Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme • Hacker News Board

Re: Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme

#261

Post by Proven » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 12:33 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #179

throwaway4good wrote: post #84

The full tweet is actually easier to read: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1382446478539550727 WHAT WE WANT CRYPTO & CURRENCY FOR: 1) Currency w/o a government 2) Stable/reliable for contracts 3) Inflation indexed store of value -- basket of items representative for me. 4) Rapid transactions Can we do it? #BTC failed to be currency, open-Ponzi speculative game. A currency must earn interest: currencies weren't bor…

Economically it's much more like gold than a ponzi scheme: Gold: Asset that goes up and down in price according to demand. No central body controlling it. Some utility as jewelry though we could get by without that. Massive dollar and environmental cost from mining the stuff. Ponzi scheme: Fraud where insiders take money from investors and use it to pay other investors. Collapses and the fraudsters run off or go to j…

> Gold: Asset that goes up and down in price according to demand. No central body controlling it. Some utility as jewelry though we could get by without that. Massive dollar and environmental cost from mining the stuff.

Wrong.

Cost of everything is included in the marginal cost of gold. And gold is still fairly inexpensive.

Re: Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme

#262

Post by lai-yin » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 12:34 PM UTC

vmurthy wrote: post #182

jacquesm wrote: post #169

So, now we know Nassim Taleb missed the crypto boat. As did I and many others. Because if he didn't he wouldn't have posted this. And what nonsense. "A currency must earn interest" It's perfectly possible to lend your bitcoins to someone and generate a return on it, that's what contracts are for and has nothing to do with the currency itself. Coming soon: one NT's own crypto coin.

Um , Taleb was a supporter of BTC a couple of years ago [0] and has owned BTC and is now selling it [1]. I think what he did falls in the category of "When facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" [0] https://news.bitcoin.com/black-swan-author-pulls-a-180-nassi... [1] https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1360276917992230919

Taleb dumped bitcoin because he couldn't stand seeing its community almost unanimously oppose the COVID lockdowns, while he was taking his precautionary principle to the extreme. You could see the divergence playing out on Twitter for months before Taleb actually came out against bitcoin. The only fact that changed about bitcoin during that time period was new all time highs and institutional adoption.

Re: Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme

#263

Post by pmurt7 » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 12:35 PM UTC

Bitcoin may be a speculative ponzi scheme and Nassim Taleb may be a fraud too.

Re: Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme

#264

Post by iso1631 » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 12:37 PM UTC

petre wrote: post #120

dmichulke wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold maybe. But gold is not a currency either, so hmmm. In all earnest, I wonder when the mainstream will realize that in a digital world the store of value and a currency can be different because they are easily interchangeable. Just like bonds or gold for long term investment (store of value) and dollar (currency).

Good luck transporting and securing larger quantities of gold and also exchanging it for money. One basically has to declare any quantity in excess of six ounces / 170 grams of gold because it exceeds 10k US dollars / euros.

If you carry your bitcoin wallet with you do you need to declare that?

Re: Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme

#265

Post by iso1631 » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 12:38 PM UTC

rvz wrote: post #51

sebmellen wrote: post #14

What's more concerning to me is the cryptocurrency market as a whole. Perhaps there is an argument to Bitcoin being a kind of "digital gold" even if it is all but useless as a currency. But events like Dogecoin hitting a $50B market cap are very unsettling to me. I used to take part in "Dogecoin Socks for the Homeless" events. It was wonderful, everyone was trying to make something good out of what we all knew to be…

'Investing' at an all time high, is going to upset lots of late comers. Signalling a great big crash, waiting to happen.

I've been saying that for years

Re: Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme

#266

Post by roenxi » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 12:39 PM UTC

kolinko wrote: post #154

roenxi wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think most people would accept a shiny rock as anything special. Gold isn't being treated all that differently to the other period 6 or 11 elements. Although it does sometimes get randomly good tax treatment due to its history which keeps it entrenched as the first choice for a monetary metal. But fundamentally it is being sold at cost to mine + a margin, same as everything else. My memory is anything with…

Alternative is that the price would drop far below $50k, mines would shut down and people would just trade gold that is already available on the market. Just because something is expensive to produce doesn’t mean that it’s worth that much.

> Just because something is expensive to produce doesn’t mean that it’s worth that much.

Well ... it kinda does? If a commodity cannot be produced for less than $X, then the price of that commodity is not going to be that far below $X. The price can vary away to anywhere you like to signal for producers to open and close in the short term, but the equilibrium price point is ~= cost of production and the market will trend in that direction.

I'm going off one article [0] but there is enough gold to make a 28m x 28m x 28m cube. That isn't a lot of gold when compared to the 8 billion humans in the world and the amount of metal we go through (of iron, aluminium, copper, etc). Unless something really novel happens in the mining space, the price is never going to be low enough that an ordinary person can have a big block of gold. It will stabilise on the cost to mine pretty quickly.

There are other metals that are just as good as gold (like platinum) that get less press but are similarly priced.

[0] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-gold-has-been-found-world

Re: Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme

#267

Post by commandlinefan » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 12:49 PM UTC

kolinko wrote: post #154

roenxi wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think most people would accept a shiny rock as anything special. Gold isn't being treated all that differently to the other period 6 or 11 elements. Although it does sometimes get randomly good tax treatment due to its history which keeps it entrenched as the first choice for a monetary metal. But fundamentally it is being sold at cost to mine + a margin, same as everything else. My memory is anything with…

Alternative is that the price would drop far below $50k, mines would shut down and people would just trade gold that is already available on the market. Just because something is expensive to produce doesn’t mean that it’s worth that much.

Fun fact: all the gold ever mined on earth could be contained in about three Olympic-sized swimming pools (https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2010/11/19/how-ma...)

Re: Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme

#268

Post by DonHopkins » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 12:50 PM UTC

lai-yin wrote: post #262

vmurthy wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um , Taleb was a supporter of BTC a couple of years ago [0] and has owned BTC and is now selling it [1]. I think what he did falls in the category of "When facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" [0] https://news.bitcoin.com/black-swan-author-pulls-a-180-nassi... [1] https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1360276917992230919

Taleb dumped bitcoin because he couldn't stand seeing its community almost unanimously oppose the COVID lockdowns, while he was taking his precautionary principle to the extreme. You could see the divergence playing out on Twitter for months before Taleb actually came out against bitcoin. The only fact that changed about bitcoin during that time period was new all time highs and institutional adoption.

>"seeing its community almost unanimously oppose the COVID lockdowns"

Say what?!? Is there some coverage of this, or do I need to read millions to tweets?

Re: Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme

#269

Post by iambateman » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 12:52 PM UTC

pyrale wrote: post #259

tim333 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economically it's much more like gold than a ponzi scheme: Gold: Asset that goes up and down in price according to demand. No central body controlling it. Some utility as jewelry though we could get by without that. Massive dollar and environmental cost from mining the stuff. Ponzi scheme: Fraud where insiders take money from investors and use it to pay other investors. Collapses and the fraudsters run off or go to j…

Gold is stable in isolation. If you bury gold in your backyard, and dig it up 20 years later, you will still have the exact same amount of gold. The exchange rate between gold and other things won't change that. On the other hand, for btc to keep value, you need people to mine it from to the moment you buy it to the moment you sell it. This has a cost, which is currently paid by newcomers. But if btc becomes stable (…

Do you have a sense of what that depreciation factor is?

If it’s nearly equivalent to overall population growth, it may not matter.

(For what it’s worth, I’m with you for the most part. Just curious. I’ve been short-term wrong on BTC since $102 and I’m trying to figure out if I’m long-term wrong as well.)

Re: Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme

#270

Post by PKop » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 12:53 PM UTC

sebmellen wrote: post #62

entropic88 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last peak was pretty much 100% retail investors like your disc golf gang. The amount of institutional investment this round offer legitimacy and absolute scale of potential that can't be overlooked by anyone that's been paying attention. Honestly, for the amount of forward thinking technologists that call this nook of the internet home, there is a ridiculous blind spot for cryptocurrency. It's actually ridiculous to…

I have been around in the crypto space for a significant amount of time (think $700 BTC) and have started two startups which use blockchain tech to a significant degree. But I am very disappointed in BTC and ETH. BTC did not become “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” and we haven’t seen the explosion of uses-cases I hoped to see from ETH (like tokenization and trading of real-world assets). There’s a ton of frot…

>BTC did not become “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,”

I understand that people are disappointed by this thus seeing the idea of BTC as a whole as a "failure", but given the fundamental properties of the system (finite supply, distributed network) it was never possible for BTC to become a currency used widely in everyday high volume transactions. Impossible.

Hal Finney even recognized this in early discussions predicting BTC wouldn't be used in high volume but more likely as a reserve asset, which BTC can absolutely be. Functioning as a digital gold, despite people's aversion or annoyance at this concept. Acting in concert w/ other payment methods or fiat currencies used for payments, taxes, commerce, transactions. A store of value to complement inevitable debasement or dilution of uncapped supplied fiat.