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Comment by timwaagh | Hacker News Reader

i say it is about time government cracks down on this tax-avoidance ponzi scheme. bitcoin is a great achievement technically but it has only negative consequences for soceity at large.

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If bitcoin is a ponzi scheme then every publicly traded asset is a ponzi scheme.

most of these assets get you something. like (parts of) voting rights in a company. or the ability to sell those rights at a fixed price at some fixed date. bitcoin just offers you the right to say 'i got 10 bitc'. if you'd say every currency is a ponzi scheme that is harder to disprove. because if space aliens invade and bring their own currency, your dollars will be worth zero. all the same real central banks have the ability to adjust money supply depending on demand. which ensures that money keeps its value as long as government does not fall. bitc is worse, because it annot insure this. because it has no central bank and its supply is more or less fixed, ensuring that once demand drops, the value of bitc drops as well.

>ponzi scheme

Bitcoin is as much as a ponzi scheme as gold is.

How is it a ponzi scheme?

The whole "ponzi scheme" accusation is trotted out every time Bitcoin is brought up, and it's always by people completely unfamiliar with how Bitcoin actually functions. It's as much a "ponzie scheme" as much as any other limited-supply asset.

ponzi scheme is not to be taken literally. people say it because the people creating currencies benefit at the expense of everyone else, without offering much in return. i know more or less how it works and that is why i say this. the founders of bitcoin have huge stocks of bitcoins, artificially restricting the bitcoin supply to keep the price up. however if that was not the case the supply of bitcoin would be more or less fixed as it gets harder and harder to mine. also there is nothing of value behind a bitcoin, just people's belief it will stay valuable. because of the inherent impossibility to adjust the supply of bitc depending on demand, it cannot ever function as a currency, because its value cant be adjusted for demand. when demand lessens, as is inevitable, investors will lose their money and the major beneficaries will be those who created bitcoin and sold it for dollars.

the only real value it currently offers, is it allows people to dodge tax and launder money. it also enables the criminal economy, with things like drug-ecommerce when the government does not approve (im all for legalisation, btw). so it undermines goverment authority and enables criminality.

i get that i get downvoted because people here believe strongly in privacy and tend to dislike their governments. but i don't. you have to think about how much of your life depends on government authority in order to understand the danger anything that undermines it poses.

Tax avoidance != tax evasion. At least get the basics right if you're going to make grand proclamations!

And you obviously got upvoted. HN is full of libtards.

No matter what you're replying to, it never helps to post uncivilly like this. In particular, the claim that HN is full of <derogatory partisan flamebait term> is the worst kind of unsubstantive tedium.

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