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Bitcoin is a Ponzi

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601–610 of 684 posts

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#601
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mining gold on asteroids will likely be more expensive than mining on this planet. If mining gold on asteroids crash the price of gold, who would mine gold from asteroids? On the other hand, if one were to buy proven gold reserves stored on an asteroid, then that might make sense. The exploration company could discount the value of the gold by the existing cost of sending it to Earth and the ongoing cost of guarding…

>Mining gold on asteroids will likely be more expensive than mining on this planet. What if I told you they could send asteroids to the planet to be mined _on the planet_ and crash the price of gold?

It’ll be interesting to see the feasibility based on next month’s launch of Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).

DART is a planetary defense-driven test of technologies for preventing an impact of Earth by a hazardous asteroid. DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique to change the motion of an asteroid in space.

https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#602
It's not a Ponzi. It's a speculative asset and one that people are buying hard into, some because they think they can avoid being the bigger sucker and some because they genuinely believe it will be useful in the future either as a store of value against inflation or a possible usable currency (right now I somewhat believe that certain properties of certain crypto currencies fundamentally make them bad in the long term). However, a Ponzi is very different from a speculative bubble.

Silver or gold in a speculative bubble behaves just the same as crypto right now but they are not Ponzi schemes. They are simply a property of how markets work when speculation gets over energized

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#603
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme "A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.[1] The scheme leads victims to believe that profits are coming from legitimate business activity (e.g., product sales or successful investments), and they remain unaware that other investors are the source of funds. A Ponzi scheme can maintain the illusion of a sustainable business as long as new investors contribute new funds, and as long as most of the investors do not demand full repayment and still believe in the non-existent assets they are purported to own."

So, no it is not a Ponzi scheme. It might be something similar to a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#604

In a Ponzi scheme, a fraudulent perpetrator takes your money (and the money of many others), gives some of that to early dropouts but takes the rest for himself . Ponzi schemers profit from lying to you where your money goes. With a decentralized digital asset there is no sole person or company that profits from just lying to you about where your Dollar goes in exchange for digitals. Sure, miners and exchanges make p…

The only way to make profit on bitcoin is to make someone else poorer by that amount. That's what makes it a ponzi - anything with this property that pretends to be an investment is one. Implementation details are irrelevant. >Goods and services provided by humans have no intrinsic value but become precious simply there being demand by other humans. Nonsense that's easy to disprove: try to stop eating food and start…

> The only way to make profit on bitcoin is to make someone else poorer by that amount. That's what makes it a ponzi - anything with this property that pretends to be an investment is one. Implementation details are irrelevant.

I'm really far from an expert in economics so I could be wrong but ain't that how the stock market works for non-dividends stocks?

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also it is not true that "governments make their currencies slightly inflationary precisely to discourage hoarding." In fact, this is done so that there can be economic expansion. It is true that some economists have advocated for deliberately trying to increase inflation to spur spending, but it turns out that actually forcing inflation is not easy (see also: Japan for the past two decades).

The US seems to be pulling it off for the last few months. https://www.statista.com/statistics/273418/unadjusted-monthl...

Yes, but not as a matter of deliberate policy.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#606
Something can be overvalued without being a Ponzi scheme.

The repeated bashing of cryptocurrency on HN of all places is tiring. There is a lot of innovation in the space outside of BTC. What about DAOs? What about lending products? The space is booming in interesting ideas and all I ever see on HN are posts about BTC being some kind of scam. Where did the 'hacker' mindset go on this site?

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Profits aren't paid out from Bitcoin. There are no profits being paid out. That's sort of the key difference. Bitcoin doesn't send you a check if you own it. That's a pedantic evasion. You're conflating profit ("making net money") with dividends or other rent mechanisms. Selling an investment is colloquially "profit taking" too. And you can only sell, on balance, to those entering the bitcoin system.

No it is not a pedantic evasion, with a Ponzi scheme, you get sent money. On a regular legally defined basis. That money has to come from somewhere. Bitcoin doesn't have to send you a check every month or it collapses.

> with a Ponzi scheme, you get sent money

Still pedantry. You're arguing that it's not a Ponzi scheme NOT because it funds promises to existing players with money coming in from new players (which is pretty much the standard definition), but because TECHNICALLY they have to "sell" their coins to get paid.

That technicality doesn't change the direction the money is flowing. It's just not relevant.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#608
post #257

Using this dumb definition of a ponzi scheme, every stock IPO that doesn't pay a dividend is a ponzi scheme. Bitcoin is valuable because people agree on using it as a form of money, and it is limited in supply. Nobody is making more bitcoins from nowhere to pay out existing bitcoin holders. Idiotic definition of a ponzi scheme crafted intentionally to include bitcoin, fails to include bitcoin, but does cover many val…

> every stock IPO that doesn't pay a dividend is a ponzi scheme I agree with you in spirit. Stocks that will never pay a dividend (if you can see the future) are worth $0. Most stocks are effectively speculative assets. The difference is that a stock has a real, legal value: ownership of a company that has cashflows. If that company is liquidated, you have rights as a shareholder. You may also be able to vote on impo…

What do you even mean when you say something is worth 0? How can a share of stock that you can sell at any time for an amount much larger than 0 be 'worth 0'? Things are worth what you can sell them for, and that is the only definition of value that isn't nonsense.

You want currency you hold to be deflationary. Deflation is a systemic problem for economies, not individuals with cash in hand. Its not expensive to transact, it is extremely cheap. You go find a provider to let you accept payments from anyone in the world for a smaller % of the transaction and that will cover chargebacks. It doesn't exist, and you are not doing an honest analysis when you compare the transaction cost of walmart instead of yourself, or the cost of exchanging cash without the costs of moving people to the same location to exchange it.

You have no practical legal right to anything as a shareholder. If a company is liquidated the shareholders get nothing in practice. Management controls the finances and expenditures of a company, and a majority of shareholders control management. This control is usually only given to special classes of stock that is for the most part impossible to buy. Why do you think people fight over control of companies? Management routinely steal huge sums by allocating it for the direct benefit of some shareholders over others.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're so certain short it. The amount of wealth you would gain by being correct is immense. You should be spending every waking moment attempting to predict it. Something about anti btcers I don't get you'll wax how smart you are and how everyone else is dumb. Just put your money where your mouth is.

This is dreadful advice that nobody should follow. (1) Shorting has a completely different risk profile than going long. If you're short, you can lose an infinite amount of money. If you're long, the most you can lose is what you put in. Unless you're familiar with what it means to take a short position in traditional markets, for the love of God don't do it in crypto. (2) The market can remain irrational longer than…

WOOOSH The point is that it's terrible advice. My point is people who espouse how smart they are about something should put up or shut up.

1.) there are a multitude of ways to you can do this on a decentralized exchange DYDX as well. Or a Mercantile exchange like BITMEX.

2.) Funny you should bring up Bill Akman he publicized his short position, and another investor took a counter bet to him. That investor so happened to do it out of (speculated) spite. So not really a good example but since we're here Herbalife was investigated and not found to be an MLM, although I'll grant you that the SEC came RIGHT up to the line in calling them an MLM scheme.

3.) I'll move past the criminal enterprise portion as that's for courts to decide. With respect to binance specifically there are multiple ways to go short I'll post the straight forward versions. Cash settled perpetual swaps, Coin settled perpetual swaps, Put option contracts, Margin shorting. The way I would recommend people short bitcoin is cash settled perpetual swaps, you will be paid out as there are insurance funds that are VERY LARGE you can see what they are, that will pay out winners should losers positions can't be sold to the market.

4.) So does every exchange with respect to the market they serve, the smart exchanges actually want to be price neutral as they view as a business, both FTX and Binance CEO go on the record about this.

So you don't want to short BTC but you still think it's a ponzi scheme ... report it as such to the SEC. Accept that's a loss cause because bitcoin is deemed as property, furthermore a commodity and thus regulated by the CFTC.

I'll finish about the crooked casino portion... you can do this in a decentralized fashion with DYDX or another de centralized exchange. EVEN IF you didn't want to take the time to do that. RIGHT NOW you can go to IBKR and take a short position on the greyscale trust which is essence a short position on BTC. FURTHERMORE if you think these exchanges are crooked and are doomed to fail. Take a short position on the exchange it self. Binance and FTX have their own coins (which are probably securities) that you can take short positions out on.

Final words, how long must a market remain irrational before your prospectus is wrong about the market being irrational? The paradox is if you answer infinity, you may be "right" but you're still wrong.

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