Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoins: The Second Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History

garynorth.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 306 posts

Re: Bitcoins: The Second Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History

#241

Post by ceejayoz »

mschuster91 wrote: post #217
ceejayoz wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's blazing fast. Ten minutes and someone deep in African desert can wire money to a researcher on one of those scientific outposts. Try to do that with a bank. Square Cash is faster than that, and the money on your debit card is significantly easier to spend than Bitcoin.

Well, but the problem is: when is the money actually on your bank account? With BTC, as soon as the network mines a block with your transaction. With anything involving multiple banks or even cross-continent transfers, the delay will be >1 day minimum.

In my experience, debit/credit card refunds show up at my bank essentially instantly - my available balance reflects it within a minute the vast majority of the time.

Re: Bitcoins: The Second Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History

#242

Post by NikolaTesla »

gnaritas wrote: post #203
dictum wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the intrinsic value of Bitcoin, aside from its scarcity?

Bitcoin is a fiat currency.

If mining additional Bitcoins at present is not economically viable than Bitcoins are not (currently) a fiat currency. The cost for the fed to increase the money supply is $0, the cost to produce a Bitcoin is equal to the cost of the hardware and electricity to produce it. I'm not sure if the definition would change once the maximum limit of Bitcoins is reached.

Re: Bitcoins: The Second Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History

#243

Post by ceejayoz »

steveplace wrote: post #161

>It will dwarf anything dreamed of by Bernard Madoff. Madoff's fraud was to the tune of >60 billion. Bitcoin's cap is at round 10 billion. So the author expects btc to rise in value by at least 600%

It's gone up 1,000% since October, so that's hardly a wild prediction.

Re: Bitcoins: The Second Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History

#244

Post by dkural »

Perseids wrote: post #151
eigenvalue wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they be invalidated? Why shouldn't the inventor of something useful benefit from the invention?

He/She/They should, but having 4% of the total amount of a currency in the hand of one completely unknown person / organization is quite a threat to its stability. Also I would see a reward of one billion dollar as pretty excessive. And that is only the worth at the current market value .

Excessive based on what metric? Inventing the worlds first successful peer-to-peer crypto-currency? Zuck @ Facebook, and other startups (Square etc.) made their founders far richer. Do you realize how hard it is to build trust in a currency even if you are a government?

Re: Bitcoins: The Second Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History

#245

Post by scotty79 »

Bitcoin is not a Ponzi Scheme because those rely on deception. If you'd set up an enterprise and clearly advertised that gains come from money later entrants contribute (as long as new entrants come) it wouldn't be Ponzi Scheme. Ponzi Scheme promises returns to everybody, and lies about where they come from.

Bitcoin is as open, transparent and honest as anything can be. Everything from the protocol, through the implementation to the all the transactions themselves are public. No one hides the fact that the gains in bitcoin price come from people wanting to buy bitcoins more and more. No one promises that this will always be the case.

Re: Bitcoins: The Second Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History

#246

Post by dredmorbius »

cynicalkane wrote: post #119
jseliger wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money develops out of market exchanges. Money was not used for its own sake initially, but it becomes widely used as money as a result of innumerable transactions within the economy This also doesn't appear to be true: see David Graeber's book Debt: The First Five Thousand Years for his descriptions of how money actually emerges from religious ceremonies and temples, not barter (as most econ books have it) or "market…

I wouldn't trust Graeber, as he is frequently wrong about easily verifiable facts in such a way that it supports his world view. There's no reason to trust a liar when he tries to tell you something you don't know about. My favorite Graeberism is when he describes the founding of Apple: > Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley…

Thanks as well. I've been intrigued by Graeber, though I've also suspected him of an ideological bias. Not that economic orthodoxy doesn't suffer from a similar bias. DeLong's list of howlers is going to get some strong looking at.

Graeber's response to the criticism doesn't instill much confidence in him. Though DeLong setting up a taunt-o-matic is a tad interesting....

Re: Bitcoins: The Second Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History

#247

Post by [deleted] »

cLeEOGPw wrote: post #234
pyalot2 wrote: post #42

> In this sense, Bitcoins is not a Ponzi scheme. It is simply a supermoney scheme. Admits that bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme in his own article. > The money was siphoned off from the beginning. Somebody owned a good percentage of the original digits. Implies that most bitcoins are owned by satoshi nakamoto, without substantiating this claim by any number to quantify the impact. The estimated stash of satoshi is about…

Also: > He made this money out of digits. No, he didn't. He made the protocol, miners made money out of WORK, not digits. Didn't even bother reading further.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoins: The Second Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History

#248

Post by mmaunder »

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #223
pyalot2 wrote: post #42

> In this sense, Bitcoins is not a Ponzi scheme. It is simply a supermoney scheme. Admits that bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme in his own article. > The money was siphoned off from the beginning. Somebody owned a good percentage of the original digits. Implies that most bitcoins are owned by satoshi nakamoto, without substantiating this claim by any number to quantify the impact. The estimated stash of satoshi is about…

WHO is Satoshi? The fact that he owns between 4-9% of all bitcoins that will ever exist... This fact is frankly outrageously frightening. We have no idea who this person or group is. They might end up being the wealthiest person in the world, by a large margin. When I tell someone about Bitcoin for the first time, and that it is developed by some mysterious person who is completely unknown... the reaction without exc…

Agreed. I'm a big BTC supporter in action, not just words. But I have the same issue when introducing someone new to BTC. "The creator is anonymous? WTF!!" It seems to be a need that humans have to put a face to an innovation.

Re: Bitcoins: The Second Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History

#250

Post by tlrobinson »

dictum wrote: post #186
akjetma wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a fiat currency is just a currency without intrinsic value. it's not a derisive term, you'll find it in any introductory economics textbook.

What is the intrinsic value of Bitcoin, aside from its scarcity?

The intrinsic value of bitcoins is as entries in a global distributed ledger.
Post reply on HN