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

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

#341

Post by acjohnson55 »

arcticbull wrote: post #86
dmitriid wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hoped to see from ETH (like tokenization and trading of real-world assets) For ETH to trade real-world assets it needs everything else that the real world already provides: laws, courts, verification systems. Hell, it actually needs that even for digital systems.

Correct. Blockchain is only able to extend its guarantees to concepts wholly encapsulated by the blockchain. That's the reason only "currencies" have been successful thus far. The boundary between the blockchain and the real world is not a surmountable one - not with the guarantees of the blockchain anyways. And once you get rid of the guarantees it's just a slow, inefficient database. This is why, try as people migh…

I think this is not quite true. You can represent real world events and data with oracles. This is being now through Chainlink for things like security price data. Of course, it's probably not so simple to keep oracles in sync with increasingly niche real world data.

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

#342

Post by christiansakai »

arcticbull wrote: post #99
christiansakai wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course! How else we gonna get rich?

Well you could build a business. That's a postive-sum investment. I hear there's even a seed stage startup accelerator that can help fund you. Something about combinators, I don't know.

Okay, I mean "how do we get rich by non honest means"

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

#343

Post by tom_mellior »

sub7 wrote: post #338
tom_mellior wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many many people have already gotten out, with things ending brilliantly for them. Out of being smarter? No, through pure dumb luck. But this notion that "the average person who holds forever can't win, ergo nobody can win" doesn't make your analysis look particularly insightful.

This isn't analysis, it's opinion. But thanks for adding to it in a meaningful way. The people who get out in time will be a tiny fraction of those that get fucked. And to date, exponentially more people have gotten fucked than have had brilliant endings.

> And to date, exponentially more people have gotten fucked than have had brilliant endings.

If you know of a good source on this, I would be interested. I don't mean this as a challenge, I'm genuinely interested if there are many people who managed to buy at a local maximum and were forced to sell much lower. Even people who bought at $20,000 in late 2017 are now up 3x if they managed to hold.

Also, what the actual ownership distribution of Bitcoin is. Is it 90% mom-and-pop investors who gambled their life savings, or is it 90% hedge funds?

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

#345

Post by saalweachter »

pyrale wrote: post #292
saalweachter wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that Ponzi schemes inherently have a small group propagating the fraud while presenting the illusion of a real business, so describing Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme may be technically inaccurate. If I understand the tweets correctly, Taleb, et al, are basically saying that the mining pool functions as the insiders in a Ponzi scheme, by outcome if not intent. The argument is that a Ponzi sc…

> I'm sympathetic to the argument that Ponzi schemes inherently have a small group propagating the fraud The existence of a group of insiders runing the scheme is really a detail when it comes to understanding how the market works. If it works like a ponzi scheme, does it really make a difference for the victims whether or not some people get arrested?

There's at least three ways you could ask the question.

There's ontologically, in the manner of pedants, where you're really asking "in this defined ontology of financial phenomena, schemes and frauds, where does Bitcoin fit in?"

There's descriptively, where you are asking if it is useful to model or think of Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme, regardless of whether it is a fully accurate categorization.

And there's rhetorically, where you are really just using "Ponzi scheme" as a concise way to tell people, "Don't invest in it, people are trying to take advantage of you."

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

#346

Post by hudon »

Just to counter the knee jerk “but it’s actually digital gold!” reaction of Bitcoin holders: One big reason Bitcoin can’t be “digital gold” is because humans don’t control the natural supply of gold. Humans, however, control the supply of Bitcoin. The “21 million limit” is just a meme that’s currently implemented in the code that the network has consensus on, but that limit can change if the influencers in the space see fit to it and the herd follows along.

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

#347

Post by [deleted] »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #333
Retric wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re misunderstanding what a buyback does, it returns value to shareholders. If you own X% of a company and it buys back 20% of it’s shares, congratulations you now own 1.25X% of the company. If you don’t want 1.25% of the company sell 1/5th and it’s equivalent to a dividend. Alternatively, if it does this for long enough without you selling then you end up owning 100% of the company and the next buyback is…

Think about what you wrote more and then come back later.

[deleted]

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

#348

Post by aazaa »

He claims what "we" want is:

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

Of these points, only (1) or (2) were ever a goals. And Bitcoin has succeeded spectacularly there. (4) is debatable. Read the white paper and the original discussions on Bitcoin Talk. Retrofitting goals on a project after the fact is just dishonest.

And who is this "we" anyway?

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

#349

Post by klyrs »

anonytrary wrote: post #151
klyrs wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the part about fiat where you can carry it in your pocket and exchange it for goods nearly instantaneously, which isn't true of the other three.

You can only transfer what's in your pocket instantaneously when the recipient is right next to you. The real value of cash is that it is able to be nearly anonymous. Venmo and other services break this anonymity. The only thing cash has on crypto is stronger anonymity.

No, bitcoin has transparency and every transaction is publicly visible. Privacy is a myth.

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

#350

Post by splix »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #319
gruez wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Stocks have dividends when was the last time TSLA paid out a dividend?

Not only that but companies keep buying back their own stock to make the price go higher. If this isn’t Ponzi I don’t know what is. The companies realized they don’t even have to wait for an investor to pump the price they can just do it themselves. Spend the money that should have been spent on keeping planes from falling out of the sky on the stock. Genius! Goodhardt’s Law in full effect. >Boeing, which has been st…

Buybacks may be more effective than dividends. If you consider your bought stocks as a source of income, then you get more control and better taxes with buy-back stocks.

With dividends you can't really rely on a future amount, i.e. you can receive more (or less) than you actually need. Also it can come at a different date that you want. Plus creates a tax event event when you maybe don't want to have it. And so on.

So it become more convinient to just have stock which you sell when you want and you sell exact amount as you need to. Also the tax rate on dividends is usually higher, especially if you hold the stock long enough.

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