis implanted in the younger generation. In its thinking, “Government” and “State” are at best clueless sheepdogs or at worst evil manipulative organisations, and web3 actively aims to strip them out of the equation of economy and finding replacements such as DAO’s which implement the “code is law” ideology and are seen as better than the lumbering political machines. Rules are something to buy into, through smart contracts. It is a reflection of the inherent mistrust in centralised organised financial institutions. It represents a desire to fight back against the massive corporations and conglomerates that were suffocating the freedom of the web. It is a wish for chance to hit reset and create a new system with the sole purpose of being free of the rot of the old.

III

So, what’s the problem with all of this? Isn’t taking back our privacy something that should be supported? Yes.

But blockchain, in its current form, is not the solution. The problem with that statement is that I don’t actually think the base technology inherently has a problem. But it’s trying to implement it in real life where things start to fall apart.

We’ve already mentioned the technical problems with blockchains power consumption, inefficiency, and inability to scale. These are problems not to be overlooked when trying to use this to build a new economy.

We then have something a lot more worrying, and we touched on it briefly before. Blockchain security is a nightmare. Imagine for a second that your debit card was stolen. Sure, it’d be annoying, you’d have to get a new card and call the bank to flag a bunch of transactions as fraudulent, but there are systems in place to protect you. You have support when interacting with the economy. With blockchain, all that goes away. All its concerned with is that something has happened, no concern is given to whether that something should have happened. A world where clicking on the wrong button, or opening a phishing email that gives your laptop a virus that wipes out all your assets and there’s no undo, is not a world we should want to live in. People need more protection not less.

The problem with this point is that it is overtly political, and really causes a divide between people who would generally agree with points made in this document up and till this point. What I seem to be alluding to is that there cannot be such a thing as true privacy or freedom in our modern digital world, and we shouldn’t be foolish enough to attempt to fix it because this solution is terrible and actively undermines itself. And in the course of my research, I’ve found that it does not seem to be a view without merit, simply going off the largest ripples in the pond.

Take the case of DAO’s that we mentioned before. Their active aim is to codify law and make it so no one has the power to control an organisation and act nefariously. They aim to be apolitical, to remove politics from the equation of governorship and organisation. But what they actually are is anti-political. It may want to be “neutral” in these matters, but the way it does so removes democratic rights and rules for participation. How do the disenfranchised get heard and the powerless organise and resist when everything is controlled by some if-else statements? Politics is supposed to be about the struggle for betterment, for people to express their differing views in a fair space (whether that exists in reality is a different point).

Web3 doesn’t want to stay out of that process, it wants it to stop entirely. And in the largest method of communication that ever existed, that’s dangerous.

What’s even worse is that they can be actively used for crime. DAOs and “code is law” offers an excuse for people to obfuscate responsibility away from themselves and point to the code and say, “it did it!”. If you don’t believe me, watch this video from 2:05:25 of someone interviewing a person associated with a DAO that had basically copied another companies’ logo, and so was accused of copyright infringement, and that persons response amounted to “oh well, it’s on the blockchain now, I can’t do anything about it”. Soooo if someone puts someone else’s bank details on the chain without permission, should we just shrug and say “oh well”?!

But don’t think these are unintended consequences. They are a direct product of the structures in place. To think that somehow rules enshrined in code and enforced by computers to be extremely hard to change or circumvent will somehow make the world fairer is quite ridiculous. In a hypothetical example, a decentralised bank could scour your entire publicly available transaction record to see if you’ve made any donations to “questionable” organisations, which would probably include CAGE or any Palestinian rights organisation, before allowing you a loan. Beyond that, what’s to stop amazon from monitoring unionisation efforts in real time by looking at the tokens issued by the union on a publicly audited blockchain. In the end, it’s just

“the corporatisation of everything, the conversion of the entire world into claves, governed by power granted by token possession and enforced by machines that allow humans to wash their hands of the outcomes”

Likewise, people crying out decentralised all the time doesn’t change the reality: web3 is decentralised because the technology inherently meant to be like that, our current web also has the technological capability to be decentralised. It is our economic and social structures that tend toward centralisation, and they will do the same with web3. Already the stack is very centralised. There are only a few exchanges and markets to buy and sell coins and NFT’s.

PART 4: THE SOCIETY

Last section I promise you, jzk for sticking with me this far ❤️

This is important to me. We’ve spent a long time talking about crypto and its benefits and multitudinous drawbacks, and that, originally, is all that I was going to discuss. I was doing this research to be able to “debate” people, to be able to understand and explain my own views/feelings. It was, to be honest, a self-righteous project.

But, as I’m slowly learning, nothing is so simple that you can sum up positives and negatives, interject some sharp opinion, and call it a day. There’s always something more, and I feel pretty bitter about this, but it’s probably that “evaluation section” English GCSEs kept moaning on about all the time. So, this is my evaluation section, or taking-a-step-back, for this document.

I

Even though I heavily oppose crypto, for all the reasons we went over, I cannot blame people who get into it. I’m now talking in a purely trading sense, which was the starting intent of this document. I cannot blame people because I have to empathise with them. Our society is a dystopia that, under the wheel of capitalism, has crushed everyone’s lives into the meaningless rat-race, wasting hours of our lives studying so that we can be better able to sell the rest of our life for a pitiful wage just so that we can function as human beings. Just so we can be a few centimetres ahead of the cannonball of student loans, rent, taxes, living costs, etc etc etc that constantly threatens to flatten us into the poverty hole.

So how can I blame people for wanting to find an easy way out, a get-rich-(relatively)-quick scheme that offers a “fair chance” for all the play (given some start-up capital and an internet connection), instead of being based on meaningless statistics about how much garbage you managed to cram into your brain and then vomit onto the exam paper.

And don’t think I’m just moaning about my life (I am but it’s a foundation). Most people do not own anything. The top 10% of Americans wealth-wise own 89% of Wall Streets value. White people own 79% of all wealth.

In an economy where the gap between the owners and buyers, poor and ultra-rich, capitalist owners and workers is at such a large and obvious high, the moral question of “how do we fix this?” instead, as a result of of people working long hours and struggling to get by internalising the status quo, becomes “how do I get in?”

The rise of the gig economy is central to this. It has paved the way for human work to be so stripped of value that people are having to turn to every corner of the compass to find a way of holding on, let alone thriving. In America, over one-third of people participate in it, either as a primary or secondary job. That’s around 59 million people. In Britain, it was around 4.7 million in 2019. The problem is, most people do not understand how bad it is. The average consumer gets so much utility out of being able to choose, order, and receive items all within a single app that they do not stop to consider if there are any down sides.

There are. The gig economy is modern day slavery. Included in the gig economy are Deliveroo, JustEat, Getir, Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash, Postmates and the Witch-King of Angmar of them all, Uber. If you work for any of these companies in America, you are not classified as an employee. You are a contractor. And this means the company is not required to give you any of the benefits of a real job. These include overtime pay, health insurance (no NHS remember, you pay for everything), or paid sick leave. That wouldn’t be a problem, if you actually got the benefits of being a contractor, such as a flexible work life and a high wage. You don’t get either in the gig economy. Instead you get companies like Uber “updating” their pay model so that delivery drivers would have their pay reduced to $8 an hour. Let’s not forget that people are putting in up to 80 hours a week regularly, over double what would be considered normal in the UK, and they’re now making $640 a week. That’s probably less than $30,000 a year. For 80 hours a week. That’s ridiculous.

And as soon as anything legal is attempted, any groups or movements formed to demand that these people are classified as employees in a company that would crumble if it weren’t for them, they’re met with fierce opposition, millions of dollars in funding for opposing groups, legal action to attempt to block bills aimed at investigating the issue, and the list goes on. Corporations are hell bent on pushing the gig economy because it is the model with the best cost to benefit ratio that exists outside of slavery. But slavery is what it is: you have no choice about what do or where to go, your life is dictated by notifications on an app, and if your car breaks down, they won’t pay to fix it. Read this and watch this for more details.

But what has this got to do with crypto? Think for a minute. If you spent your entire day and most of the night travelling around and making deliveries for people so you have no time or money to pursue side ventures or try and upskill yourself such as with a degree so you could change profession. With your entire livelihood dependant on an apps notifications, with no safety net from the company in the form of paid sick leave or overtime pay, and the very real possibility that your whole job could be finished if your car breaks down, and underlining everything, you’re being paid peanuts, and then you see the ultra-rich seemingly magicking millions out of thin air in this weird system driven by cool tech, would you not look for a way to get in as well? Would your eyes not fall on the stories of crypto-traders pulling off amazing trades with hundreds of times the return on small investments with interest? If everything in our world that was too good to be true wasn’t, I know I would.

“marked by widening inequality and underemployment, ‘money,’ feels at once deadly serious and stupidly silly,” says Max Read in New York.

You should read that article. It’s kinda hard to explain this point properly because, like that definition of money, it’s at once stupidly simple but infinitely complex. Investment is useless if Elon musk can create or destroy millions of dollars of value in a tweet, if the economy collapses again, if your house pipes burst. What’s losing a few thousand in a risky investment compared to £40,000+ of student debt that gives you no guarantee of a job? Getting rich quick is now less of a high-octane gamble and more peoples best bet for a stable life. The middle class is being wiped out, and the only choices are to indefinitely scramble at the edge of poverty or risk it all for a shot at the moon.

We mentioned briefly before another integral point. Crypto, and NFT’s in particular, represent the monetization of everything. Web3 wants everything to be represented by a token on the blockchain, and so the next logical step is to be able to sell those tokens; it’s just a new space for accumulation. It wants to turn everything about us into saleable assets, so that everything is just a vehicle for more speculation. But isn’t that already what most young people have to do? The “financialization of everything” is looked at with disdain by the older generation, but for people who grew up with Instagram, Facebook, twitter and snapchat and whose lives entire lives have already been metricized by those platforms, having a portfolio in a retail investment app (E.g. Robinhood) is just another number that needs to go up.

Mat Dryhurst, researcher and co-host of technology and art-focused
podcast Interdependence, says that

“If you are 20 now, unless you were very fortunate, you grew up in post-2008 conditions, have scarce professional opportunities outside of the self-promotion platform economy, and ecological consequences looming before you.
So, the idea of access to direct investment opportunities is naturally very enticing. Slow and steady investment lore already seems outmoded to people of my generation when stable employment is becoming rarer.
To them, it must seem supremely alien.”

Saving up for retirement is another matter entirely. In a video to college students and graduates, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler suggested saving $5 a week. You’d have “$135,000 plus saved by the time of retirement at 65,” Gensler said, as though this is impressive. Given that the average student loan debt is about $30,000, you can knock off that much from the $135,000. If inflation stays at its current 2.1 percent average of the last two decades, $135,000 then will be around $55,000 of today’s money. It’s not nothing, but probably wouldn’t go very far in retirement”.

Brian Krogsgard, an interviewee from the article I’ve been quoting, said of that

“People can obviously see the impracticality of those kinds of statements. Most people live month to month. If you do, the goal of retirement can be impossible unless you put your money into a lotto ticket. I think that leads people to meme stocks and doge coins.”

When living on the edge, every moment needs to be monetized somehow. And maybe that comes as a surprise to older people who had jobs before the financial crisis, but for people entering the market after it, it’s a reality they’re already fully acclimatised to.

And herein is why I can’t blame people for getting into crypto. When I spoke about the Financial Crisis earlier, I tried to choose my language in a way that didn’t cast everyone as evil because no one is pure evil in real life. As the saying goes, do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.

I’d maybe replace incompetence with “the human experience”.

The people who bet against the housing market, like the ratings agencies rubber stamping everything to keep up with competitors, like the banks making stupidly risky decisions to chase after more profit, like the speculators who drove everything, are just people at the end of the day, people making rational, self-interested decisions in the face of options that didn’t seem so good to begin with that ended up collectively destroying an economy.

I think trying to understand someone’s motivation, even without agreeing with them, should be encouraged more and I think it’s not helpful to wear polaroid glasses on any issue, because it allows us to dig and get the heart of the discourse and if nothing else, help us understand and refine our own stance better.

II

But do I agree with this sentiment? Even if options trading or crypto investing may seem to be a rational path to financial stability, its just simply not a good idea for most people.

All the problems we’ve mentioned so far still hold. Some people’s risky speculative bets will work out, but someone still has to be left holding the hot potato at the end for the whole thing to work. It’s a zero-sum game, because everything that you get out someone had to put in. Just being a fool who bought or sold quicker does not make you less of fool, it only makes someone else a bigger fool. One person’s gains are another’s losses. It’s even been called negative sum as in the end everyone loses when the environment is destroyed.

People are lured in with invitations to join the expert elites and get the same incredible deal they’re getting, but this will never happen. Just as newcomers to crypto groups are warned against people promising secret info that made them rich cos no one would give away the formula for success even if it existed to keep their own profits, the whales (hedge funds and venture capitalists) are not inviting the small fry (retail investors) in for their own good. Less sophisticated investors are never on equal footing with financial institutions. Robinhood famously sells its order books to Citadel Securities so that institutional investors always know what Robinhood traders are doing before their trades are even executed, and can always beat them. In the crypto discords I’m on, discussions about how the whales are manipulating the market is general chat. They know what’s going on and the smaller moneyed investors are jerked around. Yet the small fish keep coming in.

At the end of the day, the core of crypto, web3 and the NFTs is a turf war between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy, a catfight between the 5% and the 1%. They are looking for a new space they can dominate, become trendsetters and seemingly invent value through sheer will of force, to ascend from being merely wealthy programmers flirting with interesting if severely limited technology to becoming hyper wealthy industrialists and the next billionaire class of rogue overlords, as the doors to the tech industry that minted Bezos and Gates swing resolutely shut by market calcification. The fact that something as stupid as a jpg of a pixelated ape can be so expensive is not a glitch of the system: its half the point. It’s a flex and form of mythmaking. And that’s what draws in people like us. We see our world and opportunities shrinking, wave our fists uselessly at our leaders who repeatedly screw us over, internalise the casualisation of work as jobs are dissolved into the gig economy, and we want to believe that escape is just that easy. If we just buy in early on the right memecoin, just bet on being on the right discord when they airdrop the next bag of gold dust, then we too can know the feeling that the line can only go up. This is where the rage of 2008 brought us: not to the realisation that capitalism is utterly broken and needs to go away, but that it didn’t offer enough opportunities to be the boot. This system that turns everyone into petty digital landlords, that determines value by how sellable something is and whether or not it can be gambled on as a token in a micro-auction, that turns all human interaction into transactions, is not anything close to a solution to anything. Replacing a bad system of bosses with a terrible system of Apps shows we’re great at changing bad systems into worse systems. I don’t think that’s a mindset that should be brought anywhere near anything else or interacted with in any meaningful way.

In the end, it’s going to be your judgment call between the ethical, technological, and economic problems vs the potential benefits, and how much emphasis you place on the possibility of financial reward.

For me, I can safely say I will not be getting into crypto any time soon.

CONCLUSION

First off, congrats and jzk for getting to the end. I truly hope you’ve gotten some benefit from this work and at the very least you’ve been exposed to some viewpoints and perspectives you hadn’t thought of before. I know I have.

One huge problem with this topic is that you may set out to research just crypto, but in order to understand it you have to understand pretty much everything else in the space because everything is so intertwined. I 100% know I haven’t done anything close to a thorough explanation of any of these problems, and I don’t think I want to, firstly because someone else has already done probably the best attempt at that already which you must must must watch, or read some of the stuff linked below, but secondly I’ve been thinking about this for 5 weeks and I’m honestly pretty tired of it and I’m sure you must be a bit tired having read 19 pages to get here, so I want to stop so that I’m not writing for eternity and someone like you can actually read it.

I am aware that throughout this document, I have made little to no mention of the Islamic perspective, such as fatāwa etc. The main reason I didn’t is because I just didn’t know how to research and properly represent that dimension of the discussion, but I also felt it would sort of mist all of these points in legal tension. But now I would like to mention one ayah:

“And it is He who has made you successors in the land and raised some of you above others by (various) grades, so that He might try you by what He has given you”

For me this kind of summarises my reasons for being against crypto. Allah is charging us with being responsible, with acting in the right way even if he tests us with predicaments and problems. We should always be aware of what we are doing and being active in evaluating our decisions. We shouldn’t be jumping into fads because they say they give easy solutions.

I think that’s probably my main thought from all of this. We need to act responsibly to fulfil our duty on Earth, and to act responsibly, we need to understand what we’re doing. And what crypto is doing right now is, in my opinion, not good.

And, erm, yh.
The End.
Salam.

Ibraheem Saleem

Watch the video: