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Why Bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme

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Re: Why Bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme

#81

Post by johndevor »

hiq wrote: post #51
icu wrote: post #31

Indeed my first assessment way back when it was 1) Read the Whitepaper 2) Read the Bitcoin Standard Book (and subsequently the Fiat Standard book) 3) Listened to The Saylor Series on YouTube, and 4) Did the MIT Blockchain and Money course. I then re-considered criticism from: 1) Various Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger interviews 2) The Blackpaper by Nassim Taleb, and 3) Various interviews with Peter Schiff. My concl…

It would be more helpful if you could say what changed your mind. From your comment I can't say whether you changed your mind because you learned something in your studies, or because BTC went from <1$ to 10k$+.

Imagine you're Turkish, Venezuelan, Argentinian, etc.

BTC might be your best bet.

Now guess which 1st world countries are next.

Edit: as I think Naval said, crypto is insurance against politicians.

Re: Why Bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme

#82

Post by tarboreus »

fsflover wrote: post #76
tarboreus wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part where you identity is linked to the wallet can be anonymous. The transactions are public, but if your identity is unlinked, that only matters so much.

This is called "pseudonymous", not "anonymous".

I mean, an digital account will always have an identifier. If having a number associated with the wallet makes it only pseudonymous rather than anonymous, then fine, though it seems like a trivial distinction. The upshot is that it can be private, though you need to do things in a certain way.

Re: Why Bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme

#83

Post by horsawlarway »

fsflover wrote: post #78
horsawlarway wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He became a believer because he's now part of the funnel, and it's in his interest to continue promoting it to new users. Full stop.

He became a believer before becoming a part of it.

> I then decided to venture into crypto with money I could completely lose and not worry about, and it really helped my understanding further.

Did he?

Did he really?

As someone who has genuinely used bitcoin for one of the (VERY few) use cases where it's actually useful - buying drugs on a dark market. I don't buy it. You can find a lot more detail on my position here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29331167

I'm not going to type it all out again.

Re: Why Bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme

#84

Post by frankbreetz »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #73
fc373745 wrote: post #33

There was a period of time where bitcoin was almost exclusively used for illegal substances / activity - predominately for drugs (the only time I ever used bitcoin was to buy adderall on silkroad), but also for things like hiring hitmen, weapons, and child pornography. To see cryptocurrency grow to what it is today, especially given the context of what it originally was used for is a bit demoralizing.

> what it originally was used for This "guilt by association" type thinking makes no sense at all. Why would it matter who the earlier adopters of bitcoin were and what they were using it for? This is like saying TOR is bad because most people associate it with those same things (drugs, hitmen, etc.)

It matters because it is basically funding the worldwide crime system, if some bought slaves for 1000s of bitcoin, that is now worth many millions of dollars and guess what? That money is going to be reinvested into a bigger, better and more sophisticated criminal organization.

Crime is a business like anything else, profits get reinvested

Re: Why Bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme

#85

Post by icu »

hiq wrote: post #51
icu wrote: post #31

Indeed my first assessment way back when it was 1) Read the Whitepaper 2) Read the Bitcoin Standard Book (and subsequently the Fiat Standard book) 3) Listened to The Saylor Series on YouTube, and 4) Did the MIT Blockchain and Money course. I then re-considered criticism from: 1) Various Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger interviews 2) The Blackpaper by Nassim Taleb, and 3) Various interviews with Peter Schiff. My concl…

It would be more helpful if you could say what changed your mind. From your comment I can't say whether you changed your mind because you learned something in your studies, or because BTC went from <1$ to 10k$+.

I first "looked" at BTC @ I then looked again at ~$100 and felt that it was too involved with crime for me to be associated in any way with it (I work in Regulated Financial markets and I didn't want to take any career chance I could get accused of money laundering).

At ~$1,000 I actually played with some code in Python to mine BTC but figured I'd need an ASIC rig and didn't bother.

7 December 2020 one of the smartest people I know recommended I read The Bitcoin Standard I think BTC was ~$23,000. I then spent the next year studying it and talking through it with my father (he's a Boomer who favours Real Estate over all other asset classes) as a way to understand it better by discussing it with someone else.

I started buying BTC at about ~$55,000 before the recent crash. I'm fine with the volatility as I have a 10+ year time horizon. I did however start accumulating other cryptos post crash and have been working through portfolio construction based on several themes.

Surprisingly my Boomer father has decided to build his own crypto portfolio through a company based in NYC but the AML KYC hurdles with US based crypto companies (I won't name and shame them) has taken so long that he still hasn't managed to buy anything... which I suppose is a good thing since he missed the recent "crash". However, he's fine with it going to zero (and so am I). I think that unless you're diversified across different asset classes, lived through a total market crash (or two), and can lose the lot, you shouldn't be speculating in crypto.

Re: Why Bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme

#86

Post by icu »

horsawlarway wrote: post #74
hiq wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be more helpful if you could say what changed your mind. From your comment I can't say whether you changed your mind because you learned something in your studies, or because BTC went from <1$ to 10k$+.

> or because BTC went from I can give you a very good guess.

Not really, I don't dwell on it. If anything it was a series of life changes that has nothing to do with crypto that caused me to reassess life in a different way and question and challenge thoughts and decisions I had made in the past. You could just put it down to my personal growth. At that time my friend recommended I read the Bitcoin standard and rather than arrogantly believing I knew better, I read the content as an exercise in humility and curiosity.

Re: Why Bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme

#87

Post by ashwagary »

brightstep wrote: post #22
anovikov wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if crypto is meant to be used as a method of investment, then sorry, nothing which does not generate rent can be a viable method of investment (can sometimes be a method of preserving wealth e.g. gold but even that barely). In this sense, i agree with you. But crypto is also very useful for undermining governments - making them unnecessary. Which is a beneficial thing for all humankind. Whenever government real…

Governments could destroy crypto if they wanted. See China as the most obvious example. A novel technology doesn't stand much of a chance against men with guns.

They can't destroy it, a lot of miners in China continue mining using vpns and proxies.

Re: Why Bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme

#88

Post by icu »

okareaman wrote: post #55
icu wrote: post #31

Indeed my first assessment way back when it was 1) Read the Whitepaper 2) Read the Bitcoin Standard Book (and subsequently the Fiat Standard book) 3) Listened to The Saylor Series on YouTube, and 4) Did the MIT Blockchain and Money course. I then re-considered criticism from: 1) Various Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger interviews 2) The Blackpaper by Nassim Taleb, and 3) Various interviews with Peter Schiff. My concl…

Did you become a believer without evidence (faith) or do you wish to share what changed your mind? Like physicist Richard Feynman said, if you can't explain it simply, then you don't understand it.

I'll try to be brief because there are lots of reasons why I changed my mind:

1) I actually think I understand it now (I could still be wrong) because I studied it.

2) I had a very annoying use case sending money to a company in China and after having a terrible time with AliPay and getting nowhere, when I tried using crypto (not BTC) it was a breeze.

3) The way our financial system is setup has bothered me since 2000 and as a Finance professional one of the biggest problems our clients have is inflation, not CPI or RPI, but the growth of the M2 money supply. I've spent a long time thinking of solutions and the problems with fractional reserve banking and fiat currency. I've seen how money rots in real terms over decades sitting in cash (frankly due to poor investment decisions) and I'm certain that there needs to be a better way to store value in real terms. BTC is a likely contender for an intergenerational store of value. It's obviously not gold... but it could be as useful. Since the market cap of gold is ~10T, I think BTC could at least reach that level of utility.

I have other reasons but I rather not write an essay.

Re: Why Bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme

#89

Post by icu »

horsawlarway wrote: post #75
okareaman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you become a believer without evidence (faith) or do you wish to share what changed your mind? Like physicist Richard Feynman said, if you can't explain it simply, then you don't understand it.

He became a believer because he's now part of the funnel, and it's in his interest to continue promoting it to new users. Full stop.

OP here. Please refer to the study resources I posted above and please go through them.

Yes there is a lot of FUD, FOMO and scammers... but I encourage you to think about cognitive biases and take the time to assess crypto through the lens of a new technology.

Re: Why Bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme

#90

Post by anovikov »

ashwagary wrote: post #87
brightstep wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments could destroy crypto if they wanted. See China as the most obvious example. A novel technology doesn't stand much of a chance against men with guns.

They can't destroy it, a lot of miners in China continue mining using vpns and proxies.

Well, you can't mine using VPN or proxy because you can't conceal multi-megawatt power consumption that it takes. Prohibition of mining is simply about consumption of electricity which suddenly became in short supply.

Crypto is not banned in China and it is not bannable. Mining of course, is.

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