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Comment by superbcarrot | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why people's thinking swings to these wild extremes. Why does it have to be either a societal disruptor that changes everything or a doomed ponzi scheme? Can't it be something like "oh we tried to have cool internet money, turned out that it's not that great, some people are still into it I guess".

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there are a lot of people in the "not that great" and "still into it I guess" camps. Those just don't make headlines. Also, some morons can only read headlines. Don't worry, the world is not as idiotic as the headline writers and readers.

'into it' for what reason? That's where the Ponzi part comes from.

because there is no such thing as "cool invented money" it is either useful for society or it is a scam.

It becomes a Ponzi scheme the moment you realize that the idea is intrinsically broken, but still you keep shilling it and making grow the value exponentially, (value that somebody has to pay). BTW, flagged, really mods??

When does a Ponzi scheme stop being a Ponzi scheme?

This is a really, truly weird way to defend Bitcoin, whose claim to fame is that its only value comes from its uptake. The argument goes, "governments can fiat money, so why can't we?"

There is no unique creation of value anywhere in the Bitcoin life cycle. Any liquidity or anonymity externality that doesn't equally apply to USD is probably accruable only by criminals and traffickers.

The transactions are slow and costly, and there's no guarantee that some governmental research agency hasn't already broken the cryptographic underpinnings.

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