Witch trials have varied a lot from place to place: the French and the German were particularly willing to kill women for it, with England and America getting on the fad, not so much in other places. In particular in Spain, they liked to kill for “heresy”, so claiming that witchcraft existed was a worse crime than getting accused of being a witch. Stealing “the properties of women” is BS, since back then women had no right to ownership; most anyone could steal would be some clothes, and the occasional piece of jewelry.
Crypto, works the same as any other asset: it has value as long as people believe it has value.
It doesn’t work exactly like the USD, where denying USD’s value puts you on the wrong end of US’s army, and Bitcoin has a fixed limited supply, unlike the US being able to increase supply indefinitely, but otherwise the basics are the same.
Can’t really excuse the mix of metaphors, since they’re vastly different:
“MLM” has someone at the top benefitting from everyone underneath; there have been cryptos with a “premine” spread among “initial investors”, not so much with Bitcoin.
“Tulip market” is a case of black box speculation (aka: loot boxes, gacha, or “surprise mechanics”); there is nothing of that in most crypto (except cryptokitties and friends), the spot value is clear upfront.
“Hot potato”, is how all markets work: check out what happened to the last people holding Gazprom stock when it got delisted at a value of exactly $0, or the stockholders of Theranos, or 23andMe, or… etc. More stocks get delisted all the time: stockanalysis.com/actions/delisted/
crypto was certainly profitable at a time but only in deeply unethical ways
This is patently false on several fronts. Crypto is as profitable as USD: scams are highly profitable, speculation can be profitable, holding it is as profitable as the growth in demand.
You don’t need to scam anyone to get a profit… but claiming that Mar-a-Lago makes you a billionaire while being valued at $18M, can make you president 🤷