Restaurant Criterion – Public Domain

Life in the United States has never been better — if your personal fortune stretches well into the thousands of millions.

Our new year has dawned with 813 Americans cavorting in billionaire land. These deep pockets ended 2024, notes an Institute for Policy Studies analysis, with a combined wealth over $6.7 trillion. They averaged over $8.2 billion each.

Need some perspective on that $8.2 billion? The typical American worker, according to the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor stats, would have to work over 136,000 years to earn that much.

Billionaires, of course, don’t have to actually do any labor to collect their billions. They just let their money do the heavy lifting.

That money, if invested in enterprises that provide us with useful goods and services, can add real value to an economy. But these days our billionaires and their billions don’t have to produce anything of value to climb up the wealth ladder. They can make big bucks manufacturing — at a heavy environmental cost — a product that has no real-life value whatsoever.

Welcome to the world of cryptocurrency.

Crypto emerged amid the turmoil of the Great Recession, an economic catastrophe that began late in 2007 with the bursting of a housing bubble that U.S. financial institutions had pumped up with subprime mortgages and assorted other exotic financing schemes.

Crypto’s early aficionados, notes the British economist Michael Roberts, claimed that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin would eliminate “the need for financial intermediaries like banks.” Cryptocurrencies existed only electronically, as elaborate computer code that takes huge amounts of energy to “mine.” No government guarantees backed their value, and no crypto champs sought those guarantees.

Within this frame, crypto values spent a dozen years bouncing mostly upward. By mid-2024, the crypto world had turned into a speculative colossus worth some $2.5 trillion. But crypto’s biggest players were doing little celebrating. The industry seemed to be losing its big-time momentum.

Just two years before, a spectacular crypto crash had cost the sector’s founders and investors a combined $116 billion. By the end of 2023, some 20 nations had bannedbanks from dealing with crypto exchanges, and critics were blasting the crypto industry for pumping ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere “to solve complex mathematical problems that have no productive purpose.”

Early in 2024, Pew Research polling found the American public exceedingly “skeptical” about cryptocurrency, with almost two-thirds of the nation’s adults having little to no confidence that cryptocurrencies rated as either reliable or safe. Only 19 percent of Americans who had actually invested in crypto, Pew found, deemed themselves “confident” with the industry’s “reliability and safety.”

Last June, one of the nation’s most influential financial market analysts, Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler, gave cause for even more public unease. In congressional testimony, Gensler described the crypto market as a “Wild West” that has investors putting “hard-earned assets at risk in a highly speculative asset class.”

“Many of those investments,” Gensler added, “have disappeared after a crypto platform or service went under due to fraud or mismanagement, leaving investors in line at bankruptcy court.”

In the battle for public opinion, crypto kings realized, they were losing. Their response? Crypto’s big guns moved to lock down as much political help they could buy. They spent last year flooding millions upon millions of dollars into primary and general election races against lawmakers who had dared to support meaningful moves to regulate crypto’s digital highways and byways.

“It’s time to take our country back,” roared one deep-pocketed crypto mover-and-shaker, Tyler Winklevoss. “It’s time for the crypto army to send a message to Washington. That attacking us is political suicide.”

In no time at all, the Lever’s Freddy Brewster notes, this new crypto offensive had lawmakers in Congress, from both sides of the aisle, signaling their openness to minimizing any serious attempts at crypto regulation. The November elections would go on to generate a substantial crypto-friendly majority in the House and a Senate almost as crypto-committed.