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Bitcoin is a Ponzi

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Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#291

Post by Kranar »

minitoar wrote: post #194
Kranar wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average P/E ratio of U.S. stocks is 38, meaning if the value of a stock really is primarily based on its ability to produce an external source of revenue, it would take 38 years for an investor to recoup the cost of a share of a company. When you adjust for 2% inflation, it would take 117 years for someone to recoup the cost. Since that exceeds the lifespan of well over 99% of the population, it must follow that…

You don’t need to completely repay the principal to benefit from that cash flow.

What other ways could you benefit? Imagine that you had no expectation of selling your share for a higher price in the future, then what other way is there to benefit?

You have a shareholder vote, okay but the percentage of shareholders who actually vote is roughly 9%. The only people doing the voting are large institutions, not individuals:

https://www.broadridge.com/proxypulse/reports/2013/second-ed...

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#292

Post by wpietri »

hanniabu wrote: post #181
wpietri wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely not finite. Coinmarketcap.com lists 7048 cryptocurrencies, with 96 of them having nominal values over $1 billion.

OP mispoke and meant the supply is finite.

It's not finite. The supply of cryptocurrencies is effectively infinite. There's almost no barrier to entry. In the closest historical equivalent, the wildcat banking era, at least you had to have state-chartered bank. [1] But what's it take to launch a cryptocurrency these days? Is it anything beyond a tech guy, a marketing guy, and a a credit card with a little room?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#293

Post by bb88 »

G3rn0ti wrote: post #289

In a Ponzi scheme, a fraudulent perpetrator takes your money (and the money of many others), gives some of that to early dropouts but takes the rest for himself . Ponzi schemers profit from lying to you where your money goes. With a decentralized digital asset there is no sole person or company that profits from just lying to you about where your Dollar goes in exchange for digitals. Sure, miners and exchanges make p…

> With a decentralized digital asset there is no sole person or company that profits from just lying to you about where your Dollar goes in exchange for the digitals.

Ponzi schemes don't have to run by single individuals, but perhaps by multi-person organizations like the mafia. The mob was the reason the RICO laws came to be.

And undoubtedly, the mafia organizations would collaborate to break up their crime into regions. Mafia group A would take the West, etc. Since they're a criminal organization, anti-trust laws were meaningless. There wasn't a requirement that the different mob bosses had to compete with each other.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#294

Post by lalaland1125 »

earnesti wrote: post #282
lalaland1125 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fees for Bitcoin are way too high to make sense for citizens in poor authoritarian counties. The average transaction fee during slow periods is about $5 and it jumps to $20 whenever there is load on the network. And the lightning network is a poor solution to this because the LN requires a lot of capital to fund channels, something poor people explicitly don't have. Finally, the fact that Bitcoin proponents have…

Custodial wallets are also one solution to that. I'm not saying that BTC fee problem isnt real, but there also are ways around it.

If you are using custodial wallets, you might as well use USD as your unit of account.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#295

Post by zenbai »

glenvdb wrote: post #117
sentinel wrote: post #24

Another day another “stay away from bitcoin” post on HN

The anti-Bitcoin sentiment on HN is frankly baffling to me. It's one of the most exciting things happening in tech right now, and HN is at best ambivalent and at worst openly hostile to Bitcoin. Why wouldn't the tech crowd be excited about digital native money which is perfect for the Internet? Look at what's happening around the ecosystem with the Lightning Network, Impervious.AI, RGB etc. https://rgb-org.github.io/…

People just trying to justify to themselves why they didn't buy bitcoin at $100.

Looking at the comments here it's almost like a political debate where they keep trying to come up with justifications.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#296

Post by anonporridge »

qaq wrote: post #89
glenvdb wrote: post #51

A lot of the "Common Objections" relate to the REASONS people choose to own Bitcoin and how those cases make it a Ponzi. There are many different reasons to own Bitcoin, however the author seems to only view it through the lens of someone living in a wealthy and developed country with financial stability. The properties of it being difficult/impossible to confiscate and its privacy make it valuable in oppressive regi…

Generally people participating in a Ponzi scheme do not view it as such. The tactics deployed by truly oppressive regimes make anything easy to confiscate including bitcoin.

True, sufficiently oppressive regimes can confiscate bitcoin in a lot of situations.

However, as soon as they start doing that to the first few people, what's going to stop everyone else from instantly sending their bitcoin to family and friends across the border for safe keeping?

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#297

Post by esosac »

cemerick wrote: post #268
rabuse wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Venezuela

Perfect example, thank you. Given the typical wage in Venezuela of late, someone looking to exfiltrate their "wealth" there would be looking at working weeks if not months to afford a single typical BTC transaction fee. Again, these proposed use cases are absolute fantasies.

i don't think you know what the typical wage in venezuela is. i do because i live here. you can watch this video if you want to know (it's not 3$ a month): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br7aSAXcPW4

say i've happened to save 1000$ and i want to leave the country and i don't want the police near the airport to take my money as they're known to do. do you think it would be an absolute fantasy for me to find some way to sell my 1000$ for bitcoin and buy them again somewhere else?

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#298

Post by glenvdb »

curuinor wrote: post #234
glenvdb wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-Bitcoin sentiment on HN is frankly baffling to me. It's one of the most exciting things happening in tech right now, and HN is at best ambivalent and at worst openly hostile to Bitcoin. Why wouldn't the tech crowd be excited about digital native money which is perfect for the Internet? Look at what's happening around the ecosystem with the Lightning Network, Impervious.AI, RGB etc. https://rgb-org.github.io/…

it's as old as android with like 5 orders of magnitude less societal impact and worse societal impact when there is societal impact than android. it's eaten a material amount of all gains in renewable energy basically using cycles to heat the world for what ends up being an O(n) database insert.

Database insert? Ok...

You may benefit from reading about why Bitcoin works the way that it does, and why certain tradeoffs were made.

But you don't really care to know, do you?

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#299

Post by HashBasher »

sellyme wrote: post #259
HashBasher wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bitcoin transaction and a bank transaction are very different things. A bitcoin transaction is settled as soon as the block is mined. Without any third parties or trust involved, and no way to reverse the transaction. While a bank transaction could settle in days and always with some trusted third party. Try making a transaction over the lightning network (layer 2 tech of bitcoin), it’s instantly settled and almost…

> no way to reverse the transaction It boggles my mind that people genuinely believe this is a good thing, especially in an ecosystem so rife with scammers. I get that it's rather integral to the primary use cases of bitcoin, but that doesn't mean you have to pretend it's a good thing when marketing the currency to the average joe as a PayPal replacement.

How’s it bad? You have to accept responsibility when making transactions. This is tremendously beneficial for businesses and end users when making peer to peer transactions.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#300

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

tw04 wrote: post #191
jliptzin wrote: post #147

Bitcoin is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The fact that it satisfies a certain set of conditions of a Ponzi scheme does not invalidate the myriad current and future applications of crypto. The social security administration could also be considered a Ponzi scheme, but it still provides tremendous value to a lot of people.

>The social security administration could also be considered a Ponzi scheme, but it still provides tremendous value to a lot of people. The Social Security Administration is entirely solvent by itself. The only "ponzi scheme" comes from congress using it like a piggy bank. And despite all that, SSA is backed by the US government. Bitcoin is backed by... nothing. So it's basically the equivalent of the zimbabwe dollar…

Bitcoin is backed by the same thing that backs any currency: public's trust in it, expressed via a price achieved via a market consensus.
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