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> I don't trust the stock broker (intermediary) to hold my shares on my behalf. What if they go bankrupt? What if they are malicious and disappear with my money?

You don't have to trust the stock broker. If they go bankrupt or steal your money, you'll get it back through SIPC insurance (https://www.sipc.org/)

> I don't trust corporate executives to have my best interests.

You don't have to trust corporate executives to have your best interests at heart, only that they have their own best interests at heart: corporations pay executives with stocks and stock options, thus aligning incentives between executives and shareholders.

> I don't trust corporation revenue numbers because they are inflated by artificial currency supply and manipulation (e.g. corporations feeding off of debt-fueled shell companies to generate fake revenue).

You don't have to take corporate revenue numbers on trust, since they are audited. Yes, sometimes things slip through the audit, but you can just buy a well-diversified portfolio, such as an index fund, to largely eliminate the effect of outliers.

> So I started reading everything I could about our monetary system and learned that it essentially became a ponzi scheme in 1971.

Even if you want to argue that all fiat money are 'ponzi schemes' then it would have been a ponzi scheme many times over. In fact if you assume the pre 1971 system to be ok, then it might surpirse you to learn that it only came into effect in the late 1950s. That system (Brandon Woods system) actually was not even close to a real gold standard and didn't operate like one either. I don't see how you can say its not a ponzi scheme while those system before and after it were. If anything Brandon Woods was a US controlled ponzi scheme where the US could inflate their currency while pretending it was gold to other currencies.

So the system you think of as non-ponzi existed for 10-20 years max. And before that it was a ponzi scheme again? It was also a ponzi scheme in and post WW1 if that is the case?

Not even sure what it means to be a ponzi scheme for money. In a ponzi scheme you pay interest on old money with new money, that is very different from the goal of a monetary system.

The way you talk about it, it seems to me you read a heavily 'bitcoin fan' recommended literature on monetary history. What you say is very far away from almost all academic literature on money.

Do you mean Bretton Woods?

Maybe it was a ponzi scheme before 1971 in the sense that they were probably printing more bills than they had gold (even though the bills claimed that they could be redeemed for gold). But the fact that banks knew that there was a limit on how much gold they could create was in itself a good way to prevent the money supply from growing out of control. There will always be some banks who don't play by the rules.

>> In a ponzi scheme you pay interest on old money with new money, that is very different from the goal of a monetary system.

That is literally what they do. Why do you think a dollar is worth a bit less every year?

When regular banks make loans to people, the loan money is new money that they just typed into your account out of nowhere (only limited by reserve ratios which coincidentally have been lowered to 0%), then for example, when you buy a house from someone else using that new loan money and you allow them to pay off their debt, you're just paying the person who was there first.

New generations take out new loans to pay for the loans of old generations collectively.

> But the fact that banks knew that there was a limit on how much gold they could create was in itself a good way to prevent the money supply from growing out of control. There will always be some banks who don't play by the rules.

Banks are still restricted by the same mechanism as before, just that now the mechanism is not backed by gold. The central bank is in full control of how much lending can be done.

> That is literally what they do. Why do you think a dollar is worth a bit less every year?

Because the central banks WANTS the dollar to be worth a bit less every year. Because economist determainted that is the right way to do things.

And because it is known that this happens its included in loan contracts. That is why economist stress predicitibility.

In a ponzi scheme you don't have enough money to pay the interest and pay back everything, this however is not the same with fiat currency. The amount of fiat currency you can create is not limited by anything other then the choices of the central bankers.

I think you're creating a straw man here. No one is saying that the only two investment options are Bitcoin and stock. There are literally millions of other investment vehicles, from real estate to cattle to Legos.

You also have to acknowledge that most people don't pick stocks. They have exposure to the stock market indirectly through pension funds, or they manage their retirement funds by investing in ETFs.

If your ETF is sufficiently broad, you're not really betting on a single thing. Buying crypto is betting on the liquidity of that coin (or equity in a company or whatever the coin was made to track).

Buying a stock is betting on the dividends of that stock.

Buying industry-wide or nationwide index funds is betting on the long-term stability of society. If that society crashes (due to war, a pandemic, or climate change), you're probably screwed anyway because, well, your entire society has crashed.

Perhaps you could argue that investing in crypto is the opposite bet -- that society will crash in our lifetimes -- but it seems unpalatable to most people to bet on a Mad Max-like future for themselves at an old age and for their children.

> Then I found out about Proof of Stake and learned that it consumes very little electricity and doesn't require specialized hardware

So I'm skeptical about this frankly. Mostly because the security is inherent in no one having 51% of the currency. Given that governments can create currency at will, I don't foresee the rank and file bitcoin devotees to fall in line with this at all.

The thing about bitcoin is there's this "Gold Rush" aspect to it. Remove that and you remove all of its popularity.

>> So I'm skeptical about this frankly. Mostly because the security is inherent in no one having 51% of the currency.

I find that this is not a problem in practice. Even the government with infinite money would struggle to buy even 20% of circulating supply because they would have to drive the price to absolutely insane amounts in order to achieve that.

I'm involved in a DPoS project called Lisk and participants are constantly observing each other's wallets on the blockchain. If a whale tries to move too many tokens to an exchange to sell, the whole community will know and that individual risks losing their delegate position. There is a strong incentive to not sell too many tokens because everyone in the community can see it and it can have negative ramifications. Some groups of forgers make deals with each other and they agree to keep 50% of their forged tokens as reserves in exchange for votes.

Also, you can vote to earn interest on your tokens so a lot of people only sell a portion of the interest they earn and would never sell their principal.

In practice, investors' hands tend to become stronger as the price goes up.

It would be essentially impossible for an outsider to accumulate 51% of tokens. By the time they accumulated 10%, they would have paid so much money to get them that they would totally lose the incentive to harm the project.

> I find that this is not a problem in practice. Even the government with infinite money would struggle to buy even 20% of circulating supply because they would have to drive the price to absolutely insane amounts in order to achieve that.

And even if they did accumulate enough to carry out a 51% attack, they could only attack once, and then would be slashed [0].

[0] https://cointelegraph.com/news/vitalik-buterin-reveals-why-a...

True, and because the blockchain is public, the community would see the tokens accumulating.

When there is high demand, individuals in the community will naturally tend to tighten the supply on the markets. Typically, they will sell fewer and fewer tokens as the price gets higher.

This is because most community members really believe in the project and they believe that fiat is worthless, so they usually only sell just enough to fund a modest lifestyle. They know that the token is the most valuable asset in this economy. They know that once they sell it, they can't get it back.