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Preston Byrne pointed out since there is no pyramid, this can’t be called a Ponzi scheme. It deserves a new name, the “Nakamoto scheme”: https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/
"Scheme" implies a unified/central schemer, though. We can already call it a fad, or a mania (a la tulip mania).
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Preston Byrne pointed out since there is no pyramid, this can’t be called a Ponzi scheme. It deserves a new name, the “Nakamoto scheme”: https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/
why not call it a bubble, just like everything else like it that has come before in history? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Ah, the Bloomberg and TechCrunch bottom signals I’m looking for.
A year ago, I was explaining to family why crypto was a thing. This year I'm explaining why it crashed and why it's to be avoided. Also, why blockchain and crypto are not the same thing. There are many who participated in the 2017 speculation that will actively avoid and advise against participation this go around. The bubble popped and it will be many years before we see worthy investments take shape.
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show us some evidence!
What sort of evidence are you looking for? If indeed people were having problems cashing out as you seem to think, this would have been big news. In which case you should be able to find and provide evidence of this occurring. And, if I understand you correctly, you might as well ask for evidence that investors can sell their TSLA stock for cash.
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Down votes, no comment. Par for the course here.
Please don't break the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thanks, I actually had no idea about this one, and nobody ever bothered to point it out to me. I do find it disheartening though that anything against the grain in this forum often results in downvote and no comment. That said, this will be my final mention of the issue and I’ll just eat the negative karma from here rather than self censor (except on the issue as per the guideline).
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Because it's not just a bubble. Bitcoin is, on a technological level, specifically designed to be an inflationary digital asset that primarily benefits the founders. Whatever utility it has as medium of exchange is incidental to its primary purpose which is to enrich the founders.
*deflationary
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Moving money around without an authority to stop you does have value. The question is whether that value is very high at all - in current society, probably not, and in a futuristic society I’d hope we’d develop trust mechanisms that don’t require the expense of total global order to move money/tokens/whatever around.
It’s an open question how the value of the infrastructure for doing this would be determined. Ideally the infrastructure would approach zero in cost and the value would be preserved for the participants in any transaction, not the rent-seeking hodlers.
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The problem is that people adopting Bitcoin activates at least two defensive behavior triggers in other people (1. devaluation of the fiat currencies they are holding, 2. jealousy towards early adopters getting rich for doing nothing). As such, there are few people that are really neutral on cryptocurrencies and you get the kind of scam talk we see in this thread as popular consensus.
In me it triggers loss aversion: I don't want to put my money in a uninsured security that could be stolen or lost at any moment with no recourse.
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In me it triggers loss aversion: I don't want to put my money in a uninsured security that could be stolen or lost at any moment with no recourse.
Is the cash in your wallet insured? If stolen do you have recourse? Now you might tell me you have no cash for this very reason. That’s fair, but probably similar to the amount of money you should allocate.
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What would block chain do for Goldman that a SQL database couldn't?
I’m literally not sure, hence the question. I don’t know much about blockchain other than its sort of an answer to the Byzantine generals problem? It was a legit question.
For one thing, there is no solution to the Byzantine generals problem, this has been proven mathematically.
Cryptocurrencies sidestep it by saying "whoever is the luckiest (aka 'owns more GPUs') gets to decide the truth".
Traditional banks handle the problem by not having Byzantine generals: there is one and only one trusted authority who is compelled by law to keep clean and clear books. If a bank has a Byzantine problem that needs solving, they've already done something illegal.