#cryptocurrency

read title. I am curious about how you would value a crypto currency to k ow you are getting a fair deal.

Or is the strategy behind investing in them some sort of variation of the greater fool theory?

For anyone curious about how cryptocurrency actually works, I'd recommend this video from 3Blue1Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 .

I was considering making a debate about this at one point, but I decided not to for whatever reason (most likely lack of confidence). When it comes to proof-of-work, there's no way for anyone to create a block that contains a transaction that didn't happen, send out that block to only one entity (if you were trying to fool them into thinking you had sent payment, for example), and always have a longer-block chain (validity is always based on the longest block-chain) unless you controlled over 50% (let's say 52%) of the computing power involved in mining the particular crypto.

If you controlled over 52%, you would, per the law of big numbers, be capable of finding the hash needed enough that your block-chain that contains the fraudulent transaction that you never broadcast to anyone but the person you're attempting to deceive faster than anyone else on average and would be able to make it seem like your block-chain is the valid one. This isn't possible with things like bitcoin (as far as I know), but what if we reached a point where a government managed to somehow, maybe by preventing mining from anyone but the government (if that's even possible), control said 52%? They would be able to have complete control over the currency and be able to buy things without even having to spend currency as long as they hold the longest block-chain for long enough.

Having immaterial currency backed by a nation-state has worrisome implications for their ability to control money as well. If the government managed to have complete control over the currency, there's nothing stopping them from declaring all their currency worthless, forcing people to spend it in a certain period of time,  taking it away from people without even needing to be near them or their assets, etc...

I am very open to the possibility of being wrong in a lot of things that I said. It's been a while since I researched it, but I'd be curious if anyone else has similar or differing thoughts on nationally-backed crypto, especially with China's creation of one.