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Comment by chrisabrams | Hacker News Reader

No, Social Security payments (USA) is by far the greatest scam. Bitcoin is a spec of dust compared to the number of contributors that will receive nothing when the vault is empty.

Edit: grammar

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Yeah - at least no one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to buy into the latest ICO

> Social Security payments (USA) is by far the greatest scam. Bitcoin is a spec of dust compared to the number of contributors that will receive nothing when the vault is empty.

The only way people would recieve nothing is if both the trust fund was empty and there were no current SS revenues (which would mean no labor, including self-employment, income.)

So, yeah, that's possible if capital captures 100% of value, but that's both extraordinarily unlikely and has a rather trivial policy fix if things ever change so that it no longer seems improbable.

The population curve disagrees with you.

No, it does not, and can't, because the population curve is irrelevant; the error isn't about the projection of exhaustion (which may also be wrong, but it is the current intermediate-scenario projection), it's about the basics of how SS works at what trust fund exhaustion means.

If the trust fund is exhausted (which the population curve does say something about), beneficiaries don't get nothing, they get benefits limited by current SS revenue.

There is no projection i am aware of under which people working today would not get a majority of their benefits.

Worst case for SS is that it pays out ~77% of benefits.[1] Can you provide sources for your claim that people will receive nothing?

[1]https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/retirem...

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