Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme
jacobinmag.com
jacobinmag.com
I've read this "crypto has no use-case" meme a lot recently, and it's always perplexed me. Crypto is clearly the easiest way to do international payments right now, particularly for countries with restrictive capital controls, like, for example, Argentina (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-13/argentina...).
Sometimes this is qualified as "crypto has no use-case except crime", but what obligation do I, a US person, have to follow or respect corrupt Argentinian regulations?
In any case, my point is that the value comes from the societal relationships that invest the asset with value, not the physical nature of it.
No, I mean the labor of the workforce of the nation.
bitcoin is by design inefficient, and it could have been efficient by design. the inefficiency model implies the need for large compute resources, which is a form of industrial, technological, and infrastructural prowess and capacity. See smaller and more power-insecure nations banning crypto-mining. Bitcoin only makes sense from an electricity standpoint when you have excess electricity that you would otherwise have no way of using. Hydropower, solar, and virtually all power plants have some excess capacity that they could theoretically convert directly to mining operations, for as long as they had no consumer power demands. The theory behind bitcoins numbers/algos is that the power plant shouldn't have to make a choice between serving customers and running crypto operations, they make the most possible serving customers, and burning excess supply.
Market conditions have temporarily distorted bitcoin mining distribution, but with fewer coins left to mine and a growing understanding of bitcoins algorithmically enforced economics, you will see it banned from everywhere that it does "waste energy", and lots of miners will realize that "stateless" currency depends entirely on industrial surcapacity which is entirely dictated and governed by the state. So a nation's governance structures and ability to adapt to a developing world turn out to be just as critical as the country's ability to supply massive energy demand. The places that are able to do this are typically worth spending money in so it makes sense as a unit of "value".
bitcoin was an attempt to replace gold mining and gold transfers, but it was also an effort to represent something about the miner who mined it. A bitcoin miner had to have lots of cheap energy and the technological capability to run distributed compute efficiently. bitcoin has been narrowing in on global energy surcapacity, and it turns out there isn't any. This will have all kinds of effects on the price of bitcoin, as lots of inefficient players and players in insufficiently developed economies are forced out of the mining pool.
however in places where bitcoin is mined efficiently, one could theoretically use those same bitcoins to purchase either cheap (or even green) electricity, efficient (cool) compute, or whatever else goes along with running massive mining facilities.
Imagine replacing a valuable material asset with nothing. I get that bitcoin was designed as a hedge against market volatility. But instead of soaring when the traditional market sours it has become a leading indicator of volatility. If you look at the crash of 2020 and the one happening now buttcoin variants preformed poorly almost a month before the market did meanwhile gold is doing what its supposed to.
> however in places where bitcoin is mined efficiently, one could theoretically use those same bitcoins to purchase either cheap (or even green) electricity, efficient (cool) compute, or whatever else goes along with running massive mining facilities
This is stupid, who would burn energy to buy energy? Bitcoin proponents who believe these lies probably also believe in overunity, free energy and perpetual motion.
If an American wants to send money to someone in Argentina they have plenty of options that are cheaper and safer than Crypto: Wise, PayPal, Xoom, even Western Union.
If an Argentinian wants to evade capital control laws in their own country crypto may be their best option. Just calling it corrupt, as a foreigner, does not make it legal or ethical.
> Blue Dollar AKA Dolar Blue or unofficial dollar is parallel dollar rate of USD in Argentina. This is the cost of buying and selling a physical dollar bill in a cueva, or clandestine financial house in Buenos Aires. This is the best price you’ll get if you are buying or selling physical bills, and the transaction is done with no involvement of any government-sanctioned or licensed entity (like a bank).
What does exchanging physical dollar bills in Argentina have to do with remittances, or crypto? Many countries have informal or black markets for exchanging currencies, separate from the official exchange rates. That is not the same as remittances unless you are sending envelopes of dollars to someone in Argentina. My comment responds to the claim "Crypto is clearly the easiest way to do international payments right now," which simply isn't true, not even to Argentina.
That, who would have guessed, there are places who'll happily convert the crypto remittances at the Blue rate. So the people you send money to will get more money, while you'll send the same amount, just in a different way.
And the people receiving money, would would guess that, will be happier by receiving more money instead of less :)
Reading the Blue Dollar web site I noticed that Argentina recently started taxing crypto transactions, which means the government is requiring exchanges to report those transactions, like they already do for USD transactions.
I seriously doubt that people who already use the unofficial exchange rate will use the official exchanges for crypto...
https://www.pymnts.com/news/cross-border-commerce/cross-bord...
A reply with useful information works better than writing that someone absolutely doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but your comment did spur me to look more into the subject.
I made my initial reply because the amount of disinformation about crypto on HN is frightening.
You may want to incorporate that to your "reading lens" priors when reading dismissive information here: there is a large probability the person has no idea what they are talking about, and is simply repeating something.
And BTW it's not a value judgement, as repeating stuff that's true is good, valuable, and a valid default heuristic for most other topics on HN.
I make international payments regularly using things like Wise (formerly transferwise), and it’s far simpler than any crypto solution, and accepted by everyone.
And yes, I own some crypto and could use it if anyone was willing to take it.
The only case where it is simpler is there there are capital control, and in that case it is being used illegally.
And if you're sending money to Argentinians, they would beg you for it, as otherwise your recipient would just receive a fraction of the USD you send because of the difference between the official rate the government enforce, and the real rate.
Read about Blue Dollar in Argentina and you'll realize you're very mistaken in your idea that Wise is the solution there.
Nothing is lost to you in either case, but if you send it USD in the official ways, something is lost to those who'll receive less money.
Temporary, if you believe it can be strangled.
Given the lack of success of the Argentinian government with the Blue Dollar, my Bayesian prior is that it won't be temporary!
Now think about the general case: you pay a bit less than the going price in the rest of the world, to take into account the problem of "where the cash come from" (certainly not a difficulty for a country with as large as Argentina, with multiple land borders and sea ports) and price in the cost of solving this problem. Given the right price, you'll find clients, as every trade needs a counterparty, for a mutually beneficial exchange.
And you then have the answer to your question.
It's a good thing for everyone - including the people in Argentina who get to enjoy the Blue Dollar by receiving more from the remittance.
Check https://www.pymnts.com/news/cross-border-commerce/cross-bord... if you still can't see crypto being useful for remittances.
BTW It's quite frightening to see replies likes yours. Most people here on HN seems to have a blind admiration for governments and laws, with about 0 critical thinking abilities when it comes to policies that are ultimately harmful (for ex, based on what I read here about Wise etc, I'd summarize the default HN position to "let's make our apps obey currency control laws in Argentina, even if it further impoverishes the locals!") until they are ultimately proved pointless (ex: turning back Australia into a prison island to control a virus as contagious as the smallpox... yeah not gonna work, but thanks for demonstrating that)
If the people of Argentina can use cryptocurrency to route around the oppressive and unjust laws they suffer under, I say more power to them.
Cash is what the illegal drug trade runs on, and governments are generally very bad at preventing that.
One interesting data-point about Argentina is that currently about 8% of all physical US dollar bills (About $130 billion) are in Argentina (https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2021/06/28/a-cryp...).
This is not because such payments are illegal, but rather because the Brazilian financial system has poor norms and poor rule-of-law: https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/16/wise-accuses-former-brazil....
There is a reasonable question where allowing money laundering for good would offset the use cases for those with more evil intentions.
My opinion is probably not since most people in Argentina are going to launder a fraction of a BTC at a time, but all that would be offset by the harm from criminal syndicates (drugs, human trafficking, even oppressive governments).
This feels like solving an edge case with a massive potential downside. It would be a shame to have provided a technology that freed the people of Argentina, but at the same time, allowed the narcos to enslave them.
The receiving account holder may need to declare the payment to their local tax authorities, but that's true of crypto too, it's just not automatic.
Whereas with crypto, you get transparent fees/rates, transaction confirmation in minutes, at any time of day, with a permanent cryptographic record of payment, and you don't unnecessarily leak information to the recipient's local tax authorities.
I can hold foreign currency in my bank account (many banks allow this), so sending money in exact amounts internationally is trivial. And £20 isn't opaque or expensive. Much easier than putting a coin order in and then sending that.
Bypassing local law enforcement isn't a feature for me. These systems exist for reasons.
We're blinded by what was, and wrongfully infer what will be.
Also, we mix in our biases, Douglas Adams said it best:
"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
You seem to be only choosing technologies that were exceptionally successful. An odd bias.
Most of them aren’t.
- What's the total valuation today of companies dealing with Laserdisk?
- What's the total valuation today of companies dealing with crypto?
You'll have your answer about who may have a bias there.
I live in the Houston area. Some heart surgeon decided to chase his childhood dream, bought a plot of land in Texas City (I-45 south of Houston) and got a couple other backers to build a mini amusement park. He bought the land for who-knows how much. He _immediately_ bought some whirly rides. ...and that was it.
It sat like that for more or less 2 years then a metal building went up alongside the rides that have been sitting idle. About a year later a metal fence went up around the property. The waist-high weeds got mowed about every 6 months and it's all sitting idle today. This guy and his marks have surely dumped no small amount of money on it. Dude is a heart surgeon so he's not a complete moron --- he's just not good at project management _at all_. So don't use investment value as a bulletproof metric - and so far almost all of it has been speculative investment. (I'm not aware of any successful cryptocurrency businesses that have turned a profit yet. [and I could be totally wrong here, so plz tell me])
I think the real money to be made in crypto is "selling the shovels". A gold miner could've struck it rich in the California gold rush, but more often than not his costs exceeded his return on investment. The shopkeepers back in town that sold the gear made all the money. I think that's where there's money to be made. Selling hardware and consulting services to miner operations, taking sizable fees for lobbying and marketing efforts, and selling posh real estate to crypto startups.
Maybe they are all wrong and you and the few people decrying crypto are right, but I would tend to go with the majority vote (investors vote their beliefs with their money!) and even then, unless you are shorting the market (which will have lost you some large amount of money most of the time), I fail to see what you stand to gain from the contrarian position.
Given your comment from yesterday ("I'm still skeptical of blockchain as a whole and hoping someone can help explain this to me.") I think you should consider the hypothesis that these people voting with their money might be different from the heart surgeon you mentioned to check if now may not be the time to revise your priors.
It's fine to express skepticism when a new technology gets immediately dismissed by people who may lack foresight. It's harder to sustain that when over a decade goes by and the "new thing" is still struggling to deliver on its promises.
You want us to believe that crypto-currency is like the first three examples, but it's been long enough now to be certain that it's far more like the latter.
You may not believe me, never mind then, but sometimes I see good criticism with interesting new ideas and little to no appeal to emotions, but this has none of that.
The other comments on this thread are worthless and just shilling crypto.
> The other comments on this thread are worthless and just shilling crypto.
Let me try to present a rebuttal which hopefully you will not dismiss as a "shill" for crypto.
To begin, Tether is obviously ridiculous and most people, even in crypto acknowledge this. However, Tether is not precisely an unregulated "central" bank, but rather a semi-regulated private bank. I say semi-regulated, because they do have some oversight (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/23/tether-bitfinex-reach-settle...). It also has many competitors such as USDC, Binance USD, DAI, which are comparable in size: https://coinmarketcap.com/view/stablecoin/. USDT is less than half of the stablecoin market by capitalization, but it is over 80% of the daily transaction volume of the stablecoin market.
If we dig a little deeper though, you can see that the daily transaction volume of Tether often exceeds its market cap: https://nomics.com/assets/usdt-tether/history. This suggests that most owners of Tether are only holding it for a short period of time, which make sense given that on centralized exchanges like Binance it many, if not most, markets are denominated in USDT as one half of a trading pair.
So why, if Tether is generally understood by the market to be backed by nothing, and run by dubious individuals, is it still worth something? It's not because people are stupid, but because of a combination of 1. the enormous international demand for cryptocurrency assets, 2. the lack of sufficient "backed" digital dollars to efficiently lubricate the quantity of transactions people want to make and 3. Gresham's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law), which says given two kinds of commodity money, people will spend the less valuable one, and save the more valuable one.
It's honestly a fascinating example of a money forming out of the matrix of exchanges in a barter economy, and yes, it's a dubious product that will likely break its peg and crash to nothing at some point. But because the total market cap is relatively small, there's not really any significant contagion or "bank run" risk here (BTC lost more than Tether's entire market cap today and mostly people just shrug and say "that's crypto").
The question I want you and all people who say "crypto is a fraud, ponzi scheme, has no value" to ask yourself is "If I'm right, why is there such demand to buy crypto?". Some crypto-critics argue it is because people are stupid and greedy, but to me that's a lazy and elitist answer. My interpretation is that crypto demand is driven by the same forces that cause people to buy condo's in New York City, London, Vancouver, etc. which then sit empty. It's mostly, right now, a combination of inflation and capital flight.
But there is also a growing sector of the crypto-economy which is capable of doing things which are not feasible in traditional finance (e.g. crowd-funding like Gitcoin, anonymous payments like ZCash, or decentralized money like MakerDAO). I don't think current crypto-asset valuations are justified by that sector, but I am hopeful that in the coming years those use cases will grow and will create extraordinary value for the world.
There are a few reasons, but the main one is the same reason there was demand for beanie babies.
Crypto is only more complicated because it also has other groups, like anarchists/libertarians that see crypto as subversive to government, taxes, and regulation. They buy in out of a mistaken philosophical view that it furthers their political ends.
But the key factor is that they were they fed stories via a new information medium: The Internet. And the Internet is also where beanie babies could be bought (via ty.com) and resold (via Ebay). An argument could be made that Ebay might not even exist today without the beanie babies phenomenon which gave it early traction.
Is that not by definition fraud? It's like the US federal reserve printing a bunch of stimulus. At least our central banks are nominally appointed by elected officials, on the basis of a social contract.
> Bitfinex and its principals have not yet been indicted by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, but crucially, not in the same sense that you have not been indicted by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/10/28/tether-and-bitfinex/
I definitely am not in any way pro-Tether, and I think the industry/the world would be better off without them. However, I do not think this implies a. that Tether serves no function, b. that their collapse will bring down wider markets or c. that this meaningfully reflects on the ethics of cryptocurrency as a whole.
As far as central banks go, I would love to see the adoption of a central bank digital currency at the Fed, ideally with accounts open to the general public. This would combat the plague of regressive fees at commercial banks, allow future economic stimulus to go directly to spenders, and perhaps even allow people to transfer money over the weekend.
The ability to print money and misrepresent the value of the dollar (i.e., CPI, GDP) combined with incentives for personal enrichment should be evidence enough that government-controlled currencies is not the scalable solution we thought it was.
We're about to experience inflation like we've not seen in the US in a long time and the resulting transfer of wealth and increase in inequality will be a catalyst for the adoption of crypto.
I hope to see you all there.
If cryptocurrency is an inflation hedge, why are the cryptomarkets tanking when inflation is freshly high?
This reads like the writer had a conclusion in mind and couldn't be bothered to actually look at any of the existing or potential future use cases and wrote off the entire thing as a scam. It's possible the conclusion is true but too many of the actually important details are missing and too much of the focus is on completely irrelevant things (like the fact that some blockchains are proof of work so even proof of stake blockchains would be Ponzi schemes) for this to even be worth reading for most people.
If distributed, decentralized, append-only databases have wider applications (outside of crypto), what are those applications? When will we see the disruption?
David Gerard showed that blockchain is wearing no clothes in Attack of the 50-foot Blockchain and nothing has happened since he published that book to make me think he was wrong.
The author isn't claiming they're skeptical. They're claiming it's a ponzi. The burden of proof is on them to demonstrate their claim has merit. They can't fall back on saying they're just skeptical. That's not what they're arguing.
He's just making a prediction, as a novel Nostradamus, and not considering multiple scenarios.
Blockchains (and cryptocurrencies that ride atop them) keep track of all the transactions going back to its inception. Those blocks get passed around the chain. Some nodes archive them, but don't old blocks still circulate? How far back do blocks get circulated before they're no longer circulating (2, 3, 4, 5, 10 tranactions back, I'm sure it depends on the currency)?
I've heard right now BTC is running at like 3 transactions a second. Astronomically far from the same number of transactions in fiat currency. What happens if crypto was to ever reach parity with fiat transactions? Every pack of gum, every donut, every Starbucks transaction gets circulated through all nodes the same way that every hedge fund movement, real estate closure, or business acquisiton does? It seems like all the history blocks would gum up the network traffic of circulating current/real-time transactions. The amount of overhead to process 3 transactions per second isn't enough to delay those 3 transactions, but as more traffic enters the chain it seems like the amount of supporting chatter will grow even faster.
How do cryptocurrencies offload the administrative/archival overhead from the transactions in order to process transactions so you're not standing around waiting for your BTC to process payment before your coffee gets cold?
In network terms, we don't all rely on root DNS servers. Those are there for other DNS servers to pull from a trusted source. Hitting up the root DNS servers is still bad etiquette, right? The local mirroring DNS servers are faster and provide lookups for the here-and-now. If it doesn't know, the DNS server will query the roots to locate the authoritative record keeper for the domain in question (and cache it for future reference).
I see blockchain like that DNS but it requires all DNS servers to agree with the resolution before providing the results to the user. That seems like it will be incredibly slow and at some point all that administrative chatter will outstrip the capacity to process a transaction or "query".
With fiat currency, we have localized transactions. Sometimes a credit card processor may go down, sometimes your bank cannot be reached. In those cases you can resort to paying with cash or gasp a check. Those transactions get processed at the lowest local level and there's no need to concern some bank in Pakistan or the US Federal Reserve that you just paid $3.50 for an overpriced soda at Jersey Mikes (which they are!) from your checking account.
I'm very keenly interested in how these problems are to be solved when/if the dream of crypto being a truly global alternative to "cash"/fiat.
Can someone fill me in?
> Lightning is a layer on top of bitcoin that can handle an arbitrarily high transaction throughput over time, while still basing itself on bitcoin’s underlying security. It works by opening multi-signature channels between nodes, so that a user can send coins from one node to another, using a series of interconnecting nodes along the way.
So how does doing this exchange bypass the blockchain "administrative" traffic? Do transactions in Lightning get priority while non-transactional details get lower priority? She says BTC is the "final settlement layer", which I understand better since she words it like that. So that means that all transactions will be between apps and those apps abstract the actual transactions between accounts? So it's not that end users will be using the blockchain any more than bank customers use the SWIFT network, right? Such transactional exchanges will go through a clearinghouse to settle transactions?
The Lightning Network has progressed a lot in 5 years, but this article is still an excellent intro to the basics: https://www.coincenter.org/education/key-concepts/lightning-...
Citation needed. The fact that there are lots of scams or projects of dubious value doesn't prove that everything is. It's not really different than looking at tech startups, most are bad ideas that won't ever work but some do work.
If that’s the base assumption, it doesn’t matter if crypto projects do anything at all because they’re still no worse than the traditional investments (in this way of thinking).
Saying they're a Ponzi Scheme over and over again doesn't make them one. Blaming the group for the individual is certainly in the zeitgeist, but it's still BS. There's so many ways it's not a Ponzi Scheme. Maybe Tether is? But Tether isn't all cryptocurrencies.
"... making unmediated online transactions securely in a trustless environment in this way is not without costs."
Yea, sure, but it doesn't support the thesis.
"Given that cryptocurrencies don’t produce anything of material value..."
How is that a given? What defines material value? Is the author a Gold cheerleader? Do they expect us to eat dollar bills?
"The 2008 financial crisis made clear why the financial sector must be brought under public control."
What does public control mean? They are, that's what the SEC is.
Ok, so that would suggest that Tether is a Ponzi scheme, if anything. Not all of crypto. smh