Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

There are 250 million units of mobilecoin, and majority of them are owned by the founders. Only 37.5 million have been distributed. With current price ($65), they're worth $14B already. This makes the project a scam and impossible for it to work as a reliable money that holds value. Bitcoin had no pre-mine and has been fairly distributed from the start.

No “pre-mine” doesn't mean fairly distributed. Bitcoin is a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme as well. Early adopters mine or buy large proportions at negligible prices while late adopters mine or buy negligible proportions at large prices.

By that definition, any stock or collectible is a "multi-level marketing pyramid scheme". A multi-level marketing or pyramid scheme is not defined as anything where early adopters might have purchased it at a lower price than later adopters.

Which is interesting. Unlike virtually every stock on the stock market, I see Bitcoin-stans constantly harp about the "USD price" of Bitcoin on places like Twitter, Youtube, any social media with a large enough megaphone, just so they can stir up loads of FOMO and get people to make a financial decision that is likely not led with wisdom and prudence in mind. Especially with how high BTC is priced at now, you'd be lucky to have massive multipliers on your initial buy in as you might have in the earlier days. The diminishing point of returns is rearing its ugly head, so more pumping must happen to keep this all in the public zeitgeist.

That kinda smells pump and dump like to me. Lest we forget, the end of the previous bull runs in 2013 and 2017 wiped out some people that made bad investment decisions (and there's no guarantee another black swan event won't happen again in the future). Not to mention, whenever there is news of someone losing their wallet keys, Bitcoiners breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that that's one more person that has to permanently HODL. Gross.

>>That kinda smells pump and dump like to me.

Yes agreed. Though I would add that this is a paradigm shifting technology, so there may be something substantive underlying all of this Bitcoin hype.

As for crypto as a whole, Ethereum has real world use cases, like stablecoins and NFTs, and an extensive multi-pronged development effort to expand its capabilities, in particular scalability, that cannot be dismissed as mere hype.

Just on the basis of fee revenue alone, and the assumption that this turns into income for ETH holders once the platform switches to Proof-of-Stake, Ethereum's current valuation can be justified with only the assumption that its price-earnings multiple will match that of relatively mature and low-growth industries like electronics.