It was hubris, not greed.
Okay. I’ll take your word for it.
I believe I am one of the ones paying miners, BTC miners sell BTC to a crypto exchange, the crypto exchange then sell BTC to me and I forward it to my retailer if I do a transaction.
This isn’t what a ponzi scheme is because when you buy BTC you have it in your possession and you can actually use it for a transaction.
A ponzi scheme is when you pay a large amount of money for a “How to get rich training program” it’s then your job to find other people to pay a large amount of money you get a % of the money paid by the people you find and the person who introduced you also gets a % of the money from the people you find. There are very clear differences between BTC and a ponzi scheme.
Even if 98% of people who own BTC suddenly sold it all to an exchange tomorrow guess what…I’d still buy my £50 worth of BTC and use it for my transactions. But hey, you need to believe it is a ponzi scheme for some odd reason so you go ahead.
And no, I’m not telling you to go buy BTC, in fact I am telling you not to buy BTC because you don’t seem to understand it. If this was a ponzi scheme I would be trying to get you to buy some.
I listen to people who speak facts yes, and I listen to people who speak logically. I make it a point not to listen to people like SBF of FTX because they are the ones ruining the impression people get about crypto.
The truths you’ve been told;
- BTC is not only an investment
- BTC is a currency
- BTC is a money transfer network (and a very cheap one)
I’m afraid these are actually facts which you cannot change, you are not following logic because you try to pretend these facts are not true or you are not bothered to verify if these facts are true… You have been told truths feel free to accept these truths or not. I don’t care either way.
Indeed, feel free to verify these facts and revise your opinion.
No, this would not make it a ponzi scheme. If the value they provide to you was actually paid by you.
A lot of alternate currency exist. Those are not Ponzis because they don’t need people to keep investing in them to make them worth.
But the moment you need people to keep investing in them to make them valuable, then they become a ponzi
Then, you are afraid of a strawman.
- I said BTC requires investments to function. I did not say it was only investment.
- BTC can be used a a currency, as anything can. It can’t however replace the present currencies, because it lacks a fundamental quality : the stability that is brought by regulation.
- BTC is not a cheap transfer network. Its only cheap as long as other people are paying for you - they are the investers.
Those were claims, not facts.
And since you present them as a way to discuss ideas I did not actually claim, they are not worth talking about.
Feel free to read what I actually wrote.
For example, we could use plex as a currency.
Or I can emit token, that I sell you at a constant price, and that will decay after a while, and you can buy my music with them.
Or I can give you a stamp every time you purchase a meal at my place, and with 10 stamps you can have a free one. Those are also currencies.
It’s not an issue of being or not a currency. Anything can be. But then we need to look at the properties of that currency. What use cases they are built to implement, and how do they compare with other currencies doing the same thing.
And a very important property of a currency, is its stability. The BTC is bad at that, its volatility is not regulated. Also you need to be able to emit more of that currency, otherwise the stability disappears because the value per currency increases with time - so you better not spend that currency, because tomorrow it will be worth more - therefore making it a speculation-based currency.
Yes there are also good things with BTC, including the fact that you can’t get stolen. But the pros are not compensating the cons. The currency is secured, but not stable and deflatory.
So even from a sole currency approach, it’s not a good one.
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Nope, they are facts which you cannot change. this part of the convo is concluded. Stop trying to say the facts are claims.
What do you mean “People are paying for me” ?
The fact that the retailer wants BTC puts the BTC miners in business. The BTC is mined on behalf of people like me and the retailer, I will give a currency exchange fiat money and they will give me BTC, when the currency exchange have no BTC left they will buy more from BTC miners using fiat money.
Within Eve online only Yes, it can be exchanged for game time or other products like MCT and ISK.
Such a token only buys your music, everywhere else it’s useless.
No, not everything can be a currency/legal tender it has to have certain properties. And no you cannot use “Anything” for a money transfer or overseas transaction.
You only think that because you see it as only an investment, BTC was designed to have a value which matches its supply and demand, if everyone sells their BTC to an exchange the price goes lower, if lots of people buy and hold BTC the value is higher.
BTC is not bad at stability, it’s just doing precisely what it was designed to do,
You would think they were somewhat more intelligent than usual people you meet on street.
No way you can win with losers like those scammers in crypto scene. Even holding some zimbabwean money beats holding crypto. 
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Time to create zimbabwean crypto. 
They are the people you meet on the street.
I’m glad you see that, crypto gets a terrible name thanks to these scammers. they use crypto to scam because it is prolific, I wish they would ■■■■ off.
For most people, their only exposure to crypto will be these scammers. As much as crypto boosters say that these technologies are The Future - the present seems entirely dominated by scams and hustles.
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Stop saying the claims are fact.
Now you are switching the goatpost.
Stop claiming facts are opinion.
Which is, being bad at stability.
It’s designed to have a very bad stability (according to you).
So your actually saying I can’t transfer money worldwide cheaply? I can log into a wallet or coinbase right this minute and transfer a sum of BTC anywhere in the world for very cheap.
Logically it is a fact that I am able to do this. It’s not a claim because I have actually done this many times. and I am still able to do this.
According to google dictionary the definition of fact is: a thing that is known or proved to be true.
According to google dictionary the definition of Claim is: state or assert that something is the case, typically without providing evidence or proof.
Feel free to go any crypto exchange website and read about money transfer services, you’ll find this proves my statements to be true.
So if I say “I own a car that can travel at 400mph” that is clearly a claim because no proof exists unless I provide it.
No, I’m not. Read again. Your post based on such a claim is a waste of time.
You should spend more time actually reading rather than looking up definitions on google dictionary.
This makes absolutely no sense. In a ponzi scheme the inner workings are completely hidden, because the investors are getting interest payments from other money of new investors. Bitcoin is completely transparent in it’s workings, and there are no interest payments, it’s an asset that is traded on an open market.
The mechanism you describe as ponzi-like actively works against the “returns” the investors get, because it is effectively inflation by issuing new Bitcoins to pay the miners and is fundamentally a constant sell pressure that would lower the price.
That sell pressure is cut in half every four years, which means monetary inflation is constantly decreasing. At some point in the future the miners will mostly be payed by transaction fees, and eventually that is all they will get.
You can still pretend that it has no value because you think it’s fundamentally a dumb idea. Obviously the market sees this differently. But calling it a ponzi is just plain disingenuous. Just because the value of something is dependent on supply and demand on the market doesn’t make something a ponzi, otherwise everything would be one.
While I agree that Bitcoin because of it’s fixed supply may never be a very stable currency, that doesn’t mean that it is entirely useless. It just has different properties a credit based currency like fiat has. Both have their strength and their weaknesses.
The property of fiat you identify as a strength and necessity to regulate it’s value is at the same time also it’s weakness. Fiat currency need a form of central planing to work. There are certain people who will decide if the market is incentivized to produce more credit and increase the money supply or to destroy credit and shrink it.
But over the history we have seen time and time again that this proverbial power over the money printer is abused, and it is in effect in the current financial system quite heavily. Instead of having to go trough the unpopular process of raising taxes when increasing government spending, they instead just issue themselves more credit and eradicate the debt with inflation. It’s literally an additional tax, directly tapping into the lifesavings of people.
The fiat monetary system is not only run by the banks, it literally is the banks. They create and destroy the money. But because they have other roles apart from issuing credit and custody money, they are quite an unstable cog in the whole system, as we have seen time and time again when this banks collapse and cause a cascade of further collapses if the governments don’t intervene, because otherwise the whole monetary system would become dysfunctional.
Bitcoin is a new invention that creates a monetary system that doesn’t need the banking infrastructure with it’s inherent systemic risk to exist to work, and doesn’t need institutions with the power to issue new money, because everything including the initial issuance is governed by fixed rules in the code.
It’s also the first decentralized fixed supply digital asset in existence that can be exchanged at the speed of light globally. This has not existed before, only credit based ledger systems like fiat where able to do this.
It’s not created in a vacuum. It lives alongside the fiat system and both will influence each other. It’s not capitalized enough yet to be a currency. It has like 1/3 of the market cap of some tech companies. But it shows massive growth over it’s lifetime and I expect it to further grow as it’s value and properties become better known to more people.
In my opinion it will eventually function as a counter weight to the money printer. Not today, as it it heavily volatile. But as volatility dies down, it will become an alternative for people to store their money and not having it subjected to the whims of local fiat monetary policy. This will cause pressure on the fiat system to not abuse their power.
I mean again, you can say it’s complete ■■■■■■■■ and you don’t trust it. That is fine, then don’t. I for myself see it as the most trustworthy monetary system we ever had. It’s a system governed by rules instead of rulers. It’s in my eyes literally as revolutionary as when we took the power of the law out of the hand of kings and put it in writing, the law, instead.
Yeah, maybe you can elaborate why that point seems convincing to you, as this is in my eyes so objectively wrong, I can’t figure out why people fall for it and repeat it. People buy things because they want or need them and not because they want to get rid of the money.
Did you ever buy something apart from a pure investment like stocks etc., something that actually has any influence on the real economy, because you wanted to get rid of money?
But that’s not in the present.
And I’m talking about the present time.
A ponzi always find investers because it looks good - until it does not anymore and crashes.
It’s the opposite, the market is supposed to reflect what people consider their personal value of something.
That is, when there is no speculation.
So the value of something is not the market value. If you think it’s good for you, then the value is what you accept to pay for it.
But then if it costs more than something else, be in in stability, in energy usage, in transaction speed, then it has no value because there are better things on the market.
What you identify as a weakness is actually a requirement. You don’t want to be paid “maybe this value, maybe 10 times less, maybe 4 times more”. You need to be able to know when you have enough or not to live.
I did not claim it was perfect. I claim, it is better.
Yes, that’s always been their role.
That’s a lot of useless words.
It can not. It lacks the properties to become one.
Some do, and some don’t. Claiming there is no speculation is delusional. Also is claiming peoples don’t save money.
People buy things mostly because they need them, or because they consider the price is good enough for what it brings them(=price matches value).
The goal of the money is to make peoples’ need and production match. In a deflatory model, what you purchase now is at the cost of not purchasing more tomorrow. So you have an interest to NOT purchase, but rather wait. You also need to produce and sell today than tomorrow.
If today there are 10 boxes to be sold(in the whole world), and only 100 money, then basically those boxes are worth 10 each.
If tomorrow there are 20 boxes, but still 100 money, their value becomes 5.
So instead of buying a box today, you buy it “later” and save your money.
THAT is why there needs to be money printing. So that tomorrow, the amount of money that is exchanged matches the value of the products that are exchanged.
You have a very strange way of talking and I can see why this confuses you. You’ve completely lost me and I am baffled as to what you’re actually saying. From what I see you are saying what you say you didn’t say.
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As you said yourself, Bitcoin is at present a speculative investment. Investments are always about the possible value in the future and not the present.
I already explained why it’s not a ponzi. Since you did not address this points I have to assume you don’t have an actual answer and this is just a knee jerk reaction to losing an argument.
“Supposed” to is a completely empty statement if the reality is that markets work by supply and demand. People who see a certain commodity overvalued and expect it to be cheaper in the future sell, people who expect it to be higher in the future buy, it’s all speculation and price discovery by supply and demand.
That’s true for everything, even fiat money.
It’s clearly not for you to decide if something has value or not, it’s still decided by the market.
You can argue that the market is wrong and you yourself value Bitcoin at $0 and the future will tell if you are right. But since you demonstrate with basically every statement you make about Bitcoin that you get even the simple technical properties wrong, it’s not very likely that your judgement of the value is a very good indication of future performance.
No it’s not. But since you refuse to even speculate about the future volatility of a fixed supply asset that is fully capitalized we have probably nothing more to discuss here.
Perfect example
So where are this additional 10 boxes coming from? Is it over production do to lower demand? Is it because production gets automated and more efficient, so basically the economy can produce more for less work?
It would be logical that if the supply suddenly doubles the price falls. This signals the market that it’s overproducing and production has to cut back to match the actual demand. This automatically happens and it should be completely normal that in an economy where automation increases and things need less labor to produce, prices get constantly cheaper.
Except obviously if we have people on the money printer who see this as an opportunity to siphon money out of the market by manipulating the money supply, and in the process destroy the actual market signals.
Everything would naturally be deflationary in our markets. One example where the money printer can’t outperform the increase in performance has traditionally be computer technology. If you wait you get better hardware for your money. Yet people still spend money to buy hardware despite knowing this fact.
So the whole notion that falling prices will prevent people from buying is complete ■■■■■■■■. It’s an argument constructed to justify the inflationary tax, that has no bearing in reality. It actually harms the economy in that it siphons purchasing power from mainly the poorest people in society who would spend most of their money anyway and who don’t have the excess money or even access to global stock markets to protect their savings.
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