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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

#421

Post by question11 »

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 (…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

1) require an initial investment and promise above-average returns

2) money cannot be withdrawn for a certain period of time in exchange for higher returns.

High investment returns with little or no risk.? Overly consistent returns?

Your argument is that if I buy an ETF for gold and they charge 2% to keep the gold safe and manage it. This etf is a ponzi scheme as they need have holders to keep the thing going.

As the transaction fees go to miners you could then argue VISA and mastercard are ponzi schemes?

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

#422

Post by dorkwood »

herbst wrote: post #415
dorkwood wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire crypto art movement is a marketing campaign designed to turn artists into crypto evangelists, i.e. convert others.

Source? Couldnt it be that some artists are just super happy they found a way to dsitribute their art lucratively?

I’m not saying that all artists are in on it (probably very few of them are). But the truth is that the artists who are getting paid are the ones pushing NFTs as “the future of art” and who have the influence to rope in newcomers. Collectors in the space refer to this as “engaging with the community”.

The crypto-famous NFT collector “Silver Surfer”, known for dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars on NFTs [1], tweets “celebrities that fail to get engaged with their communities will continue to have weak secondary [NFT] sales.” [2] That’s weird, I wonder why the money would stop flowing if the artist stopped tweeting about NFTs? Doesn’t their art still have value?

The truth is, if you spend enough time around the crypto art community, you realize that there aren’t any “real” art collectors in the space. There are crypto speculators, and there are artists who feel obliged to “engage with the community”. The lack of real money flowing into the space is what leads me to label this as a marketing campaign, as opposed to a completely organic movement. It’s a somewhat decentralized marketing campaign, but it’s a marketing campaign nonetheless.

[1] https://twitter.com/makersplaceco/status/1359654252944105473

[2] https://twitter.com/7Surfer7Silver7/status/13827818844433367...

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

#423

Post by NicoJuicy »

herbst wrote: post #413
matkoniecz wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malware scanning for wallets is not unusual. In some cases password (private key) as sole and sufficient method to have full control over asset, executable by anyone is a problem not a benefit.

Malware stealing bank accounts, credit cards & paypal is just as popular. All of which you have no real influence about the actual account security.

Banks have more security measures in particular.

You can't just login to paypal from another IP. You can't just login into most emails these days ( 2FA)

Crypto wallets have none of those protections.

Other than that:

EOS (dPoS) reversed transactions multiple times while being top 10 at the time: https://cointelegraph.com/news/eos-reverses-previously-confi...

Ethereum Classic was attacked multiple times with chain reversing double spends due to not enough energy being committed to immutability: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-classic-attacker-successfu...

Ethereum reversed the "DAO hack" with a hard fork.

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

#424

Post by redwood »

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 (…

It's not enough to simply bury the gold. You have to guard its whereabouts and that cost something

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

#425

Post by rektide »

prepend wrote: post #167
rektide wrote: post #34

I want to agree, but I have to confess, I don't think currency necessarily has to be cheap nor fast to use. For example, there are Rai Stones[1] or Yapese stone money , which can require more than one person to move in some cases. They're not really currency per se, so it only sort of counts. But I feel like I have to allow currency with different behaviors & characteristics than the cash we all know. I do think ther…

Those currencies sucked. Pointing out other terrible currencies once existed in dead civilizations doesn’t quite help with the argument that currently doesn’t need to be easy to use.

I think it's ok to consider that different currencies can fill different roles & have different advantages than one another. Not all currencies need to compete on the same terms.

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

#426

Post by webinvest »

strogonoff wrote: post #149
narrator wrote: post #24

Stocks: * You buy them because they increase earnings and eventually produce dividends at a very high yield to your initial investment. * The company can issue shares suppressing the price. * The company can do stock buybacks, increasing the price. * Brokers can naked short, suppressing the price. Fiat currency * You need it to pay taxes and debts. * Endless Printing. Gold * Bought because of limited supply. * Supply…

> Stocks: you buy them because they increase earnings and eventually produce dividends at a very high yield to your initial investment. No, you buy them because you want to support good, non-nefarious companies with sound business models. (I know that’s idealistic, but focusing purely on speculative uses of stocks is another extreme and paints a very incomplete picture.)

Most of the time, you’re supporting your fellow investors rather than the company. In many cases, after an IPO, the company doesn’t care about the price of it’s non-voting shares anymore — only the other investor that you bought them from.

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

#427

Post by hudon »

j0ba wrote: post #380
hudon wrote: post #346

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…

Then it would be a fork of bitcoin (and therefore not bitcoin). Everybody who already owned a bitcoin would also own the equivalent amount in the forked coin. This already happened in 2016 with bitcoin cash.

You don’t get to choose which cryptobean keeps the name, the market does (see 2016 fork, and 2013 fork).

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

#428

Post by jude- »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #403
jude- wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is no longer exposed to BTC, and thus no longer assumes any risk from the advice he gives on it. Like, if he wanted me to pay attention, he'd be shorting BTC right now.

Shorting Bitcoin, even theoretically, is a bad idea. He doesn't short it because he understands convexity. This is an arbitrary "asset" and can therefore go as high as it wants. If he shorts it, the risk that he'll get squeezed out is high.

Well, I guess he also understands me not giving a sh*t about his opinions if he's not going to put his money where his mouth is. I hope he's not managing someone else's BTC wealth.

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

#429

Post by jude- »

ummonk wrote: post #378
jude- wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he really believes BTC has failed, he'd be shorting it.

That's not true. The risks from shorting BTC are far higher precisely because it has failed as a currency and is instead a vehicle for speculative investment.

Then I guess his opinions on BTC are pretty loosely held.

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

#430

Post by diedyesterday »

Bitcoin is INDEED a ponzi/pyramid scheme. The main hallmark of a pyramid scheme is that is produced no significant net wealth but somehow makes a minority richer, much richer! How can this be? Because a pyramid scheme is designed to transfer wealth from the base of the pyramid (new recruits) to the upper layers of the pyramid (earlier entrants) and this is exactly what bitcoin has been doing and is the very main reason for it being promoted.
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