The way Sam Bankman-Fried makes money is much more nefarious actually. He made over $30 billion last year by liquidating leveraged futures contracts on his exchange, FTX. Because crypto is still an extremely small market compared to traditional markets, a heavy hitter with several billion can swing price action into so-called "scamwicks". He can buy or sell several million worth of crypto at once, forcing the price to violently explode up or down because its market capitalization is very small. This price action absolutely rekts leveraged futures, forcing liquidations: paying back the exchange and then some. Sam is basically hunting for liquidity. If there are a lot of longs open, Sam just sells. If there are many shorts open, he buys. Every time this happens, everyone with a futures contract playing with high leverage gets liquidated and the exchange makes money. Because Sam IS the exchange, you can understand how he can make several billion per month doing that. Normally I'm completely against leveraged trading and these people are basically gambling way beyond the realms of gambling in simple crypto trading, but this fucker deserves to rot in jail.
What you have just described follows the logic of supply and demand. How it usually works is very simple, it also happens in other markets such as Forex: you convert a stable asset into a volatile asset, sell the highs of the volatile asset, convert back to the stable asset. The reason you do this is to accumulate the stable asset, because there is no other way to accumulate it other than mining it. The people left holding the bag of the volatile asset are actually the majority in these situations, and it's the way every market operates, from commodities to currencies.
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https://www.reuters.com/world/africa...cy-2022-04-27/
After El Salvador, Central African Republic is the second nation to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. South Africa and Tanzania are very likely to follow suit.
I think such extremely impoverished nations have nothing to lose.
Half a decade ago, people had no idea what crypto was and how it worked, except for a select few who saw it as a niche to "stick it to the man".
Once Bitcoin hit 5 digits a couple years ago, it became an interesting thing to own as a means of diversifying one's portfolio.
We are now slowly approaching stage 3, experimenting with adoption.
Financial institutions and nations are slowly taking notice. They become all the more interested in a universal financial network that can transfer tokens without a middleman, under a regulatory umbrella that is anti-fraud, throughout all asset classes. The technology is here, regulation unfortunately takes some time to process.
Once it's there though, the benefits will utterly overwhelm the legacy network of fiat: deflationary staking protocols, meaning you can accumulate passive income through holding and staking. Lightning fast and free transfers, complete transparency for regulatory bodies because everything can be viewed through the blockchain ledger. Interconnectability through cross chain exchanges, meaning you can convert everything to anything at any moment free of charge. Implementation of smart contracts, automating every single financial process, from payrolls to trading, to money management.