The fact that YOU do not believe that future will happen doesn't make it a Ponzi, just a bad investment in your eyes. And yes, some people talking up their book and trying to manipulate it's price — a pump and dump — is still a scam on their part, but it doesn't make the underlying asset a Ponzi scheme.
At a bare minimum there are some fringe use cases (no matter how unsavoury - dark web, ransomware, etc.), so I'd argue that barring a major security flaw, even if bitcoin was banned everywhere, the floor price would be >0. (I am considerably more optimistic for long term use cases, but we're just talking about whether it's a Ponzi or not here, which doesn't require any extra optimism.)
I honestly don't know if BTC will end up above the current price in 2, 5, 10, 50 years time, but I do still think it's incredibly cool that we were able to create something with a demonstrable non-zero value and no centralised control.
The challenge now is to keep iterating the ideas, make new weird and wonderful things, throw them all at the wall, and see if anything sticks. Luckily plenty of people seem as excited about that research and exploration for the sake of it as me, so I think we're going to get to find out :)
then you have the HN holier than thou geniuses who think they have it all figured out because they can quickly scream ponzi over and over. it's fuckin weird. i always subscribed to this forum because it's full of nerds who are deeply interested in tech and can debate things neutrally. so not the case lately.
and this is coming from someone who is deeply interested in the tech and fascinated by some of the subscultures that had been created out of crypto, while also remaining extremely skeptical and very turned off by some of the scams and mindless fanatics that exist. but, i still dive deep into whitepapers, and read a lot to have a good opinion on a subject, like...you should. there is A LOT of interesting shit in this space. i've been into it for a couple of months now and have yet to scratch the surface, honestly.
...yet the comments are always the same low effort crap which makes me realize nobody knows or understands a goddamn thing about this tech on here. really reductive surface level points.
actual smart or just hustlers? It is a scam. Yes, you can make money from it. But are you ok with ripping people off? Because the only way to make a gain with any coin is to force the next bigger fool to sit on a bigger loss. They might not have realized it but it's there. All of these made up usages are just there to trick people to buy your coin at an elevated price -- but there's still no uses of coins which have a real world use case and couldn't be better done with a centralized database (or sometimes git). I just wrote up in a top comment that when tech does deliver something real it needs no explanation or these discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29951993
You also can take a very lucrative job at Facebook. It might be interesting tech too. I refused one this week.
Do not think us stupid for having a conscience.
You seem to forget that it's about interacting in the crypto economy, not selling all your coins to make more fiat. I wonder how long this fad will last of people hating on crypto because they don't understand it.. Probably forever?
Edit: I can't answer for some reason below but I can edit this one, it's miners vs everyone else.
That's what the big blockers thought, and they got their own BCH network to show for it. I can't find any adoption metrics to show that the miner-controlled BCH chain has won.
On BTC, miners just run the code and get rewarded to do that simpleton job.