Bitcoin is a Ponzi • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#681

Post by nootropicat » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

miracle2k wrote: post #670

nootropicat wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with your definition of a scam, however: > Telling people bitcoin has value, while being a developer (thus smart enough to know it's worthless)? Scammer. There is little about being a programmer that qualifies you to declare Bitcoin a scam, or not a sacm. There is a set of programmers opposed to cryptocurrency that believes that their background qualifies them uniquely - that is hubris. People don't need to u…

Non-programmers can be easily bamboozled by marketing: for example they may sincerely believe bitcoin stores energy in some magical way.

For a dev there's no such excuse - they know for a fact bitcoin isn't backed by anything and all energy used for mining is irrevocably gone, and that no mechanism exists for bitcoin holders to earn transaction fees (because miners are a separate entity). There's no escape from knowledge that bitcoin is a negative sum game - which means claiming it's anything but a new version of a ponzi is a deliberate lie.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#682

Post by wpietri » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 8:37 PM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #642

wpietri wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not finite. The supply of cryptocurrencies is effectively infinite. There's almost no barrier to entry. In the closest historical equivalent, the wildcat banking era, at least you had to have state-chartered bank. [1] But what's it take to launch a cryptocurrency these days? Is it anything beyond a tech guy, a marketing guy, and a a credit card with a little room? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_bankin…

The supply in different cryptos is infinite, but the supply of any particular crypto may or may not be infinite. In the case of bitcoin which was the topic of discussion, it's finite. To say it's not is plainly false. Your (clear) bias is blinding you.

Bitcoin is no longer the only cryptocurrency, and is competing for investor money with all the rest. If all of those were basically unused, I'd say you had a point. But since that's not the case, I stand by my view that "people that trade their fiat currency", as mentioned in the post I'm replying to, are a crucial part of the analysis.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#683

Post by ashwagary » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 10:45 PM UTC

graeme wrote: post #654

ashwagary wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nassim Taleb pointed out that if you have no 'skin in the game' your opinion is actually less than worthless. Worth considering...

If you are long bitcoin, you hold bitcoin. If you are for some other asset vs bitcoin, you hold that asset and not bitcoin. Some things are simply tradeable, and his advice is not “throw money at the owners of a fraudulent casino to say you are short” Nassim Taleb himself wrote a paper arguing Bitcoin’s value is zero and sold all his Bitcoin. I do not believe he believes it is his moral duty to open a Binance account…

That's true and technically anyone that doesn't have bitcoin (or a bitcoin owning entity) in their portfolio has a short position open.

So far, that 12 year short position has been a disaster for all of the people (literally every single person) on the planet.

Re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

#684

Post by randomswede » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 9:56 AM UTC

feanaro wrote: post #662

randomswede wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold has inherently good conductivity, extreme malleability and pretty good chemical resistance. I would call those intrinsically valuable traits. Likewise a whole slew of physical goods, who have built-in traits due to what they are that make them (on some level) valuable. Bitcoin only has value due to a shared hallucination.

Most of the value of gold is not due to those properties. Yet even for those properties, if you look close enough, it is shared hallucinations all the way down. I think you'll also have a hard time explaining how "good conductivity" is fundamentally different from e.g. "resistance to tampering of historical records".

Bitcoin is only resistant to tampering of historical records if you have a continuous expenditure of compute to maintain that tamper-proofness.

In the absence of substantial compute resources dedicated to maintaining the longest fork, there is in principle nothing stopping anyone from changing a historic blok and rolling forwards from that.

The good conductivity is a base physical property, not really requiring any external investment of anything to be maintained.