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Comment by krrrh | Hacker News Reader

Preston Byrne pointed out since there is no pyramid, this can’t be called a Ponzi scheme. It deserves a new name, the “Nakamoto scheme”:

https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/

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"Scheme" implies a unified/central schemer, though. We can already call it a fad, or a mania (a la tulip mania).

It certainly does seem to be a "scheme" but I wonder how it compares to other fiat or gold currency when looked at through a "scheme" lens.

Fiat currency generally has some military, militia, or at least a police force and a tax payable in that currency. Gold is somewhat similar historically, though has been abandoned for that purpose in recent decades.

There is. The Schemer is Satoshi Nakamoto and anyone else involved with bitcoin's initial creation. They stand to profit handily by selling off their coins at many times their original, minimal value. But unlike a ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme, one can't trace fraudulent transactions directly to the schemers. It doesn't mean that it not a scheme.

Bitcoin isn't just a fad, it was clearly designed to enrich the original founders and early adopters at the expense of whoever is left holding the bag when the bubble bursts.

When does it stop being a fad?

When it wins and/or is popular enough to dictate rules and write it's own history.

why not call it a bubble, just like everything else like it that has come before in history?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Maybe bubble implies that the asset or resource has some actual value but the value was being over inflated.

Do cryptos have any real value?

Moving money around without an authority to stop you does have value. The question is whether that value is very high at all - in current society, probably not, and in a futuristic society I’d hope we’d develop trust mechanisms that don’t require the expense of total global order to move money/tokens/whatever around.

It’s an open question how the value of the infrastructure for doing this would be determined. Ideally the infrastructure would approach zero in cost and the value would be preserved for the participants in any transaction, not the rent-seeking hodlers.

Hodlers don’t extract rents.

Zero-point energy bubble.

Because it's not just a bubble. Bitcoin is, on a technological level, specifically designed to be an inflationary digital asset that primarily benefits the founders. Whatever utility it has as medium of exchange is incidental to its primary purpose which is to enrich the founders.

*deflationary

Disinflationary

Sure, there have been multiple bubbles. Always good to see the tulip posters keeping at it.

I guess you can say it's less like a scheme and more like a meme.

Isn't most of the scheme the classic pump and dump?

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