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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

A ponzi is when an investment that supposedly produces a return actually pays the funds needed to deliver that return from new entrants to the scheme rather than productive enterprise.

Given that there’s literally no productive return-producing enterprise underpinning any of this it’s totally fine to consider the word ponzi at least loosely applicable to the entire concept of cryptocurrency as practiced.

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By this definition most crypto wouldn‘t be a ponzi. E.g. bitcoin doesn‘t claim that funds are invested in productive entreprise. It is clear that it is only a value store (like gold). Whether it is any good at storing value long term, we will see.

Bitcoin proponents definitely (for a time) claimed that it was Bitcoin's utility as a currency that gave it value in the first place. That everyone would need some because everyone would use it to transact. That's a claim of an inherent investment value that didn't actually exist, making Bitcoin exactly like a distributed Ponzi scheme.

It was originally created to be a form of non-fiat democratized currency. It is exactly that even though it's not its most popular use which is as a store of value. I don't see how that makes it a Ponzi scheme. I buy things with it a few times per year and do my degenerate sports gambling with it all the time. It works within seconds for almost no cost.

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