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

The thing about them is technically they are not. But - they can be used as schemes. And that's what makes them powerful as schemes - the veneer of credibility that actual bad actors can hide behind. Which taints the good actors.

I agree with everything you say, except the idea that it is zero-sum. It is very nonzero-sum insofar as the bulk of the purported value of the system derived from revaluation and windfall: much of the $158 billion market cap of bitcoin derives not from outright transactions at market value (and thus conversion of assets from one form to another with face-value liquidity) but from revaluation of coins purchased at lower prices or mined out of thin air (or rather electricity). This means that the market has ballooned in value (as do speculative bubbles... not stating outright that this is a bubble, but analogously) and has benefitted all asset-holders super-linearly, but it also puts them all at immense risk of devaluation (which would be sub-proportional). This nonlinearity in the risk profile is a direct result of its nonzero-sumness.

As for it being anti-fragile... meh... that’s to be ascertained. For sure so past it has benefited from volatility, but in the relatively short-term many things do. Only the long term will tell whether it will regress to the mean or not, and only a bunch of ’real’ crashes (massive liquidity events, as opposed to strong fluctuations in value with limited trade volumes) will tell us empirically what that ”long term” timeframe is.

(Yup, finance’s a pain for anybody trying to predict the future.)

True, but I think we all can say with some certainty that "a token intended to be used as currency should not regularly increase or decrease in value by 20% or more in a matter of days or weeks".

Who on earth would actually spend any Bitcoins right now? If you'd bought a Pizza with BTC back in 2010, you could have bought a car (or house?) instead only several years later. This type of volatility makes it totally unsuitable as currency.

yes!

Bikeshedding this some more because HN is for bikeshedding...

I am toying around with the wacky heresy that Karl Marx (not Lenin) was right. Capitalism will evolve into socialism.

It would be a form of socialism we haven't seen yet and that would have been technologically impossible in the past. Capitalism's role is to develop the technology, wealth, and infrastructure to enable it... as Marx said. Tech titans, startuppers, hackers, and VCs are in this view actually communist revolutionaries of a sort.

The new socialism would be fully decentralized, consensus based, anti-fragile, nameless, leaderless, borderless, and viral as hell. It would just take over by viral attrition. Later on historians would be like "wow, we now have a completely new social paradigm."

My read on Marx's original speculative idea was closer to that and quite far from the USSR. The USSR was like the ancient Egyptians deciding to build social media based on this vague wishy-washy futurist idea of what that is but without any of the tools or core innovations. They would have ended up with something that basically didn't work and in no way resembled Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Without the core enabling innovations they would not have been able to even imagine those, let alone build them. The apparatchiks and politburo of the USSR could not have imagined distributed consensus operating at global scale. The tools to even think about that didn't exist. They basically tried to force-fit the goals of socialism using the methods of fascism with predictably awful results.

I also think many capitalists of the Randian/libertarian school will see this as capitalism and not socialism since it will retain capitalist elements or at least entities and institutions that outwardly resemble them and fulfill the same functions. There will still be money, fund raising, capital gains, corporations in some form, etc. That's fine. Names don't matter. It will be nameless and formless.

Edit: I still see Bitcoin as version 0.1 alpha of something much more significant. I am more interested in what version 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0 might look like. I think Ethereum is version 0.5 beta. Version 1.0 will be something that somehow ditches the expensive boat-anchor of proof-of-work, resolves transactions a lot faster, and is way more secure and powerful.

I also do think Bitcoin at the moment is a bubble. Something being a major innovation and a bubble are not mutually exclusive. In fact most major innovations lead to bubbles when they first start climbing their hype/adoption curve.