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So no different than gold?
https://www.usfunds.com/slideshows/the-many-uses-of-gold/ Go to Coinbase and try to figure out how to use Bitcoin to buy something with. All they talk about is Bitcoin as an investment. A currency can’t be an investment as the expectation that it will rise in value undermines the main quality of a currency, which is to maintain a stable value, so it can be used as intermediary.
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…
I got involved in bitcoin after being blackballed from the (US) financial world while for 2-3 months while I was "investigated" in the most dystopianly opaque way possible. One day I lost the ability to transact. A few months later I got it back. Had it not been for good friends who could cover my expenses, I could have easily ended up homeless. And the most shocking part of it all, was that I was merely collateral d…
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How about the stock market? Everyone I know that invested in stocks did so hoping to trade it back later on for more fiat than they paid.
Well the idea that stocks must go up is a kind of scheme in itself. The whole financialization of our economy is based on constant growth. So you could argue that it’s a Ponzi scheme as well. Our children will likely be caught holding the bag.
That's why I see crypto tokenization as an important step towards having another "financial material" to work with. It doesn't commandeer enforcement at a global level, so it doesn't compete with governments on their own terms, but it can help build trust at scale by being designed around the trustless scenario, which reduces reliance on enforcement and bureaucratic methodology in many applications. Crypto projects with a focus on achieving good governance are some of the most promising out there, even as they are hidden in the endless waves of scams.
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…
I got involved in bitcoin after being blackballed from the (US) financial world while for 2-3 months while I was "investigated" in the most dystopianly opaque way possible. One day I lost the ability to transact. A few months later I got it back. Had it not been for good friends who could cover my expenses, I could have easily ended up homeless. And the most shocking part of it all, was that I was merely collateral d…
Well you certainly can't do that with Bitcoin unless your landlord has a similarly anarchocapitalist worldview. You'd have to cash it out at an exchange and pay the individual in question. This choke point would leave you similarly locked out.
This applies to only a fringe minority of the participants in the Ponzi.
More sympathetically, even if this was a real problem that doesn't mean a Ponzi scheme is the way out. It's like saying you got burned in 2001 so decided to invest with Madoff knowing full well he was a Ponzi, but at least he wasn't a tech company.
This is a misconception and a fundamental misunderstanding of gold's primary utility for thousands of years.
While it is true that gold's price reflects a significant premium beyond the "natural" market price, this has been the case for millennia. Since ancient times, most demand for gold has not been for industrial uses or jewelry, but rather as a store of a value. This results in gold having a "monetary premium".
It's also worth mentioning that it is no coincidence that humans happened to chose gold as money. Among all chemical elements, gold has a favorable combination of chemical properties and rarity in the earth's crust that make it a suitable choice for storing value over long periods of time. In fact, nearly all gold mined in human history is still around today. We've been hoarding it since the time of the pharaohs.
I'm sympathetic to crypto skepticism, but I'm afraid many people are missing the forest for the trees. I'm curious for those that still truly believe Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme or a bubble - at what price point and time would you start to consider that you may be tragically wrong?
> bitcoins can be earned and spent, not just bought and sold. That makes no difference for the purpose of this discussion. If you buy a $2000 laptop directly with bitcoin, for financial analysis it is the same as if you had sold the coins for $2000 and bought the laptop with that.
The core of the post seems to be a claim that demand for Bitcoin is a recursion with no base case. But then this passage gets to the base case and just dismisses it as irrelevant -- since it could counterfactually transit through dollars. If you think a state currency is the only logically possible currency, that needs an argument (and an difficult one, given history).
The rest I'd call rhetoric and side issues.
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…
While Bitcoin‘s value might be grossly underestimated
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I find it very manipulative to offhandedly dismiss the utility it provides to people suffering under oppression or unstable financial systems and to compare that to smoking. As the article states, check your financial privilege. And "tiny amount of people"? What's "tiny" here? Hundreds, thousands, millions? Do you know how many people use Bitcoin in this way?
> Do you know how many people use Bitcoin in this way? Do you?
https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adop...
It's very hard to get exact numbers of users, because of how Bitcoin works, but this should give you a good sense of proportions and you could infer numbers of people based on known population sizes for each country
>that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. However,
>there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead,
>the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, while
>the operators take away a large portion of this money.
This seems to perfectly fit financial markets.