Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history (2018)
vox.com
vox.com
Meanwhile, the amount of misinformation around inflation and fiat money is getting ridiculous. Bitcoin proponents talk about Bitcoin as if the only alternative investment was to keep all of your savings in cash under your mattress. Too many people think that inflation means everything loses value except Bitcoin, all while ignoring the fact that inflation literally means the value of traditional assets and commodities goes up in dollar terms.
No, the value of assets doesn’t change - the price goes up.
Price in dollars (or any other currency) is a proxy for value, but not the same thing. A loaf of bread has the same value whether it costs $1, $5, or $0.05.
Surely a bread that requires the worker to work only 5 minutes has a lower value than a bread that requires 2h or labor?
If your house is worth $100,000 one year and the equivalent house costs $105,000 next year, inflation is 5% in the cost of housing.
The absolute value is the same (assuming all things equal).
The price in dollar terms is higher.
The point is that Bitcoin advocates try to imply that Bitcoin is the only place to put cash that is safe from inflation. Meanwhile, investing in nearly any asset or stock will hedge against inflation.
I regret using phrasing that invited pedantic debates about terminology. Only distracts from the point.
I also don’t take any issue with your assertion that the vast majority of “investors” in Bitcoin aren’t interested with the mechanics of the protocol or in the economic possibilities - they’re interested in the price going up, and the majority of them don’t dive any deeper than to see that it has continued to do so.
> The point is that Bitcoin advocates try to imply that Bitcoin is the only place to put cash that is safe from inflation. Meanwhile, investing in nearly any asset or stock will hedge against inflation.
This strikes me as a bit of a straw man, though I’m very much aware that there are definitely some people like this. They’re disproportionately loud to be sure.
Neither inflation nor deflation are a good thing for the economy overall. In the US, the purpose of the Federal Reserve system is to limit and - to the extent that it is possible - control both.
Consider for the sake of this conversation that there are three classes of people: “savers”, who keep a substantial part of their wealth in liquid assets (like USD), “borrowers”, who owe debts denominated in USD, and “lenders”, who are owed debts denominated in USD.
Inflation hurts savers. The “cash in their mattress” is worth less, and they are therefore encouraged to participate in the overall economy. It hurts lenders, who see the future value of the debts owed to them decrease due to the decrease in failure of the USD. It helps borrowers, because the value of their debts are decreased in comparison to the value of their work. Deflation helps savers and lenders, and hurts borrowers.
The big problem here - and from this point forward I’m speaking of my inferences, not from facts - is that both inflation and deflation harm economic mobility.
In an inflationary environment, lenders don’t want to loan money because they money they get back in the future will be worth less. To offset that, interest rates and lending requirements rise, which cuts the poor off from access to capital.
In a deflationary environment, money is expected to be worth more in the future, so borderline investments have to produce a larger expected return in order to “beat” deflation.
Periods of stability are therefore what we should seek, in order to maximize access to capital for those most in need of it (the poor).
Bitcoin is mildly inflationary now, but is more than offset by adoption/speculation. At some point in the future, when mining rewards taper into nothing and mining is incentivized only by transaction fees, Bitcoin will become mildly (but consistently) deflationary. This assumes adoption and speculation is fully saturated by then.
I don’t know if Bitcoin itself will ever get there, but I’m reasonably confident that some cryptocurrency will. From a larger economic perspective, that’s what I want to see from the cryptocurrency world. I could speak all day about the anti-state/pro-individual-freedom aspects, but from a purely economic perspective, I strongly prefer the rapid feedback of fixed-supply (but infinitely divisible) currencies (in the form of boom/bust cycles).
If the UX is better around this, I think they would. It's only in the last 15 years that people really stopped carrying large amounts of cash around. And from what I understand, people still use a lot of cash in places outside of the US.
But for example, there are bitcoin wallets (ZenGo) and nodes (Umbrel) that provide protections around footguns now and make for a much more straightforward user experience.
If Bitcoin sluggishness and fees got sorted out, I think people would like this. But I suspect that the powers that be do not want these issues fixed. Bitcoin is not a threat when it is "just another commodity".
The UX isn’t the point. Why would anyone want to use a protocol with $8 transaction fees and no recourse for vendors stealing their money? We all have credit cards in our pockets that might even pay us cash back to use them, and if a vendor fails to deliver I can get the charges reversed with a phone call.
It’s not a conspiracy by “the powers that be” to keep Bitcoin sluggish and unusable. It’s Bitcoiners themselves who reject proposals to increase block size (see the BCH drama)
Bitcoin holders don’t want people spending or using coins. They only want people to do things that increase price: Buying and hoarding.
They got sorted out via Lightning Network. Instantanious transactions with very low fees are possible. However UX around Lightning is lacking and regular transmission fees are still too low to incentivize the majority of people to take a look at it.
Exactly. Afaik the entire point of inflation modern monetary strategy is to force people to take the money out of their mattresses and participate in the economy.
Bitcoin is basically just a better mattress. The most compelling arguments for bitcoin's usefulness is as a store of value.
So why is encouraging everyone to mindlessly consume through continuous debasement of the currency a good thing? If saving money didn’t mean I would constantly lose my wealth, given interest on cash savings is vastly lower than inflation, I wouldn’t have to buy whatever asset I could get my grubby hands on. I could focus more on quality, and vendors would have to put more effort into convincing me to part with my savings.
Bitcoin proponents like to focus on things like M0 money supply while ignoring the fact that value isn’t created by the government printing money. It’s created by people producing valuable things and businesses.
Likewise, storing money under your mattress isn’t a useful thing to do, digital or otherwise. In the real world, investors don’t stuff cash under mattresses, they invest it in things that produce value. Bitcoin incentivizes the opposite of that: It discourages investing in anything that creates value and instead encourages people to not spend or use the currency at all.
The Bitcoin narrative only works as long as there is a net influx of people looking to stuff digital money under their mattress instead of deploying it to something useful.
This is just not true. It is a tool to let prices properly represent the risk of future price changes. People who save money supply a net positive value to the economy while withholding demand to sometimes in future at the risk that they will afford less for the money. This lowers the price for people that need that immediate demand.
Fiat money and central banks completely destroy that kind of price discovery obviously.
1) yours from an individual point of view
2) the GP from society's point of view
Some inflation is required, I completely agree with that. But the inflation being pushed on the population is unreasonable and equates to stealing imo. Especially given the lack of wage increases over the last 50 years or so for 90+% of people.
Yes, CPI numbers are probably 1-3% depending on where you live. But CPI is bs.
It purposely leaves out things like healthcare, schooling, housing etc.
Real inflation rates is probably closer to 5-8% depending on where you live. That's just unreasonable, and is a result of governments not wanting to put in the hard work to fix real problems. So they take the easy, but worse route, and inflate.
I agree that inflation is too high, but the role of fiscal policy isn’t as singular or simplified as it has been portrayed.
At the end of the day, only one thing drives prices: Supply and demand. Home prices are going up because people are pouring more money into the housing market, and because low interest rates make that money go farther.
Think of it this way: How are home prices inflating (adjusted for interest rates, even) if people’s wages are simultaneously going down?
One of the biggest misunderstandings of financial stimulus is this idea that the average or lower class person will somehow suffer. That would be true if stimulus went straight to companies (as some of it did) but more recent proposals are at least focused on individuals.
Bitcoin is valuable because it holds the collective attention of a huge number of people - This makes it an ideal asset to soak up the surplus fiat which is constantly being injected into the economy which would otherwise have been soaked up by some mega-corporation.
People can collectively keep taking out more loans from banks and dump it on Bitcoin. It will always go up that way so long as the next generation starts doing the same thing.
This is not a new thing. That's basically what was happening with corporate stocks over the past few decades; it's a continuation of the same fiat pyramid scheme except that now the focus point of the scheme is crypto instead of stocks.
The fact that crypto is honest about the reality of the scheme which it benefits from is why it will succeed. They just capitalize on distrust and contempt for the monetary system and it cannot really crash because the really smart investors know exactly what they're buying.
"Yeah I agree that cryptocurrencies are interesting, perhaps some day one will replace the USD. It will probably not be Bitcoin, but rather some other cryptocurrency“.
Watch how they recoil!
For they have been found out, they do not actually care for financial freedom, etc., all these noble crypto goals which can also be achieved with a cryptocurrency that is not Bitcoin.
All they care about is their speculative investment in Bitcoin in particular, so it won't help them much if another crypto becomes the world standard.
It‘s probably <1% that are true believers and >99% that have missed out on a few bull runs and are now hoping to get rich quickly.
Really, try this line some time and you will come to the same conclusion.
In all seriousness, there are various replies to this line of argument. I'm not gonna post them because if you have a genuine interest in learning more instead of just "arguing with a Bitcoin-fanatic" you can easily find them on the internet.
“Could it be that I don’t get this technology and the market is better at valuing it than me? ... No! It is the market that is wrong! I AM SMARTER!”
If both can be true then you're left analyzing the fundamentals and making a call based on that.
Just like GME, Bitcoin requires a "greater fool" to pay more and more. It's only worth what people are willing to pay. Eventually you'll pay 100k for a string of characters that a specific network can process. Similar to Confederate American currency. Never worthless, but a curiosity/collectable to speculate with.
You can keep shouting ponzi but there is so much more to bitcoin than that.
But it was the first and there is something to that in my opinion. Especially given the network effect.
What Bitcoin will never be is:
- A replacement for daily spending
- A stable store of value
What Bitcoin is, imo:
- An appreciating store of value/currency devaluation hedge
- Resistant to government intervention
USD is fiat currency. Fiat simply means by decree. USD is a currency by decree of the US Govt.
It's highly unlikely Bitcoin would ever become a fiat currency by the US Govt. It's also highly unlikely the US Govt would allow a free banking system and allow a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin to fill the void naturally.
Also, Bitcoin can evolve overtime through consensus of it's users. So it is highly unlikely it would be surpassed by a cryptocurrency that is like Bitcoin but marginally different, it would have to be something radically different.
The majority of BTC owners are probably not Bitcoin-fanatics or Bitcoin-maximalists as you described them. I personally know no cryptocurrency owner who only holds Bitcoin or who truly believes it is the be-all-end-all of (crypto)currency.
Maybe these people exist as a small but vocal minority, but those should be disregarded in any online community.
Yeah sure there will be volatility in the price for some time or maybe even forever, but at some point we'll have to accept that there are two camps of people: one that believe in it and have a vested interest in it, including in pushing for its wider adoption and the other group that believes that it has no inherent value.
For what it's worth, I'm in the camp that believes that it does have some value, but no where near the level that it's currently trading at. But I'm also a bit biased/bitter, see my submission history :'(
Fiat currencies are a store of value because they are backed by a Central Bank and by extension by the economy/economies that Central Bank supports combined with the 'general trust' in the currency. Bitcoin only has the latter, so there is a key difference here.
IMO that does not necessarily involve a developer that 'believes in the message' but it does involve every buyer or seller that wants to 'make money'
They only care that their number goes up. Why would it go up? Because more people buy Bitcoin. Why would more people buy Bitcoin? Because the number goes up.
It’s a great system for early adopters, right up until the music stops. Currently there are a lot of businesses, billionaires, and massive mining corporations heavily invested in keeping the hype going, though.
A more appropriate question would be, "Who is not perpetrating the scam?" Crypto and the exchanges are unregulated --- which means that anyone and everyone can get in on the scam.
Example of a bitcoin "pump and dump" scam.
The pump --- "Famous wealthy entrepreneur" announces with much fanfare that he bought a large quantity of bitcoin.
The dump --- "Famous wealthy entrepreneur" sells said large quantity of bitcoin after the price increases 20% in reaction to his announcement.
I am not saying this scam is what happened. I am saying there is nothing currently in place to prevent this sort of scam from happening.
Do this with any regulated security and "famous wealthy entrepreneur" would be in legal trouble. Instead, he is scamming naive crypto "investors" for fun and profit and daring the SEC to take action to stop it.
Firstly, fiat money can often experience instability which is quite extreme. Moderate instability, mostly in form of inflation, is even normal in large parts of the developing world. And just because the Dollar has been reasonable stable for a hundred years or so, people assume that this is the natural state of affairs.
Secondly, is it a reasonable expectation, that a new store of value would be stable from the start? For example, platinum has become more common as a store of value in the last 30ish years, and its value has sprung up and fluctuated quite heavily (see here for example https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Pt_price...). A similar argument can be made regarding storehouses being less trustworthy than traditional banks. This sort of thing would be expected with a new type of value.
Ultimately I think Ethereum's market cap will come close to challenging BTC's in the next 10 years and when that happens we will see a rapid transfer of capital from the BTC chain to the ETH chain.
Kind of subtle and hand-wavy, but I think it's dysfunctionality in terms of leadership and "emergent nature" may be features rather than bugs.
For example a crypto asset sanctioned by a government is based on that government's legitimacy. This kind of means that the government could decide to "turn it off". And with Bitcoin, it's not clear at all who could do this.
But yeah, that's very unsure, I guess.
There are many valid points to be made against bitcoin but "It's used by criminal" isn't one of them.
My experience is exactly the opposite, I think most people don't understand bitcoin at all (or monetary systems, for that matter).
For example, you say that bitcoin is polluting, but in reality it's the power generation companies that pollute, isn't it? The carbon-based power generation facilities, at least. Why don't you "need laws and regulations" for those, but you need them for bitcoin, huh?!
KYCs are abysmal? Clearly you've never used a serious bitcoin exchange with large sums, have you? Personally, I've faced more a lot more scrutiny and privacy invasion in bitcoin exchanges than banks.
The propaganda is mindboggling!
If you ask me, Tesla is openly going to accept bitcoin and MasterCard is also starting to accept crypto, so I would say indeed it's becoming more mainstream and yes more than last week.
Bitcoin is polluting because of the way their POW works, in comparison to other coins. Its literally banging random data to the hash function until it starts with a couple of zeros. Even if you get it this energy from renewable resources these resources will still go into mining instead of going into homes or cars. I personally would go for a less energy taxing financial system, that doesn't burden the energy system as much.
Yes, we also need regulations for those carbon based power generation facilities, which is besides the matter, but that doesn't make the energy consumption of bitcoin any less, nor justifies it.
From my experience, the KYC is only something that recently started. And only on certain exchanges is this really enforced. And afaik it's not done retroactively, something that does happen with current banks. KYC didn't exist for a long time.
Furthermore, due to the difficulty/power consumption of mining people will naturally swarm into pools which will eventually grow bigger, which in turn might result into schemes that could create incentives to pump. There are no regulations in place.
On top of that you can use your money however you've acquired it to buy tons and tons of graphics cards, and mine bitcoins and convert your money.
With our current monetary system we have things in place. They are shit, and sometimes s corrupt, but at least they are there and we have something to work with.
A subpar technical solution which bitcoin at this moment is. Is not going to solve anything of this, it's a fundamental human problem, and technology is not going to solve it, and in this case I think it's going to make matter worse. Bitcoin hasn't proven to be more transparant, more open or more efficient.
How I see it is that Bitcoin represents a vision, or an ideal for many people which resonates because people don't like the system and are upset. Bitcoin hailed as a saviour while it ain't better or faster, or more transparant than the current system in power. It also doesn't stop people with loads of money now buying large sums and selling it to the 1% believing in a false prophecy.
If you see it differently let me know, how exactly. I really would love it to work.
I will try to answer your points to the best of my ability.
> Even if you get it this energy from renewable resources these resources will still go into mining instead of going into homes or cars. I personally would go for a less energy taxing financial system, that doesn't burden the energy system as much.
Well, you are free to use whatever financial system you want, I'm fine with that.
Take into account that bitcoin users and miners are paying for that energy usage. They are competing for energy usage like everyone else, on a fair basis, in a relatively efficient market. You may disagree with their energy usage, like I disagree with other energy consumption activities which I will not mention, but we don't get to decide who or what uses energy, society in aggregate is supposed to decide that using price signals.
In other words, energy consumption/production is supposed to be an efficient market, and whoever has more utility for it (i.e. is willing to pay more) should get to use it (vs. activities which are not profitable/useful enough for society and its limited resources).
If you can make another cryptocurrency with the same pros/cons of bitcoin but with less energy usage, then by all means, incentivize people to use that. Since it will use less energy, users/miners will pay less for energy and therefore transactions will be more price competitive, which means it will win out vs bitcoin in the long term. But so far there is no such cryptocurrency. Other cryptocurrencies have other trade-offs, including less security guarantees.
> Yes, we also need regulations for those carbon based power generation facilities, which is besides the matter
It's not besides the matter, it's the whole matter. Those are the ones that are polluting, it's not bitcoin. Bitcoin couldn't care less how you generate electricity, it can use renewable energy just as easily as carbon-based energy. Do you want less carbon emissions? Tax carbon! Price carbon-based facilities out of the market (which incentivizes renewables production). It's not rocket science.
> From my experience, the KYC is only something that recently started. And only on certain exchanges is this really enforced. And afaik it's not done retroactively, something that does happen with current banks. KYC didn't exist for a long time.
That's not my experience at all, in fact it's the opposite on all those points! All the exchanges I've used have strict limits on how much you can buy/sell without doing KYC checks, which is enforced for all users (current and past), and they've had that for almost all their existence (7 years, at least). I can't explain why our experiences are so different.
Either way, those rules are being enforced today.
> Furthermore, due to the difficulty/power consumption of mining people will naturally swarm into pools which will eventually grow bigger, which in turn might result into schemes that could create incentives to pump. There are no regulations in place.
All sellers of all assets have incentives to pump, can you elaborate on how this is different?
> On top of that you can use your money however you've acquired it to buy tons and tons of graphics cards, and mine bitcoins and convert your money.
You will lose money buying graphics cards to mine bitcoins, believe me. I guess you mean bitcoin mining ASICs, so let's go with that.
Sure, you can theoretically launder money that way, but there are many other ways of laundering money which are less risky.
You see, ironically, laundering money by mining bitcoins will be really stupid since power usage will give you away to the authorities, should they be interested in that. It's trivial to monitor power usage, in fact this is exactly how they detect marijuana production in my country, which is also illegal.
No additional regulations are necessary, thank you very much. An old fashioned police investigation would be more than enough.
> With our current monetary system we have things in place. They are shit, and sometimes s corrupt, but at least they are there and we have something to work with.
That's probably the worst argument I've ever heard for anything. Hey, our genocidal government/spanish inquisition/polluting cars/whatever is shit and/or corrupt, but since it's here, let's continue living with it and not replace it altogether with something better?
> A subpar technical solution which bitcoin at this moment is.
Let me know when anyone comes up with something better, I am really genuinely interested (although other cryptocurrencies don't count because they have different, in my opinion worse, trade-offs).
> Is not going to solve anything of this, it's a fundamental human problem, and technology is not going to solve it, and in this case I think it's going to make matter worse. Bitcoin hasn't proven to be more transparant, more open or more efficient.
Bitcoin is not supposed to solve all problems. It does, however, create a permissionless, irreversible, decentralized, open ledger with a limited coin supply and relatively fast transactions (practically infinitely fast with the lightning network) and with unparallelled security guarantees. Nothing like this ever existed before and nothing else exists like this currently (although some other cryptocurrencies come close).
> I really would love it to work.
It already works, today (well, for 12 years and counting). It works for many people. Maybe not for you, but that's OK.
The more competition and more available options there are for valuable assets, the better.
Gold is as much useless as btc or piece of paper when we hit an iceberg.
Btc was dead and busted at least 10 times already.
It has no 'function' and is using all the electricity in the world. It is solely responsible for global warming and gulags.
I am all seriousness why are those kind of articles showing up amass and are not getting flagged?
It is same low quality repetitive content. Can we stop it already?
https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/
You're off by a factor of 4 and probably more because that website doesn't list the dozens of half-baked Bitcoin bashing blogs posted to HN in the last few weeks.
Can you imagine the posts on Ethereum-based Defi?
That, and its use of technology to exercise influence, like selectively blocking the 996 repo on GitHub, the Great Firewall etc. suggests to me that Bitcoin, that holy democratic unmovable "store of value" is in fact owned by the Chinese government, which just hasn't exercised its option to meddle in it yet.
In this light, most of the economic assertions about Bitcoin enthusiasts are just wrong. It is state-controlled, hackable by a single entity, and can disappear into thin air whenever. It is just that China doesn't choose to do that yet. And no, offline wallets don't help.
You don't even need to think China is less trustworthy than the US to be concerned. Half the shout about Bitcoin is how trustworthy it is compared to the US dollar...
I was surprised by the pump, but didn’t buy in because by the time you see such a thing it is always too late.
All Bitcoin are not worth $50k each, but a Bitcoin is. Someone who can't afford to buy a Bitcoin, will buy 1/50th of a Bitcoin for $1000. That's affordable. Then they'll sell that 1/50th to the next guy for $2000. That prices a Bitcoin at $100k. Try to sell 1000's of coins at that price and the buyer pool will eventually dry up, prices will begin to go down, and all those white knuckle retail investors who can't afford to lose $1k dump and the price collapses. Millions of people each lose a grand here or there. Hedge funds sold long ago to those fractional buyers. Pump and dump 100%.
I'd bet it's a popular method of payment when it comes to illegal activities. And I doubt those people would have an issue with the fluctuations of 10% a day when you consider the benefits they get - anonymity, ease of transport, storage and liquidity.
> Store of Value. Extreme price volatility also makes bitcoin undesirable as a store of value.
Again, same argument, storage of assets you'd lose otherwise (confiscated, repo'ed) if it's from criminal activities.
I got downvoted in another thread for being against bitcoin, but I don't think these concerns are addressed properly out there.
Different from gold? You can't transport billions of it easily across borders, or give to a politician as easily.
So we small holders are basically at the mercy of any big whale who might decide to nudge the price up or down for profit. Then on top of that, there are more elaborate plays like Tether and lots of WallSt money doing their voodoo as well.
Which other asset has the property that it suddenly goes to 200% or 50% and nobody has a clear idea why? The whole thing is the opposite of transparent and if you really wanted to store your wealth you would not put it at the mercy of Bitcoin whales.
Could it be this is revolution world-changing technology and the market is valuing it as such?