For example, major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin aim to replace state issued fiat currencies with privately issued currencies that have limited/fixed supply and no connection to the real economy. That's insanely stupid and detrimental. They also aim to preserve privacy when teleporting billions across continents - a dangerous and anti-social feature no society needs.
The vast majority of ICOs and DeFi projects are just a way to do regulatory arbitrage - issue unregulated or lightly regulated securities that are excelent for speculation, but have close to non-existent real world utility. The same for NFTs, completely fictional wealth creation that was powered solely by the speculative search for greater fools.
The field as a whole, despite probably hundreds of billions in real wealth dumped into it by now, produces close to zero value for society, or even negative if we consider the impact of resource burn and facilitation of money laundry. It has spiraled into a pure speculative mania that destroys the lives of many retail investors: https://twitter.com/coinfessions
You're being straight up dishonest. Darknet Markets have been operating for over a decade now, they obviously have tons of legitimate uses and have created a plenty of wealth.
If the only utility of crypto is in facilitating illegal transactions, then prima facie anyone in crypto should be charged with money laundering.
For crypto to be financially successful, strictly speaking it doesn't need to create wealth, it only needs to attract it.
Plenty of profitable businesses are arguably a net negative to society - tobacco, gambling, private prisons, ad agencies, data brokers - but that doesn't make them ponzi schemes.
Speculative crypto assets are not intrinsically valuable, they have no desirable properties other than the ability to make you rich in the future by selling them to someone else. If investors would be guaranteed their crypto assets will not appreciate, the vast majority would dump them immediately. (so called stable coins are the exception, but they only make sense as a component of the crypto ecosystem, people need them as enablers of speculation).
You might argue that the need to hope for quick financial success is a basic human need, which crypto fulfills, so it does indeed provide value for its users; but by then it's indistinguishable from classic Ponzi schemes or gambling. It's in fact even more toxic than gambling, since it disguises as a form of wealth creation and legitimate investment, as opposed to a game of poker which every investor can recognize as zero sum.
> Obvious enough to anyone who actually understands how bitcoin, or eth work, it does not fit the definition of a ponzi scheme.
This is indeed obvious to anyone who knows what both of those things are. He very clearly explained where they got it wrong.
Same applies here.
> Saying "you don't understand something" is not an argument
It's a statement of fact.
Edit: I can't reply below due to HN ratelimits, so I will do so here.
>Saying "it's not" is not an argument, particularly when a good argument has just been laid out in front of you.
It's pretty clear that you haven't actually read the article we're discussing, it does not at any point attempt to explain how cryptocurrencies would meet the definition of a Ponzi scheme.
The part which comes closest is this, but you'd be delusional to call it a "good argument"
>There's already substantial evidence that the crypto space is infested with frauds, scams and ponzis. But I would go further. The entire crypto ecosystem is ponzi. The whole thing depends on ever more people parting with their savings and wages to pay the lunatic returns promised by the platforms to people who can provide the liquidity they so desperately need.
That's just not what a Ponzi scheme is!
I look forward to a good argument debunking the ponzi scheme thesis. Saying "it's not" is not an argument, particularly when a good argument has just been laid out in front of you.
Edited to add:
> It's pretty clear that you haven't actually read the article we're discussing, it does not at any point attempt to explain how cryptocurrencies would meet the definition of a Ponzi scheme.
Yeah that's not a good argument either. Since I did actually read it -- and it does.
Here's an exercise, I'll replace a bunch of words with their opposites, and present it as my counter argument:
"This is a great argument, and not clickbait. Obvious enough to anyone who actually understands how bitcoin, or eth work, it fits the definition of a ponzi scheme."
Are you convinced? Do you know where you got it wrong?
Cryptocurrency in general is not an investment promising profits, but a tool for payments (or a smart contract platform, whatever).
A Ponzi scheme is a fraud which takes money from investors, pretends to invest it in something profit-generating, but only pays out profits to earlier investors using funds from more recent investors.
Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, ethereum or monero are nothing like a ponzi scheme. There's zero pretence that it would be a profitable investment. Who would even be paying you these ponzi-dividends?
It's utterly stupid to make me spell this out, presumably anyone making the claim that "The entire crypto ecosystem is a ponzi" should know what those things are.
I'll use the wikipedia definition for a ponzi scheme because it's simpler.
> A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.
It doesn't say dividends. It just says "pays profits". Those profits in dollars could be realized by the early investors selling their stake. No dividends needed -- though some would say "mining" is a dividend producing activity -- I'm not sure I would though.
You always have exactly the same amount of cryptocurrency, with no serious claim made by the authors as to why you should profit by merely owning some.
(Of course, it's a bit silly of me to use "cryptocurrency" as a general term when there certainly are cryptocurrencies which are ponzis. But I'm referring to the "serious" projects like Bitcoin, Ethereum or Monero)
Also, you forgot a crucial bit from the wikipedia page:
> Named after Italian businessman Charles Ponzi, the scheme leads victims to believe that profits are coming from legitimate business activity (e.g., product sales or successful investments), and they remain unaware that other investors are the source of funds.
> leads victims to believe that profits are coming from legitimate business activity
I don't think this is true of any of the big cryptocurrencies.
> and they remain unaware that other investors are the source of funds
Of course everyone knows this.
I'm willing to listen to where he's wrong, but saying it's due to a lack of understanding ain't it chief.
At the end of the day, crypto is likely only useful for one thing and that is an exchange of value and identity for AI/ML applications. Just like Splunk was search for machine data, crypto is payments for machine entities. Until that becomes a reality, the markets are just speculative and uninteresting. Ethereum especially, given no real thing occurs on that chain other than bad code and hacks that lose "investors" millions.
Lightning has been the best thing that has happened to crypto in a long time and the reason why is because it can scale Bitcoin to the numbers we need for large amounts of transactions between machine entities...
> CoinDesk reports: Just over 51%, or 24.6 million addresses of the total 47.9 million, are below purchase price on their investments, according to data provided by blockchain analytics firm IntoTheBlock. About 45% are in the money, which means they are boasting unrealized gains, while the rest are roughly at break-even.
This is the opposite of the canonical ecosystem [1].
Most tech stocks have a plausible explanation for future revenues, other than "the next investor will buy your chips for a higher price"
Your dreamt of, decentralized system that was imagined by Satoshi is gone. It will either never exist anymore and be gangrened by said centralized exchanges (which are the only things that are artificially prop up the value of your coins), or it will go back to the days where you can pay 10 000 BTC for a pizza because someone decided it would be fun. ETH would be worthless without exchanges (because its current value is only propped up by "what bullshit can I sell that mimics real world services but without any legal repercussions when I commit fraud and exchange it for cash, disappearing in the Bahamas in the process?"), doge would be worthless, USDT would be worthless, etc.
A system that has no real world value will not exchange anything, unless scammers like Binance and FTX come in to sell get-rich-quick dreams to suckers and artificially bring in money and "volume". When 99% of your volume is just big traders sending money to one another and keeping the price high (because it makes cryptobros feel good when they see their big number go bigger), you don't have an economy, you have at best a really shit game of Monopoly.
What do you mean? There are tons of decentralized exchanges I can use to acquire cryptocurrency to buy drugs with.
the best I can tell is that you are saying that centralized institutions having extremely large influence is necessary? in which case I would disagree
some of your points are clear without the pejoratives
to your actual point, I dont think there is anything inherently necessary for exchanges to make price discovery. people do not need to custody their assets there for more than a few minutes, and properly run exchanges (not overleveraged, solvent) do this just fine
OTC desks never custody and are okay examples of this
We have. We learned to ban what crypto does and put people promoting it in jail.
We monitor large cash transactions, and don’t let randos print. We also restrict who can facilitate transmitting it and under what rules. We further made securities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering illegal, a trifecta of crimes most people working in crypto facilitate.
The state of transaction processing in this country is hot garbage. I'm not claiming that crypto is the answer, but I sure as hell don't think our society has arrived at any sort of best solution. I'm personally fine with a lot more "crime" (aka transactions you personally don't approve of) if it gets us a better financial system.
We should not regulate those that wish to hold their own assets.
If (old) people loose money, they will complain, legislators will notice, regulating policy will be implemented.
There is no point. Crypto is a fantasy.
Centralized entities (ie businesses) that are holding people’s funds absolutely should be regulated, and certainly more than the current state. The scammers in this space don’t have any real connection to the tech per se, they’ve just identified a relatively friction-free way to scam people.
“Crypto” itself (the tech) can’t be regulated, short of coordinating all countries to confiscate mining rigs/validators and make them seriously illegal, thus breaking the network.
So regulating the businesses does not invalidate the premise—it just protects people as they onboard funds.
There's a difference between regulating the institutions that hold crypto customer deposits, compared to regulating the crypto networks themselves.
The fact that the stock market has almost forgotten about dividends and bubble mechanics have taken over the tech sector isn't a real counter example. That is also bad.
And I'm just responding to the parent post who defended crypto by claiming tech stocks looked like more of a Ponzi than crypto. If you can see the bubble/ponzi-like behavior in the stock market, that isn't a defense of crypto (if you can't see the similarities in behavior between either of them, then I can't help you at all).
Maybe it works poorly for traders but those of us actually using cryptoassets for privacy, inflation resistance, and censorship resistance ignore the scams and traders. Scams and traders dominate the conversation of most new technology. Same things happen in traditional markets.
Cults of personality and false promises by corporations inflate stock prices all the time. Takes a while to find the real price sometimes.
I was buying at $10, $1k, $10k, $60k, and everywhere between. I will be buying at 100k too.
Deflationary assets trend to be short term volatile, but long term up.
Heh, gotta say cryptos have weathered their first real test as a hedge against rising global inflation (since early 2021) really well. Meaning, the rising interest rates have almost decimated dollar valuation of cryptos as the tech gold rush imploded.
Please do not mistake this article's author's concern as an attack on the libertarian fundamentals of cryptocurrency. The article is about how crypto has been marketed as an investment to retail consumers, and this space is simply wrought with terrible scams.
Cryptocurrencies current landscape is just same as the current financial system indeed. Cypherpunk ideals are long gone.
(Also just to point out, Communism isn't an "alternative" to capitalism, but actually the conclusion to it... on paper) - That is, even if you're right, Capitalism is required to achieve communism... so it seems "hellscape" is the only way.
Same story in crypto. There will be shock and awe when Binance falls and plenty of people saying “real crypto has never been tried”.
Maybe the pattern is toltalitarian countries are going to be toltarian regardless of what they call themselves.
As far as crypto goes, there are like a billion different variations on the idea, most are scams, and i dont think i have ever heard anyone say "real crypto hasn't been tried" before this.
Australia, Sweden, Norway have been much better examples. Though their secret has been to not call it Communism/Socialism but instead something like "liberal democracy" or "democratic socialism".
Agree there is propaganda war that has been waged to ensure communism looks bad... which is why it's potentially a good parallel for crypto, as I think (potentially even literally not just metaphorically) the same vested interests are against it.