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Bitcoin is a Ponzi

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Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#591

Post by feanaro »

nuerow wrote: post #562
feanaro wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whereas virtually 100% of all money invested into crypto has been burned by miners. This is pretty easy to model. People like Bitcoin's provable global ledger and this is where the value lies. The value is not burned, it's embedded into this ledger.

> People like Bitcoin's provable global ledger and this is where the value lies. The value is not burned, it's embedded into this ledger. Aren't you just stating that Bitcoin has absolutely no intrinsic value?

What is "intrinsic"? Nothing has intrinsic value.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#592

Post by gunshai »

amalcon wrote: post #570
gunshai wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're so certain short it. The amount of wealth you would gain by being correct is immense. You should be spending every waking moment attempting to predict it. Something about anti btcers I don't get you'll wax how smart you are and how everyone else is dumb. Just put your money where your mouth is.

"Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." -- A. Gary Shilling

You don't say.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#593

Post by derangedHorse »

amarant wrote: post #449
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…

Rarely is it one person doing all the lying in a Ponzi scheme. Commonly they're labeled as multi level marketing, which then encourages more people to lie. And I disagree that bitcoin proponents doesn't claim they make your money with for you: there's a lot of talk about the "deflationary nature" of bitcoin, aka the "magical scheme". Miners haven't burned all the money invested in bitcoin, but I'll admit this particu…

A lot of people compare the Tulip craze to Bitcoin but the differences in the properties of each should make it clear why Bitcoin has a higher chance of maintaining value over time. The qualities that Bitcoin has, have typically been sought after in other high valued commodities.

Things like longevity and (protocol enforced) scarcity are previously things attributed to gold and remains one of the reasons why gold continues to hold value. Tulips on the other hand can easily wither away and its amount can grow exponentially. There are more reasons on why Bitcoin should be valuable in its own right, but many people who can write a lot better than me have written about it.

If you haven’t made up your mind on Bitcoin and still have an open mind to learning what it is, or even if you want more intelligent arguments to critique and debunk, I highly recommend reading The Bitcoin Standard written by Saifedean Ammous.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#594

Post by gunshai »

rank0 wrote: post #513
gunshai wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An entire country is using btc as their currency of exchange. Is it a major economy no but now its your turn to move the goal post.

El Salvador’s recent decision is a Hail Mary attempt at solving a tiny impoverished country’s crippling financial situation. They make their citizens use a government approved wallet where they process transactions off chain. This is the antithesis of what crypto used to stand for. The worlds largest country just banned Bitcoin too. I don’t think either event is indicative of btc’s intrinsic value.

I meant to say it is not a major economy, so thank you for not being pedantic on that point.

But, can you give me a source on how their transactions are being processed off chain. I know that they use a government backed wallet. It was my understanding that any transactions handled in this way eventually have to be settled back into the main chain.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#595

Post by mftb »

G3rn0ti wrote: post #555
mftb wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Goods and services provided by humans have no intrinsic value but become precious simply there being demand by other humans. This incorrect. I can purchase a home or food from humans and they have intrinsic value. If whatever market they were purchased on collapses, I simply live in the home and eat the food to realize their value, no further transacting required. Similarly with services I can pay for someone to bu…

> If whatever market they were purchased on collapses, I simply live in the home and eat the food to realize their value If the market for food „collapses“ that means there is too much of it. Its value has gone down because your fellow humans do not want to buy any food from you anymore. Now, you can eat your own food, yes, but if you hoarded too much of it you will have to let the remainders rot away. In this extrem…

I am in agreement with you precisely because I wasn't trying to contradict the original comment. I did want to correct their statement about intrinsic value because others will accept it as fact without understanding that things can be evaluated in multiple value systems at once, and their intrinsic value can be more or less independent of their market value.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#596

Post by cemerick »

fay59 wrote: post #549
cemerick wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unfortunately quite factual that the vast majority of refugees worldwide functionally have no assets and often end up in debt at the end of their journey from home. Anecdotes of relative handfuls of affluent migrants are hardly compelling vis a vis the utility of e.g. BTC, especially given the lofty claims being made.

Outside of whether it would be feasible to move wealth to bitcoin before fleeing, discounting the existence of people who weren't miserable before they had to flee their decent existence due to war is insulting. You insinuated that all people who flee their country were resourceless before their displacement. Confronted with the fact that they aren't, you thought to save your point by declaring them "anecdotal". Not…

I didn't discount anyone's existence, or make any insinuation about "all people" of any description. The claim upthread was that BTC is useful when exfiltrating wealth when emigrating; for that to be a compelling and common use case for BTC, said wealth would need to be common. My pointing out trivially verifiable facts re: the typical (a.k.a. statistically predominant) financial disposition of refugees might not put that claim in a good light, but it's not pejorative or dismissive whatsoever of anyone or their experiences.

IMO, the not-classy thing is cryptocurrency advocates constantly trying to leverage the plight of refugees, the unbanked, and those living in locales with constrained economic freedom to underwrite the reputation of a set of technologies that are overwhelmingly used as pernicious speculative vehicles.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#597

Post by pixelgeek »

joe_the_user wrote: post #428
scottyp21 wrote: post #326

> Nevertheless, investing in gold at the current price seems unwise, since its price is many times its "natural" price as commodity and so it is more likely to go down than up. 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 millen…

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? What price would tulips have had to have attained for them to be proved "not a mania"? [1] "At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled artisan." Which is to…

Its useful to read the Social Mania & Legacy section [1] as a more modern look at 'Tulip Mania' tends to see the "historical" record of it as a post-event reaction. A recent book actually suggest that the entire thing might be BS [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#Social_mania_and_l...

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/431666.Tulipmania

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#598

Post by piva00 »

gunshai wrote: post #510
bb88 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. They instead take your money, buy coal, and burn it. Nothing is left. Interesting, I never thought of it that way, and it makes sense. Since money is not created or destroyed the balance sheet on inflows and outflows of BTC to dollars must be zero at all times. And some x% (which is variable) of it is transferred to miners which is the so-called "transaction" cost. I guess there must be a point at which the bub…

If you're so certain short it. The amount of wealth you would gain by being correct is immense. You should be spending every waking moment attempting to predict it. Something about anti btcers I don't get you'll wax how smart you are and how everyone else is dumb. Just put your money where your mouth is.

> Something about anti btcers I don't get you'll wax how smart you are and how everyone else is dumb. Just put your money where your mouth is.

I don't have infinite money to keep propping up my short positions until this thing collapses. That's the reason, not because I don't want to put my money where my mouth is, it's because I don't have enough money to see the pay off.

It's not that hard of a concept to grasp, I believe...

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#599

Post by piva00 »

feanaro wrote: post #541
graeme wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They do not pretend making your money work for you by some magical scheme. No. They instead take your money, buy coal, and burn it. Nothing is left. As you say, Ponzi schemers take money for themselves and keep it. Most of what Madoff stole was recovered, for instance. Whereas virtually 100% of all money invested into crypto has been burned by miners. This is pretty easy to model. So there’s nothing left to recover…

> Whereas virtually 100% of all money invested into crypto has been burned by miners. This is pretty easy to model. People like Bitcoin's provable global ledger and this is where the value lies. The value is not burned, it's embedded into this ledger.

> People like Bitcoin's provable global ledger and this is where the value lies.

What real world value has this brought?

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#600

Post by pixelgeek »

It is an interesting read and I want to go back and read it a bit more carefully (now that the server is finally back up) but one factor in a ponzi scheme is that there is ultimately a limit on suggestible investors. This isn't part of the definition of a scheme but seems to be an obvious limitation of them. Seems the smart operator plans for that drop in ability to pay out. Most long-term MLMs work out this revenue drop as well.

There is an upper cap to the ability to generate bitcoins [1] which acts as a similar cap on the long-term viability of the system.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28780925

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