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Comment by ikt | Hacker News Reader

So by and by you're saying something like Cardano is definitely not a ponzi because it's extremely focused on doing everything academically?

https://docs.cardano.org/explore-cardano/relevant-research-p...

If this is a ponzi then I have to give them credit, to be doing research at a university level in order to swipe me of a bundle of dollars is amazing. They don't have anything about making themselves richer at the expense of new users either, for some reason it's all focused on developing a great blockchain that is sustainable and is usable for dapps which ultimately provides utility for end users.

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I know what Cardano is because I've heard of it through the Haskell community. I bet most people have not. How do you sift through the thousands of ridiculous coins out there and say to yourself, "Oh, they probably have integrity"?

This continues to be a mystery to me as it seems no one can put themselves in the common man shoes. The common man doesn't care about tech. They don't care about the integrity behind it. They care about whether it can make them money.

List 5 coins I've never heard of and I'd probably say, "ponzi scheme" without hesitation. Do I actually know if it is? No. Does it matter? No. If the majority of shitcoins come off as a ponzi scheme, then why would anyone think something like Cardano isn't?

You don't need to know or trust any underlying technology though. The only thing you need is a basic grasp of Darwinian natural selection.

The "shittier" those "shitcoins" are, the quicker they'll die out. The ones that heavily incentivize early adopters might hang around longer, but they too will inevitably fizzle out if they don't offer any practical innovation.

But if something has a steadily growing user base year after year, maybe it's worth some attention after all?

Or you can just keep screeching "Shitcoins! Shitcoins!". I guess we can all settle for ourselves what form of discourse we consider more constructive and worthwhile.

GP said uncorrelated. I don’t think that’s an effective counterpoint, although GP seems to be indicating anti-correlation. Either way, this is about undergraduate students, and I also don’t think you can claim superlative undergraduate performance for that particular founder. Maybe crypto is where motivated underperformers found a place at the table because the overperformers are settled in more civilized places. Also, these research papers in cryptocurrency are probably not comparable to serious contemporary work in mainstream journals of pure math and theoretical computer science, but I am personally fascinated by the way that old research is slowly finding it’s way into applications through the sometimes absurd financialization of these ideas, enough to get scammed and swindled a bit myself.

That wouldn't be a 'billion dollar'+ cryptocurrency though would it

It’s a 16 billion dollar market cap currently.

Guess we'll find out which it is in the next few months. Proof of stake is just as vulnerable to Ponzi, especially if promising any sort of outsized interest returns through middle-men services. The 'scientific, peer-reviewed philosophy' statements appear as marketing, with peer review appearing to be crypto tech conferences (not itself a poor measure), not the classical 'peer-review' format the statements would allude to.

We're finding out it seems...

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