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Bitcoin is a Ponzi

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41–50 of 684 posts

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#41
post #15

Nope. No one is being deceived. A Ponzi scheme pretends to be based on legitimate equities and value and is therefore a fraud. Bitcoin makes no such claim.

Not all of them, some are even advertised as Ponzi schemes.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#43
post #26

I think this is simplistic. It’s viewing Bitcoin through a lens of a traditional Ponzi scheme assuming people that trade their fiat currency for Bitcoin are investing, with a view to one day take profits back into dollars. What if people are seeing discussion of minting a trillion dollar coin, trillions in QE, 25% of all dollars created in the last 12 months…and concluding that fiat currency is in an endgame and they…

If it's not about cashing out then why is the primary hype mechanism talking about the dollar-equivalent value of anything crypto related? Why does it matter if an NFT was sold for $300k worth of ether?

More and more, I'm hearing only the ETH value rather than dollar denomination. Personally, when I bid (or receive bids) on any of my NFTs, I'm only considering the ETH price.

It's a new shift, but I think quite profound.

Edit: If you're referring to mainstream media, the dollar value is all that most would be able to put into context. For those deep in the space, we're thinking about dollar values less and less. My primary benchmark on overall portfolio value is the value denominated in ETH, not USD.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#44
"By that definition, stocks too are ponzis. No. Stocks have an external source of revenue, namely the profit that the company makes by selling its products and services to customers..."

This is a very simplistic view of equities markets and does not explain penny stocks, meme stocks (GME/AMC), TSLA, and other things that seem to escape traditional fundamental analyses.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#45
post #16

Judging by the attitude on HN, cryptocurrency should be worth $0 and written off years ago. Instead it's bigger than ever and the most important people on earth are focusing on it. Somehow it's simultaneously an incredible, useless scam but is so powerful that we must ban it at all costs! HN doesn't know everything, do your own research, use your own logic.

“Do your own research”, the tag line of quacks and kranks everywhere…

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#46

I think this is simplistic. It’s viewing Bitcoin through a lens of a traditional Ponzi scheme assuming people that trade their fiat currency for Bitcoin are investing, with a view to one day take profits back into dollars. What if people are seeing discussion of minting a trillion dollar coin, trillions in QE, 25% of all dollars created in the last 12 months…and concluding that fiat currency is in an endgame and they…

Quantum computing is going to bring this entire house down.

Money without an army is just paper. Or, in this case, imaginary numbers.

There will be no one to cry to when the machines start cracking all the hashes and wipe away the entire ecosystem.

I'd wager the NSA already has this capability, but they won't blow it on something so stupid.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#47
post #26

I think this is simplistic. It’s viewing Bitcoin through a lens of a traditional Ponzi scheme assuming people that trade their fiat currency for Bitcoin are investing, with a view to one day take profits back into dollars. What if people are seeing discussion of minting a trillion dollar coin, trillions in QE, 25% of all dollars created in the last 12 months…and concluding that fiat currency is in an endgame and they…

If it's not about cashing out then why is the primary hype mechanism talking about the dollar-equivalent value of anything crypto related? Why does it matter if an NFT was sold for $300k worth of ether?

Presumably because people are currently most familiar with the price of everything else in dollars.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#48

About two weeks ago a coworker came into my office and told me he bought a cheap motherboard so he could mine bitcoin with his graphics card. Is it theoretically still possible to make a profit with that kind of hardware nowadays? Please someone just tell me. I have no interest to do research into this. I just feel sadness for the crypto-bros.

Bitcoin? No. Not even a little bit. Bitcoin mining has been dominated by ASICs since 2012 or so. Some other cryptocurrencies can still be mined on GPUs, but the profit margins are rather narrow.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#49

I think this is simplistic. It’s viewing Bitcoin through a lens of a traditional Ponzi scheme assuming people that trade their fiat currency for Bitcoin are investing, with a view to one day take profits back into dollars. What if people are seeing discussion of minting a trillion dollar coin, trillions in QE, 25% of all dollars created in the last 12 months…and concluding that fiat currency is in an endgame and they…

I agree with your sentiment, however I wouldn't use Michael Saylor's quotes as strong ground to stand on, he also said BTC can scale to millions of transactions per second which is impossible.

IMO he comes off a grifter who needed to save his company and kept buying loads of BTC to start the "institutions are buying" FOMO.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#50
post #26

I think this is simplistic. It’s viewing Bitcoin through a lens of a traditional Ponzi scheme assuming people that trade their fiat currency for Bitcoin are investing, with a view to one day take profits back into dollars. What if people are seeing discussion of minting a trillion dollar coin, trillions in QE, 25% of all dollars created in the last 12 months…and concluding that fiat currency is in an endgame and they…

If it's not about cashing out then why is the primary hype mechanism talking about the dollar-equivalent value of anything crypto related? Why does it matter if an NFT was sold for $300k worth of ether?

Blame financial news media, things like Fortune magazine's list of new crypto billionaires.

The author of this blog post's claim that 99.99% of people in crypto are only participating because of expectations of future profit is unsourced and a fiction that he has created based on preconceived notions.

Don't participate if you don't want - I like participating in a system that isn't being tracked by agencies especially with news of Treasury actively building out systematic functionality to investigate any bank accounts with transactions exceeding $600

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