Dismantling An Absolutely Atrocious Forbes Anti-Crypto Article

Here is the link to the original article.

This is literally one of the worst published pieces I've have seen in a while and it comes from a name like Forbes. In my opinion, Forbes isn't the most analytical and hard-hitting as they're known for highlighting trend and situations rather than real ground-breaking journalistic reporting. However, this article was just bad on all fronts.

The article starts by stalking about the merge and its social impact and then goes on to say "But we already know that in practical terms it won’t make any difference for the long-run fundamental prospects of crypto." Anyone who even half-way knows about the tech knows this is a highly questionable statement but so far there's nothing concrete to dismantle so we go on. It then goes on to make another high-handed assertion that "There are so many things wrong with cryptocurrency it is hard to know where to begin." Another unsupported assertion that seems to be based solely on personal sentiment and then states that "the facilitation of illicit transactions, the money-laundering, the ransomware extortions, the drug dealing, porn and god-knows-what". The author speaks as if there issues are new or even a huge problem in crypto, as if it's not a much larger issue in fiat. Let's feed him some facts.

European Central Bank’s Fabio Panetta cited a wide range of figures for illicit crypto activity, ranging from under 1% to as much as half of all virtual transactions Obviously, these numbers can't be trusted. Clearly the EU have no idea of the real number if they say that crime in crypto is linked to either an insignificant amount or every other transaction. Chainalysis said in January that transactions involving illicit addresses represented just 0.15% of cryptocurrency transaction volumes last year. The FATF(Financial Task Force Agency), the international body responsible for developing money laundering norms for conventional finance and the crypto sector, for an unclear reason believes that the analysts’ estimates of the percentage of transactions that are unlawful, which range from 0.1% to 15.4%, are all too low and should be treated as the low. It is absolutely clear that nobody really knows and that those who do have and incentive to either inflate or decrease the value to varying degrees. This is proven even more so by this research, which uses data taken from Google Big query public Eth dataset, shows that half of the ETH network is 2 hops away from a tornado cash receiver. It's almost impossible that half the network wallets are involved in criminal activity and then this percentage is only for Tornado Cash, much less other sketchy services. If it were we would be looking at a very impossible number very close to 100%.

And then of course, the author acts like porn is illegal or evil and completely "forgets" that the majority of porn is free. And as a matter of fact, paying for is likely better for everyone involved as it supports the actors financially, allows work in a safe environment, encourages entrepreneurship in the sector and is related to lower levels of human abuses in the industry as some of the things stated in in several studies and interviews.

Now here is where the crap really hits the fan. After stating how useless the Merge apparently was, the article goes on to state how terrible the carbon footprint of crypto is, comparing those of ETH and BTC to Finland and Sweden. I don't know the levels of asinine this is, so obvious of a contradiction that I really don't think I should waste any energy pointing it out. I now have to go back to my most recent post where I point out that between studies by Coinshares, the Bitcoin Mining Council and Cambridge among others, consensus was reached that mining uses between 40%-70% of renewables.

The article goes on to use this graph to illustrate the ponzi-like nature of crypto.

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https://preview.redd.it/z5spa57brvo91.png?959&format=png&auto=webp&s=e633d5f6b3ef1f4ab54a35b87150c7947c1bd938

For some reason, the article omits the previous decade of price action. I obviously don't need to state how cherry picked this data is as we know the real graph looks like this.

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SPY vs BTC

Here we see BTC consistently outperformed the SPY just over the last 5 years and at times by a margin on 10 times! I do believe this chart understates it as the gold standard of stock exchanges the Nasdaq published that BTC returned 437,171% since 2011 compared to the S&P's 277% at the very end of 2021. Even updating to today's market prices, there is absolutely no comparison.

He then goes on to state a major flaw in the irreparable framework BTC and ETH such of "the extremely low transaction processing capacity". The author again contradicts his prior statements of the apparently uselessness of the merge. Further, he is clearly ignorant of the massive improvements is TPS by layer 2 technologies. Even more so by that fact that there are many other network with higher TPS and well as many other features and not only two networks exist. In delusion and dissonance the author even goes on to mention some L2's and the future sharding in ETH in such a way as if they will never come to fruition and are dreams sold by crypto devs when in facts these features are already here! Sharding is not yet present in ETH tho it is on other networks and even the merge itself did decrease block times by more than .6 seconds which is massive.

He also goes on to somehow compare apple producing 10 iPhones every second to the network capacity that that "That would use up bitcoin’s capacity right there". I don't think I need to say anymore.

The author goes on to praise the Onyx system developed by JP Morgan in the implication of a "real proper" financial system. Of course, he obviously did not research to discover the fact that Umar Farooq, CEO of J.P. Morgan’s Onyx, told Karen Webster that peer-to-peer (P2P) private blockchain networks can help streamline information flows tied to cross-border payments and remove the complexities tied to legacy systems.

He also went on to rant on the Solana outages in a persecution of the entire crypto space. I suppose this means that because of one murderer, all humans of completely evil, because of one mistake you are undeserving of everything in your life and of Lehman Brothers all banks and conventional financial institutions are untrustworthy with no exceptions. Even in the crypto space itself to the mainstream of Fortune, Solana called out many times on its failures.

Clearly, this guy has an agenda and an educated opinion would probably say that Forbes is in on it or at the very least complicit. Objectively, there is no higher rating this article can be given that utter foolishness. I know I shouldn't indulge in the ramblings of the ignorant, but it is good to know that if this is what we are up against crypto won a long time ago.