While the Superbowl brings football fans together from far and wide, it has the rare opportunity of attracting attention from people who know nothing or could care less about football. Between the new and exciting movie trailers, the ads companies pay millions of dollars to feature during the game and the star-studded half time show, every Super Bowl is sure to attract hundreds of thousands of viewers at the least. The 2022 Super Bowl was no different, with a halftime show featuring Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Mary J. Blige and Eminem, and plenty of new movie trailers that attracted filmgoers. The game was also filled with ads that starred a variety of celebrities, everywhere from Doja Cat to Paul Rudd.
However, the game was also littered with ads for cryptocurrency. Not one but four ads aired during the Super Bowl for crypto currency, with the most prominent being a simple QR code that drifted over the screen with soothing background music. If viewers scanned the code, they were led to a promotional deal that offered them $15 in Bitcoin if they signed up for the cryptocurrency site Coinbase.
The site got so much traffic in such a short amount of time that it promptly crashed. While the memes were great, the feeling the ad and others like it left was not. Cryptocurrency may be the trend, but ultimately, it’s unsustainable and a volatile investment.
Not only does cryptocurrency mining take an immense amount of power to process, but the fluctuation of the marketable value of cryptocurrency makes investing in it a gamble many cannot afford. The energy it takes to run the computers to mine cryptocurrency is astronomical, wasting valuable resources to gather something that isn’t even tangible.
Cryptocurrency is often described as an investment, not an exchange, which in my opinion makes it even sketchier and classist. The market value of cryptocurrency fluctuates frequently and is only a safe investment for those who can afford to gamble their money. For example, Dogecoin shot up 15000% last summer but fell all the way back down within weeks. Disadvantaged communities or individuals often don’t have the luxury to risk putting their money into something so unpredictable, especially when priorities like food, rent or other essentials are involved.
If the service is only accessible to a minute community instead of the many fans gathered to watch the game, there’s no point in airing four ads about how great cryptocurrency is. Cryptocurrency isn’t the future, especially since it puts our environmental and financial future at risk.
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