Shane Vogel:
Silas Kennedy: Exposing Cryptocurrency For What It Is
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year or so, you’d be familiar with the recent spike in popularity of crypto, including digital currencies, or cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.), and NFTs (Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, etc.). Controversy has arisen with the recent surge of crypto’s popularity, though. When it comes to cryptocurrency, many believe that digital currencies don’t hold any meaningful real-world value. As for NFTs, which is a newer trend compared to cryptocurrency, people tend to disagree with the fact that buying a digital image of something, which can be easily replicated by anyone with a simple right-click, means that you own the exclusive rights to it; others laugh at the horrendous looks of the more notable NFT brands on the market, too, with the Bored Ape NFTs being infamous for this. As a result of all this conflict, the concept of crypto as a whole has become a laughing stock to many communities on the internet. None could agree with this sentiment more than Silas Kennedy, and you’ll learn why.
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When news got to me that fellow George School student Silas Kennedy invested in cryptocurrency, and supposedly lost five trillion dollars in doing so, I figured I’d interview him to get to know what his thought process was upon investing, how he lost his money investing, and where he currently stands on crypto. The thing is, though, I quickly learned that it wasn’t five trillion dollars he lost investing in cryptocurrency; that was the 1923 German mark value of his loss (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/ess_germanhyperinflation.html#:~:text=In%201923%2C%20at%20the%20most,surprise%20by%20the%20financial%20tornado.). He actually lost five dollars, but I’m sure it was still very devastating. Anyways, Silas agreed to do the interview.
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The first thing I wanted to know was how Silas decided to invest in cryptocurrency. Thus, I opened the interview by asking him what caught his eye to make him consider investing, to which Silas responded, “So there was an ad in the superbowl, it was a bouncing QR code, and it was an ad for a company called CoinBase. It was offering 15 free dollars worth of bitcoin, so I said sure.” It should be known that this was also Silas’ first time investing in crypto. “So, I decided to actually invest in crypto because I thought it would be funny. It’s literally a meme. It is literally the most unregulated currency in the world market. So before the government started taxing me on crypto, I decided to buy some Ethereum and Dogecoin.” In case you don’t know, Dogecoin is actually based on a meme, particularly the shiba inu one, so Silas wasn’t wrong.
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I then proceeded to ask him why one should (or shouldn’t) invest in crypto opposed to other economic assets, such as stocks on the stock market. Silas wasn’t hesitant to attack cryptocurrency with this question, claiming, “There are much safer things that you can invest in and should invest in, like traditional stocks. If you think about it like this, crypto is a pyramid scheme. If you invested in crypto around 2010, it was a one-to-one exchange rate, and now, if I’m not mistaken, the exchange rate of bitcoin to a dollar is that one bitcoin is worth [about] 40,000 [U.S.] dollars, so the people that invested now are getting the short end of the stick.”
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When putting this into the perspective of a buyer potentially looking to get into crypto nowadays, it makes sense. The big crypto identities who are floating their wealth from investing in cryptocurrency seem to omit that they bought their crypto when it was as cheap as it was, giving people the false notion that it is more profitable than it really is, thus creating the crypto “hype train” that we’ve seen recently. The hype train has become increasingly expensive and less worthwhile to hop onto as it progresses, in which crypto is a “speculative market”, so the only real factor in determining cryptocurrency’s value is its popularity, and what people say it’s worth. In turn, crypto essentially shapes out to be, as Silas put it, a pyramid scheme, only really benefiting those who figured out how to profit from it first.
Moving on from this, it’s quite simple how Silas lost his five dollars investing in Ethereum and Dogecoin. When I questioned him about this in our interview, he said, “I invested in crypto the day of the Super Bowl 2022, February 14th, and crypto was very stable for approximately eleven days after that, and then Russia invaded and the crypto coin market kinda took a gigantic hit, same with every other market on the planet, except for military stuff.” Silas even agreed to show me a graph showing the change in the total value of his cryptocurrency over a week during this period:
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The value presumably continued to go down as time went on, leading to Silas’ devastating five-dollar loss. This mishap didn’t seem to change Silas’ views on cryptocurrency, and crypto as a whole, though; he already hated it all. Nevertheless, to close out the interview, Silas reassured me that crypto and cryptocurrency “are memes and they’re stupid. NFTs in particular. NFTs are stupid, crypto is stupid, they will not be the way of the future, they are a fad. There’s no way it’s going to replace the standard dollar.” As a journalist on this matter, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to express my opinion, but I’ll do it anyway and proceed to get canceled by the George School crypto community:
I agree (and so does the anonymous editor of this article).