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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

#351

Post by deschutes »

entropic88 wrote: post #59
Crye wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if we're there yet or not, but I remember last peak I started to here about crypto in my non crypto media feeds, aka comedy podcasts. I just saw my disc golf feeds talk about crypto. I think that's a strong signal.

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…

Crypto is a grift that grew into a scam economy. That's why it's unpopular on this site.

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

#352

Post by newsbinator »

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.

I’m surprised Monero is not more popular.

It’s got the positives of Bitcoin, plus it’s as anonymous as cash: simply buying a used book on the street doesn’t welcome the seller to scrutinize your bank account.

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

#353

Post by ralusek »

piva00 wrote: post #136
ralusek wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean a new cryptocurrency altogether? Sure, but it's not worth squat unless you get tons of people on board. With Bitcoin and Ethereum, they already are.

Basically cryptocurrencies' value are completely related to their network effect. WhatsApp on another comment was a good parallel/analogy, still it sounds a bit flimsy that value is tied to an amorphous network of people trying to earn money by mining, not sure how comfortable I feel with that as the only incentive for a whole network keeping my "store of value" afloat. Even more when this network can collapse at any…

The stock market is more and more detached from the underlying companies that stocks represent, and more and more based on network effect. Most countries currencies are just based off of network effect. Try getting people in Argentina to buy a house using their own currency. Good luck.

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

#354

Post by corty »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #310
corty wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Tether people know quite well when to exit, because their implosion will bring Bitcoin down.

Why? There are other stablecoins, with better reputation. Could people just switch to them?

Tether mediates a lot of the BTC/USD-exchanges. At the same time there are rumours that tether has insufficient USD backing, so if there is ever a bank run, exchanges will be unable to pay. At that point it will be too late for a tether alternative. And after the "big tether crash", regulation will be a lot harsher on exchanges and possibly all crypto currencies, which will continue to depress courses. And I really don't know if the alternatives are any better.

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

#355

Post by dmitriid »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #341
arcticbull wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You can represent real world events and data with oracles.

You can represent them, but that's about it.

For Ethereum contracts to be enforceable in the real world (and even in the digital world) you need significantly more than just representation.

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

#356

Post by notSupplied »

GuB-42 wrote: post #283
pyrale wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

Bitcoin will stay forever as long as someone has a copy of the blockchain (around 300GB now). The cost of which is negligible today. Mining is only necessary for making transactions, and it doesn't have to be expensive. It only is because of the competition. That expensive competition is important for stability but in theory, the entire system could run on a smartphone. And it could run without newcomers. If everyone…

That "someone with a copy of the blockchain" is not going to be credible enough to rehydrate Bitcoin. Mining is not just for transactions, but for maintaining the ongoing legitimacy of the blockchain, which is where the real value of Bitcoin lies.

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

#357

Post by copenocoiner »

thkim wrote: post #325
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…

An investment asset must have a cash flow and/or intrinsic value. Otherwise you do not have a way to recuperate your money, so it is not an investment. They also provide basis for value of the asset. Bitcoin has neither. That is why Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme regardless of all the rosy pictures the believers try to paint. This is very important: Bitcoin has neither cash flow nor intrinsic value. The only way to recupe…

How much does it cost to move 17 tons of gold? What is the risk involved in transfer?

I can answer that question for BTC. To transfer the USD value equivalent of 17 tons of gold, it's currently around $27.50[1]. This transaction can be made anywhere you can broadcast a hash string.

If you want to get fancy, you can trade wBTC on ethereum for, as of this moment, ~$8[2]. If even that is too high a fee for you, you could bridge over to xDAI and trade for orders of magnitude less than the value of a penny[3]. Again, you can do this anywhere you can broadcast a hash string.]

All of this is EXCHANGE, transaction, alone. Zero mention of the amazing utility of the financial instruments that are IMPOSSIBLE with legacy protocols. To go over which is not a comment or a blogpost but a detailed textbook or equivalent of a MOOC.

How's that for intrinsic value?

[1]https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

[2]https://etherscan.io/gastracker

[3]https://jaredstauffer.medium.com/what-is-xdai-how-do-i-use-x....

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

#358

Post by entropic88 »

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…

I've been around since I read about it on slashdot in 2009. Was one of the first online retailers accepting bitcoin for purchases (late 2010). And I completely agree.

Monero is the 'ideological' best cryptocurrency in my opinion, and I've hedged my bets across a handful of coins that I think at least offer something valuable to the future space.

Bitcoin has the first mover advantage and although bastardized into a 'gold like store of value' completely detached from its original use case I'd still want to own a decent amount because why fight momentum.

I agree with everything you say (wild west token scams, tether backing and sketchy accounting) but I think there is too much benefit at the core for one to disregard the entire space. The cream will rise to the top.

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

#359

Post by entropic88 »

alwillis wrote: post #288
PKop wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Sure but Hal probably didn’t realize layer 2 solutions such as Lightning Network were possible, with low fees and fast transaction times using bitcoin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

I see that as third party rent seeking behavior and a bit of a co-opting.

And that's fine, because the beauty of satoshi releasing it as open source spawned an entire ecosystem of ideas and implementations, so while his 'baby' may not be what he envisioned the basic idea and problems solved live on through evolution.

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

#360

Post by thkim »

copenocoiner wrote: post #357
thkim wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An investment asset must have a cash flow and/or intrinsic value. Otherwise you do not have a way to recuperate your money, so it is not an investment. They also provide basis for value of the asset. Bitcoin has neither. That is why Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme regardless of all the rosy pictures the believers try to paint. This is very important: Bitcoin has neither cash flow nor intrinsic value. The only way to recupe…

How much does it cost to move 17 tons of gold? What is the risk involved in transfer? I can answer that question for BTC. To transfer the USD value equivalent of 17 tons of gold, it's currently around $27.50[1]. This transaction can be made anywhere you can broadcast a hash string. If you want to get fancy, you can trade wBTC on ethereum for, as of this moment, ~$8[2]. If even that is too high a fee for you, you coul…

Intrinsic value has nothing to do with cost of transaction.
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