Bible Prophecy Spells Doom for Crypto-Currencies - Todd Strandberg -
Financial bubbles generally occur once in a generation. When large numbers of people make bad investments, those experiences are enough of a warning to make caution a virtue.
Today we don't seem to have an ever-dwindling supply of caution. Some form of bubbles now come along every few years. In 2000 we had the Dotcom Bubble; in 2008 we had the Housing Bubble; and in 2017 we are in the middle of the Crypto-Currencies Bubble.
Interest in digital crypto-currency started with Bitcoin. In 2010, you could buy a pizza for 10,000 bitcoins, which someone famously did with the price in dollars less than a penny. I hope the pizza parlor kept their bitcoins, because now they are worth $18.45 million. As I'm writing, the price of one bitcoin is $1820.
The total value of all bitcoins in circulation now totals $29.600 billion. Their increase in value for just this year has been 90 percent. When you add all the other currencies that brings the grand total to $52.5 billion. This is a huge amount of money for a type currency that only has a five year history.
I cannot find a record of any other asset increasing more 200,000 times in value. Apple Computer, from its 1982 near-bankruptcy low is only up 765 times. People are talking as if Bitcoin's best gains are yet to come.
I read one report of a man taking out an equity loan of $325,239 on his house to buy 191 bitcoins. If Bitcoin reaches the $10,000 mark, he plans on moving to the West Coast and living in quiet luxury. If it drops below $100, that man may find himself living on the street.
Before people convert their life savings into Bitcoins, Ripples, Ethereum, or my favorite-Stellar Lumens, they may want to take an assessment of the risks.
The biggest threat to crypto-currency is someone breaking into the system and stealing your account code information. In the past few years, several exchanges have gone bankrupt after their systems were hacked. The biggest bust was at MT Gox; $450 million in bitcoins were stolen from customer accounts.
Once a hacker has your passwords, your pile of bitcoins can vanish without a trace. You can even be your own thief by losing your password. For example, in 2013 one user lost 7,500 bitcoins, worth $7.5 million at the time when he accidentally discarded a hard drive containing the digital key to his account.
Another problem with crypto-currencies is their unlimited number. About a year ago, there were about 400 types of these coins. When I last checked, there was 727 crypto-currencies. If this mania continues, there will soon be over a thousand digital currencies. As their numbers increase, people will have to start to question the value of wealth that is created from nothing.
The quantity of each individual coin is also a problem. The exchanges that manage them, create new ones to pay for operating costs. The quantity of some coins increases at a rate that is greater than 50 percent each year. This high level of inflation can only cause the value of each coin to go down.
Crime is becoming yet another problem for crypto-currencies. The untraceable nature of Bitcoin makes it popular with criminal agents. And it's becoming more common practice to demand ransom in bitcoin, too. This from the New York Times: "Those threats have increased with the advent of ransomware, malicious software that encrypts victims' data and prevents them from accessing it until they pay a ransom, often hundreds or thousands of dollars' worth of bitcoin, a crypto-currency."
I think the biggest threat to crypto-currency is the government seeing it as a competition to national currency. Lawmakers don't like any other monetary system stepping into their domain. As soon as Congress realizes it is losing tax dollars from people exchanging goods and services with crypto-currencies, they will move to ban the practice. The big banks are not going to stand for a system that cuts them out of transaction fees.
The state of Florida is working on legislation that will make it a money laundering offense to use virtual currencies to hide funds that are related to a crime.
Bible prophecy would seem to indicate that crypto-currencies are going to have a short life. Under the mark of the beast system, all transactions will be supervised by the Antichrist's government. The devil may be allowing this latest mania to flourish in order to fulfill his end-time plans. Once the crash comes, it will be easy to argue that all digital money needs strong central control.
"And the second beast required all people small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, o that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark-the name of the beast or the number of its name" (Revelation 13:16-17).
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