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Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

I increasingly see this sales pitch as similar to a pyramid scheme schilling vitamin supplements.

Yes, vitamins "have some benefits", but no one wants them. If they cured cancer, sure. But they dont.

Likewise, sure, an international distributed ledger that can compute about as much as a school calculator "has some benefits", but it doesnt cure anything. Least of all "international finance".

Crypto-holders (ie., people in the pyramid scheme) want the debate to be about the technology... so you can't quite see the structure of whats going on.

ie., that there's no demand for the product. No one wants your 100MW blockchain calculator

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You're confused about the difference between "something having value" and "something being revolutionary and universally transformative".

People buy vitamins, that is a fact. From walgreens or CVS. I do not buy vitamins, but some people do. I know that most people buying vitamins do not benefit from them. Does it follow that vitamins "have no value"? No, they just have less value than the currently market would suggest.

I'm referring to the marketing of MLM companies around supplements which do heavily imply (or claim) that they have often dramatic and curative benefits.

Customers dont believe this, they dont want supplements from MLMs. But dupes believe it enough that, at least, they buy a warehouse full and start shilling; or otherwise, think that enough other people can be duped.

Now, since there's no actual demand, these dupes are forced to sell to other dupes just the prospect of further selling, not the actual product for its own use. Since there's no actual market, this whole thing collapses ("when the dupes run out") and 95% of people lose money with warehouses full of product they cant sell.

This is, in my view, where crypto is heading. I believe within the year there'll be a lot of impoverished people with wallets full of useless coins: though, of course, we're already there in many cases.

I think this is patently obvious to the 1% of crypto holders who own and run the crypto market. It's a scam.

This has already happened 3 times, and it will keep happening. The dynamic is more complicated than what you're describing.

Crypto isn't a big MLM. Crypto is a family of technologies that make it possible to easily build MLMs.

The analogous thing in traditional MLM is the internet or mail. The difference is that the internet is much more valuable as a technology than crypto. That doesn't mean crypto has 0 value though, it's just that the internet is one of the most valuable things humans have created.

I buy vitamins. It’s because of a vitamin deficiency identified by my yearly doctor visit. When I am good about taking them, my numbers come back good. When I am not, she reports a deficiency again.

I don’t guarantee my life would be worse if I continued my vitamin D deficiency, but my doctor suggested I fix it and CVS sells me the fix. Certainly not a useless product until the scientists tell me my doctor is a quack.

Difference being vitamins can be produced in a profitable way despite limited value. Bitcoin, by design, can not.

What does that even mean? Plenty of people have profited off of bitcoin.

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