The inevitable crypto crash should be another warning to zealots

How many times do the foaming-at-the-mouth advocates of cryptocurrency need telling that they are peddling a dangerous and futile vaccum.

For the past ten years, anyone wishing to throw their money away has had the chance to do so via any number of maverick-led and often fraudulent false and non existent ‘currency’ methods.

Ten years is a very long time, and certainly long enough for the general public to understand that a non-existent currency traded on a non-existent exchange is the equivalent to snake oil, only with massive self-imposed volatility and leverage, making the inevitable losses more significant than simple, old fashioned snake oil.

It took a very long time. Long enough for some retail brokers to get themselves involved in trading cryptocurrency CFDs which in some cases cost them tens of millions of dollars in a short time. FinanceFeeds is privy to inside information that showed losses at two firms of $17 million and $40 million respectively within one week at the end of 2017, one of which was a publicly listed entity which hid this unfortunate scenario by reporting the entire year in one quarter, presumably to avoid shareholder furore.

Then came all the ICO fraud, and inability to withdraw from various ‘exchanges’ that the proponents who all came out of nowhere with no industry expertise and were uttering the word ‘crypto’ at every opportunity with almost foaming-at-the-mouth obsession, all of which are now either under sanctions, in jail or on the run.

Surely by now, with the penny finally dropping at the FCA, the world would finally begin to understand that any digital currency is a fraud, yet here we are, at the end of 2020, and Bitcoin values – which are false valuations of a false and intangible currency – have been soaring, and once again the talking heads of the media have been encouraging the lemmings to jump from the precipice.

Thankfully, the authorities in some of the most important regions for financial markets infrastructure are well aware of this, and have made some steps – albeit not enough – to thwart the deluge of people who have never worked in their lives who suddenly appear and use the word ‘crypto’ twenty times per sentence with their eyes wide open and levels of hyperactivity that would send many medical professionals reaching for the strait jacket.

The latest clear indication that putting money into these non-existent and dangerous digital follies has happened today as the value of one of the world’s most valuable cryptocurrencies has once again begun to crash with a recently filed SEC complaint at the root of the free fall.

According to CoinMarketCap, the XRP token’s value has declined more than 42% in the past 24 hours and is down more than 63% from its 30-day high of $0.76. It now sits at just $0.27.

XRP’s price volatility has rivaled the most capricious of cryptocurrencies. Since reaching an all-time-high of $3.84 back in January of 2018, the coin has spent much of the past two years drifting closer and closer to pennies. In the past month, on the back of major rallies from other cryptocurrencies, XRP has seen its biggest rally in years, but those gains were all erased this week by the Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse’s admission that the SEC was planning to file a sweeping lawsuit against the company during the current administration’s final days.

The SEC’s fundamental argument is that XRP has always been a security and that it should have been registered with the commission from the beginning more than seven years ago. The SEC claims that the defendants in the case — namely the company Ripple, CEO Bran Garlinghouse and executive chairman Chris Larsen — generated more than $1.38 billion from sales of the XRP token.

The company’s line has been that XRP is not a security but is, in fact, a tool for financial institutions, though the coin’s volatility has discouraged banks from actually adopting the token. Meanwhile, XRP is present on a number of cryptocurrency exchanges, a fact which could expand the scope of this legal complaint and affect more players in the space.

It is astonishing that the SEC can even consider these as securities, as they don’t even exist.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in Britain got this right by outlawing all forms of cryptocurrency in any capacity whatsoever recently.

If human beings are impulsive and rash enough to think that cryptocurrency is worth throwing their real money away for despite the ten year trail of destruction its no-mark advocates have unleashed on the world, then it is definitely the job of the regulators to put a stop to the whole thing.

Electric fences are used by farmers to shock livestock into staying in their fields and not being run over by vehicles or falling foul of steep hills or other obstacles.

On this basis, the FCA and SEC should be looking at an ‘electric fence’ to stop the easily led from being run over by bow tie-wearing nobodies who convince them that the ‘banksters’ are their enemy and somehow these crooks are their best friends.