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Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

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Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#3

Post by soneca »

edit: Weird, I thought I was commenting on another thread, about Nobel laureates criticizing Bitcoin. I saw it on my phone, then opened HN at my notebook to comment. I misread the title and commented here, but now I can't find the correct thread (was it flagged?).

I am growing this idea that Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency that is affected by aggressive price growth) is an anti-fragile indirect multilevel marketing scheme, the "diamond" of the digital era.

It is anti-fragile because it does not have a single point of failure, it is decentralized, its creators are unknown, it is adaptable to several use cases. So each attack on Bitcoin (be it exchange hacking, scams or celebrities' critics) that doesn't kill it, make it stronger.

It is a multilevel marketing scheme because it is mostly a zero-sum game, all earnings of bitcoin owners come from new money entering the game. It is indirect because the ones that are most fervourous advertising and defending bitcoin are holding it, not selling.

I believe it is the diamond of the new era because of some key similarities:

Both BTC and Diamond:

- Its original bump in value come from a marketing campaign (even if with Diamond it was centralized and offline, and with BTC is decentralized and viral)

- Its scarcity is artificially controlled

- Its main use case is black market commerce (for one side of the argument) or money laundry (for the other side).

For BTC owners the good news is that the "diamond bubble" it is still strong decades (centuries?) after its modern boom. The bad news is that Diamond was able to correlate to status, a strong (if subjective) value that is part of humanity since always. BTC only appeal is its value as money, so bubbly reinforcements (up and down) apply.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#8

Post by tomasien »

jstanley wrote: post #2

Filecoin is a huge disappointment to me. IPFS is fantastic technology, but the main developers getting sidetracked with yet another scammy ICO is the last thing we need.

Something like Filecoin is necessary to make IPFS what it could become, I recognize there are huge unsolved problems with it but it's not legitimately so that they can't be solved. It's worth a shot and sophisticated private investors took bets on this with eyes wide open, followed by the public of course which many consider problematic (I don't).

There are complaints about the discounts private investors got etc but at the end of the day I'm glad this is research getting funded and I think calling it a scam is straight up wrong. We'll see I guess.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#9

Post by patrickaljord »

tl;dr conclusion from the article: "Filecoin’s economic feasibility is hard to predict and, given a simple summary of risk related points, the biggest hurdles are probably going to be acceptance from the users. In addition, Filecoin shows certain characteristics of a Ponzi scheme but the trust built by the team members in the past leads us to believe that it is not one. Filecoin’s Whitepaper introduces novel concepts and predecessor projects by the team members which prove their technical capabilities. Hence, it appears that Filecoin is poised to be an outstanding project although it remains to be seen if it will be adopted by the average cloud storage user."
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