LA

spartikle

The average home in LA costs just under $1 million. Affording that with a $200k income, on top of state income tax, student loans, and child expenses, is difficult. Also most lawyers don’t just graduate law school and make $200k. IDK this judge but if she was a career prosecutor or public defender that would mean a decade or two of low pay and very high stress.

ikurei_conphas

Yeah, I refrained from commenting on whether I thought it was high or low because of the COL differences, but as I pointed out below, $200k is *juuuuuust* about what you need to comfortably buy a mid-sized suburban house in or near a major city like LA or Chicago. It's a high income, but not obscene wealth.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

soyelvorph

I'm in Latin America and with a very few exceptions, I wouldn't say it is a boom. We are far away from that to happen, yet, we've seen a slight progress in some LA areas.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

Legitimate_Cattle254

Buy a lambo and a glasshouse in LA

Giga79

When was that their purpose? They serve *money*, if you don't have any then a bank won't serve you. All you are to a bank is a depositor, which is seen as a liability in most cases. Back when the reserve requirement was 10% the bank needed you to mint more money, today the requirement is 0% so they just need you to fund someone else's withdraw to keep up the charade they play. Haven't you ever heard of the phrase, "too big to fail"? That isn't a new feature of the financial sector.. https://academic.oup.com/jeea/article-abstract/2/6/929/2281616 >The financial crisis that swept across northern Europe in 1763 bears a strong resemblance to more recent episodes of financial distress. The combination of the specific contractual arrangements at the time, interlocking credit relationships, and the high leverage of market participants triggered distress sales of assets, leading to a severe liquidity crisis. Hence, the crisis is an early instance of contagion on the asset side of the balance sheet. We highlight the salient features of the 1763 crisis and propose a stylized model of the events. While the financial institutions have changed fundamentally in the intervening 200 or so years, the underlying problems appear to be universal. The police don't *serve and protect* either, that's just the sloagn/branding LA coppers used and it caught on in language (because it seems like a duh, it seems intrinsic to their entire duty but it's not and never was). Maybe you got caught up in some big-bank propaganda lol.

RespondEfficient1343

Just say: SIM SA LA BIM .. the magic words will open it. #magic

DaddyDuma69

Oh no worries. Normally I’m a lot more aware of that stuff so all good. Struggling in another country may not be struggling in alabama or mississippi or wherever. Concerning them, they both have plenty of money. Joe Rogan’s podcast I’m sure brings in good money and Matthew is a well known actor. Texas would have a lower cost of living than say LA area california so their dollar will go a lot farther. Bigger house, more land, etc. although texas’ cost of living is increasing now too due to a lot of the tech industry moving their and buying up a ton of land and housing and such.

Ateam043

Just ask CDC. LA peeps still refer it as the Staples Center.

narco501

Fitting his wife used to be an escort and was ran through by every rich dude in LA

jaydub1376

I like the way you think!!! VIVA LA CRYPTO!!!

KingPodrickPayne

Can I get an....LA Knight¡!!!!!!¡

blingless8

You probably want to first define what being well off means to you. An annual income of USD100K in Vancouver, Toronto, New York, LA etc offers a vastly different lifestyle vs USD100K in most major cities in Southeast Asia except Singapore for example. So how much BTC you'd need in the future would likely still depend on your costs of living, desired quality of life, and geographic location.

neen209

Let’s just make an agreement guys… If moons gives us life changing money, we will build our own gated community. I’m thinking LA. I hate that city, but when you have money it’s a whole different experience lol

Tasigur1

coffee grounds x crystal ball + rainy days in LA per year = BTC price in 2025

Pr0Meister

It's not even just Africa. Well,maybe they are a few points behind in that particular education scale, but both from all the news I've read and anecdotal personal knowledge - the financial literacy, not to mention the crypto literacy, of the majority of people the world over is severely lacking. Same thing from LA to London to Tokyo.

ftball21

It’s 10:56 pm in LA right now

Waste_Actuary_3290

The truth is its not that easy to say. Over the course of 10 years Bitcoin specifically has been a far better investment than real-estate . According to feds housing prices in 2010 average roughly $250,000 todays it's roughly 500,000. Basically a %100 increase. While BTC averages %4,000 over 10 years. ​ This depends on property location. While houses in LA and other popular locations have grown a lot more over the same ten years. On average BTC was the better investment.

obesefamily

Manhattan is in such shambles these days the property should be worthless. Couldn't believe the state of it last time I went in. It's not LA or Portland Oregon bad, but sheesh.

KingPodrickPayne

LA Knight brought me back into this show. RIP funker and Bray

--Banda--

I would expect nothing less than to be linked an LA times article. Thank you for playing, pal.

jrecio26

Bullshit, I just went to Farmer Boys and a combo cost $15.59 plus Tax. Out here in LA minimum wage is $15.50, that’s an hours pay for a fucking burger, fries and a drink. I spent $40 on two combos and a kids meal for myself, my wife and daughter.

Different_Plant5583

I work as an event staff(some call it brand ambassadors). You'd be surprised. This line of work is independent contractor and most hire younger people, so the older 'experienced' staffers got no job security and gang up against the young, unless you're hot and a model because those got connections. Doesn't help that that most of the people in this industry are aspiring actors, models, entrepreneurs who are trying to 'make it'. My city is known for these people's nesting ground after they failed to make it in LA and NY.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

SammyCraigar

I've only got 2 gifted from that nice fella LA. I'm sad I don't have any more. Gnosis sounds like a science term, like Osmo.

ftball21

I can’t believe we’re even talking about a residual hurricane in LA.

Esco1980

Its so scary , i remember the first time i went to LA i was soo close to turning around and going back to london because of the data they wanted but had to do it sadly and still pisses me off to this day that they have it

LeThaLxdARk

Enjin is a mess, used to have hype and the potential was brought by Lost Relics and some other games that adopted it, but they actually made it worse and swapped everything at one point, making jumpnet useless. Same goes for 9 lives arena and another mmorpg i forgot the name Best people to give an opinion on this would be Lost Relics founder and 9LA founder. Had potential, but is trash now(not referring to the price, strictly the network) imo

Ok-Hyena-2175

I got 3.5 ethereum for 175 per coin. It was growing but the btc skyrocketed first and back then fees were close to nothing compared to now. So, after eth had grown to 500-600ish in 2021 I noticed btc hitting 20k at a more rapid pace then ethereum a gains. I sold all my ether and put 2000 into btc. That was the beginning up the first rip which ended at 55k and bankrolled my 2-3 years of crypto trading. Those trades in particular were made on E toro. Ended up having around 60% profit creating an approximate 12k crypto bankroll spread across 3 platforms. Unfortunately there is a horrible ending to this story: My girlfriend was mentally unstable and wanted to bring me down. After an incident, I left the house, returned and couldn’t access my email and my phone was gone. We’ll, there went my 2FA for all 3 platforms with over 10k after thousands of trades on each. To make it a real shitty situation truly was that my ID was expired, and I didn’t have a birth verticals or SS card. To make matters worse I had to leave the next day for Los Angeles from my home in NJ so I couldn’t renew any of these things. Long and painful story short, I kept an eye on ny holdings, all 12 coins, and had to watch, helplessly, while everything ripped from September through November. When I was reading before I got screwed I watched everyday so I would not in a million years have missed the peaks bad I not lost access. My etoro account alone only had Btc and eth but at the peak was worth 8-9k; they emailed me December or last year when crypto bottomed out and btc was at 16k. After making sure I kept good standing with etoro via email regarding my sccount, they told me since I had been inactive for a year the account had to be closed. So they sent me 1350, but why didn’t they offer to close my account since I lost access when it held well over 8k in coin? Coincidence? I doubt it. Another one of my 12 coins was Decentraland or MANA. I bought around $400 at .55-60cent s per coin. Around ten days after arriving at my friends in LA I had to watch it rise to well over $8 per coin. And the ride and fall lasted a wk or two so whether I caught the leak or not I missed out on a few thousand on that one alone. I think It was worth $40 when Coinbase finally let me back in after renewing my ID. This happened with 12 coins. I don’t even know why I felt like commenting on this, because in the long run it was an obvious fail. But It also made and kept me motivated to make it back and keep going without fucking up like that ever again.

Sideboard81

I put my fingers in my ear and shout LA LA LA until it's over

degeneratelunatic

That's from the *LA Times* article that someone else posted, not the *Blockworks* article in the original link. And please, save your BoTh SiDeS crap for one of the subs that's been permeated by never-was-been douchey tech bros looking to treat the markets like their own personal casinos who of course have a hard-on for the likes of Bob Latta and Marc Molinaro. Oh wait... I'll let myself out.

Bandit_Quick

Maybe in Hawaii. Almost lunch time in LA.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

simplicity92

BTC has died for 69429 times already. For whats worth, everytime news report and people fug, its the sign to buy and stacked up our crypto. I always use this as a signal. But hey OP. Nice digging LA TIMES. Hope they feel bad and embarassed now

hi-imBen

LA times should not feel silly. 2021-2022 was an even bigger crash which has not recovered and BTC is still down *over* 50% from those highs. Crypto is *still* gambling, and the price movement and the sentiment of people in this sub reflect that. No one is buying groceries with crypto... it still isn't effective as an actual currency.

road22

The LA Times and NY Times should only be used for Pee Pads in training dogs.

SammyCraigar

I've got my 2 that LA gifted me. BRICS to the moon, I'm ready.

Electrical-Lead5993

The LA Times hasn’t been a real useful paper in decades - it’s more of a gossip rag

Intelligent_Page2732

The LA Times redaction is in shambles right now.

jdickstein

A major news radio station in LA now lists the cost of BTC, ETH and Doge next to the DOW and S&P. At least they did the other day. That was surprising to hear, especially since it’s a conservative leaning station. So maybe we are headed in the direction of it being normalized where these numbers will go up hard. Maybe the next bull run. It would surprise me given how hard crypto burned so many people so very recently with FTX and Celsius. But it would be great.

Ninja_Vagabond

I see them around LA in some pretty sketchy spots. Gas stations mostly. I always wonder the point. It seems like an antiquated way to buy BTC.

AcademicTortoise

I’ve seen in my local car wash and grocery store in the LA area

PM_ME_UR_DICK_GURLZ

I hold a y00ts, and for me, it mostly regarding networking and exclusive events. For example in here, there’s various events you can go to, as shown in here, [De[events].](https://lu.ma/delabs)it’s basically a networking club, like SoHo House. Is it worth it? Well, I like meeting new people and socializing, so yes. Getting access to nightclub, bars meetup, from NYC to LA is worth it. Same reason why those billionaire club are expensive to enter because of the networking opportunity you’ll get. Same with y00ts and DeGods, I met a fair amount of people through their IRL social meetup that now become business partners.

PM_ME_UR_DICK_GURLZ

Yeah. A couple of basketball game with front row seat, some bar meetup in LA, a holder only nightclub party in NYC, the list go on. Really worth it if you value networking and making new friend with those who have the same interest as you

mimbled

"If New York or LA collapses the rest of the world follows suit." Fuck off. They truly think they're the center of the world.

amicablegradient

"What would you do if you were an evil dictator?" "I would just shred everybody's shit down and say it was an attack from another country. If New York or LA goes down, the world goes down with them. Only 3% of your money is real the rest of it is a digital number. We saw it with the banks collapsing, but the payout is 250 grand. Your money is insured but you could have a billion dollars in that bank and your only paid out 250 grand. Where the fuck did it go? All you need to say is if someone goes in and tries to order postmates on their phone. Just say, oh your cards not working your cards been declined. Everyones cards get declined at the same fucking time and people are going to cannabalise themselves within a week. And just say we don't know who's doing it but this is an outside attack. All it takes is, because everything is so digital now, like you mentioned in Canada people who donated to these guys are getting their bank account shut off. Imagine if that happened to an entire major city. It would be anarchy." tldr; If I wanted to be an 'evil' dictator I would attack the money supply by crashing visa / bank cards. Hopefully this would domino into anarchy on the streets of major cities and several banks collapsing, wiping out billions of their clients deposits in the process.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

Soil_Electronic

This man knows what’s up imagine Moon billboards on highways in LA/New york and other cities big ass advertisements oh man those were the days! haha

acajic

I don’t think the comparison is valid. Even if 0 people use planes, the first one that decided to be a freak and use it could reap massive economic rewards as the only person in the world able to go from from LA to Rome in less than 24h. With bitcoin, the utility in joining the network is: “Whom and what can I pay using btc? Who will accept this as a form of payment?” This is why the price of bitcoin is expected to correlate with the answer to this question. And the ppl in this sub are essentially betting on the optimistic answer that is “you will be able to pay anyone for anything with bitcoin.” This is not true today, that’s why the price is 30k and not 1m.

elysiansaurus

Not really, hype is the reason they do it. Sure the crypto dot com arena in LA sounds cool, but nobody really cares.

OneCylinderPower

no. at public places in LA libraries for example they refuse cash i.e legal tender. they do this to stop the homeless from having access. the homeless have cash but no address no digital cash etc .

Duomax81

I’m confused. So LA and San Francisco (which are in a blue state) are in better shape socially and economically than Miami and Orlando (which are in a red state)? Just asking based off the logic you’re providing. It’s not always party and it’s not always people. There are great people of all levels of government (city, county, state, federal) that have a D or an R next to their names and there are garbage people in the same positions that just vote based on what the D or R tell them to vote.

chuck_portis

"performs well and fast" That's like saying a road you use in Alaska is faster than the 405 highway in LA. It's fast because no one is using it.

lordofming-rises

Selon que vous serez puissant ou misérable Les jugements de cour vous rendront blanc ou noir. LA FONTAINE

GStarRaww

Going LA for a friends wedding early November, I'm a groomsmen

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

pbjclimbing

> rich This number is hugely different between what someone making $150k in LA and someone living in Sri Lanka consider being “rich”

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

jadequarter

gg LA

COVID19MurderHornet

[https://na-st01.ext.exlibrisgroup.com/01AUL\_INST/storage/alma/3F/80/56/FA/B5/BE/85/C0/E1/B2/8A/2D/38/35/35/04/Softwar\_A%20Novel%20Theory%20on%20Power%20Projection.pdf?Expires=1690512365&Signature=bOS\~zbOF3U-bG6Db8TK8oxCvi4tlIXvHaXgtrmv7RMBUXqfpoEzvhipEAuAxGOwgDlBrP\~bkmq0zH3tTNuiqnxJhyKQYMgO9Ce\~T3A-dXuXJtiQzxQjC9Bjd71F3jGxEQ0OH6xuey3fjNxoOOyjstKlJ2k-pMxT\~EMNM2KcaCxIK0nXC-HP97wmpEef8w2myUs0nsyoenf6NUorxDny7pEFQc3LG9x0EdGyjZONL6UFES1DxIhF\~D7XsgtuaVmNrEgFapnyZWHUei\~yi\~J6YAQFFxdtkWKb52i\~RBAqNkYyOhRdf2TR\~tJVDhOuA3UDbtS0mfCQAeTQcq2WeKMA\~LA\_\_&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJ72OZCZ36VGVASIA](https://na-st01.ext.exlibrisgroup.com/01AUL_INST/storage/alma/3F/80/56/FA/B5/BE/85/C0/E1/B2/8A/2D/38/35/35/04/Softwar_A%20Novel%20Theory%20on%20Power%20Projection.pdf?Expires=1690512365&Signature=bOS~zbOF3U-bG6Db8TK8oxCvi4tlIXvHaXgtrmv7RMBUXqfpoEzvhipEAuAxGOwgDlBrP~bkmq0zH3tTNuiqnxJhyKQYMgO9Ce~T3A-dXuXJtiQzxQjC9Bjd71F3jGxEQ0OH6xuey3fjNxoOOyjstKlJ2k-pMxT~EMNM2KcaCxIK0nXC-HP97wmpEef8w2myUs0nsyoenf6NUorxDny7pEFQc3LG9x0EdGyjZONL6UFES1DxIhF~D7XsgtuaVmNrEgFapnyZWHUei~yi~J6YAQFFxdtkWKb52i~RBAqNkYyOhRdf2TR~tJVDhOuA3UDbtS0mfCQAeTQcq2WeKMA~LA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJ72OZCZ36VGVASIA)

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > >