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You can't just mint a new BTC on demand -- the hashing takes a fixed amount of time/energy that you have to wait for.

But that doesn't matter, you can borrow one on a defi platform and re-lend it. The exact same "money creation" process that people complain about with "banks" also works for any deposit-taking lending organisation.

But you can mint Tether or USDC on demand and use that to buy BTC.

As long as no one tries to cash it into real money the BTC price goes up and so does the market cap

the fundamental risks of crypto seems to just be a repeat of the fundamental risks of unregulated banking... first as tragedy then as farce eh?

That's an interesting point I hadn't thought about before but it should have been obvious. Crypto is inherently inflationary to the system as a whole, since you're increasing the amount of currency without increasing the number of goods.