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https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon...> https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-pon...
Points 3, 4, & 5 apply similarly to any investments made in commodities (gold, silver, copper). A direct source of revenue for those commodities themselves is not provided: There are no dividends being paid out just because I hold 1 kg of gold in a safe. Instead, the people that want to use that gold for other purposes is what provides revenue.
Point 1 & 2 can similarly be demanded from commodities as well. The only difference being is that the public market is where I can cash out my 1kg of gold to.
> *By that definition, gold too is a ponzi.* No, gold clearly fails to satisfy that definition on two counts.
> First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour.
There is no difference between the expectation of profits & stores of value: They're facets of the same diamond - Value. The pursuit of one is a masked notion of the other & vice versa - Expectations of profit are a consequence of wanting to retain & accumulate resources against the eroding forces of inflation & entropy in general, & a desire for stores of value is of similar expectation that the overall value grows faster than the eroding forces themselves.
> Second, as a commodity, gold HAS a source of revenue besides the investors; namely, the purchases by consumers like jewelers and industry, who take gold out of the market (2/3 of the production) for uses other than re-sale. When one buys 1 oz of gold, one gets a chip of a metal that one can sell to those consumers, and thus obtain some money that does not come from other investors.
Again, as stated above, the gold itself doesn't have inherent value: It's value comes from what can be done with it after being transformed/used for something else.
Similarly, digital services have already been shown to be commodifiable via AWS' EC2 Spot Instances & their fluctuating prices as demand changes.
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/pricing/
The consequence of this logic is that in the long term, such compute can eventually be accessed by *anyone* from *anyone* willing to sell it via public markets. HOWEVER, such a public market was not yet feasible due to the possibility of such computations not actually being done & fraudulently being reported as such. The stopgap between that future is what we have now: Centralized companies selling compute under trust-based assumptions that do currently work, but that present significant problems related to control over said compute.
The technology was not there yet, but it's being launched now.
EVM-based & Turing-complete VMs in general will generally be made more verifiable with the rollout & integrations of ZK (0-knowledge) proving systems into said VMs. When such computations can be verified to have been genuinely computed within 1/2^n (n >= 64) of an error rate, the addition of a public market to make such compute sellable to people that want said compute is the next logical step, to which Ethereum, its L2 solutions (zkSync, Polygon zkEVM, Optimism, Arbitrum, etc.), & all Lx (x > 2) markets that will come in the future, have already & will provide.