March 25, 2022
By Jude McElroy
Editor
Cryptocurrency has had quite the boost in popularity recently, but it’s still relatively new and has a lot of flaws to work out.
Crypto allows people to trade currency online through the blockchain, and plenty of new ideas have come as a result of it. More recently, NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have risen in popularity. Many people are hopping on the trend of crypto, but is it worth it for them to do so? Right now, the answer is unclear, but to me, it looks more like a no.
The idea for crypto dates back to as early as the 1980s and ‘90s, but it did not come to fruition until 2009 when a pseudonymous developer by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin, the first official cryptocurrency. These coins were exchanged through the blockchain, which completely locks away the data of transactions, preventing them from being modified from a third party in any way. The coins are also completely disconnected from any government control, making it a decentralized market where coins are traded between users on a trust system, and the blockchain makes it hard for scams between users to happen.
Since then, various coins have been released, such as Ethereum. These coins are called Altcoins, and they essentially are Bitcoin with a different coat of paint, but some try to do something different. Ethereum, for example, allows users to build applications based on Ethereum’s blockchain. This all sounds complicated, but it’s also fascinating.
The idea of trading money through the internet is amazing, but that hasn’t prevented people from taking advantage of it.
The community surrounding crypto is full of scams and fraud. Most are only in it to make some quick money. Pump-and-dumps—where someone promotes a coin, gets the price to a certain point and then sells the coin—causes the coin to lose all value. This practice is extremely common in the crypto community.
The idea of trading money through the internet is amazing, but that hasn’t prevented people from taking advantage of it.
NFTs allow someone to buy a ticket that says they own an image, among other things. NFTs are ripe with art theft and scams, with many people hopping on the trend without knowing what they’re getting into. All someone has to do is upload another’s art to an NFT platform, and that person is now profiting off of something they did not make while passing it off as their own.
There is still plenty of potential with crypto. The ability to safely trade currencies through the internet is revolutionary, and NFTs truly can help artists, as they claim to do, but only if the aforementioned problems are fixed.
There must be more legal regulations regarding crypto as a whole so scams are prevented and become less prevalent. As for NFTs, more rigorous moderation needs to be put in place to prevent the theft of art. As of now, I feel the negative aspects of crypto outweigh the benefits, but with some ironing out, crypto could do a lot of good.
