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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

Investment into a corporation becomes capital. It is used to buy resources which when combined properly can be sold for more than the raw cost. You are entitled to a share of these profits in the form of dividends.

On the other hand, buying crypto"currency" becomes ... just that. It sits there until you sell it to someone else.

In other words, if you rolled back all transactions in a stock ever made you'd end up with a positive sum totaling dividends paid out. If you rolled back all Bitcoin transactions you'd end up with a big fat zero. Minus, in both cases, transaction fees but while it's a mere convenience for stocks it's inherent in Bitcoin which makes it a negative sum game and as such a scam.

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Unless you take part in a share emission, then no, investment in the form of buying stocks does not become capital.

There's a seller for every buyer, and the company does not care about it any more than having happy owners is good.

Investment in the form of bonds is another thing entirely, that's purely capital.

Clearly currencies don't pay dividends but doesn't matter for this argument. There's a fair chunk of people treating stocks exactly the way gp described. To conclude from that that all stocks are a ponzi is as retarded as it is to conclude all crypto is a ponzi

Is crypto not a ponzi as an investment, though? Who in their right mind buys currency and sits on it as an investment? If it has utility as a currency, then use it as one, otherwise it is just speculative, and a speculative investment which relies on other people to buy out your stake and has no positive cash flow is a ponzi. No?

> as it is to conclude all crypto is a ponzi

Yet we didn't conclude only from this all crypto is a ponzi.

That all crypto is a scam clearly comes from the fact it is a negative sum game. When you have a game where you can tell which set of players in total are going to lose and which set of players in total are going to win without knowing the rules of the game -- that's clearly a scam. All you need here is any commodity with baked in transaction fees. The exact same would be true if you traded with plastic poker chips but you needed to pay someone a fee whenever you bought or sold one. Indeed, reviewing the process with such chips makes it more clear, stripped of high tech mumbo jumbo.

Stolfi argues all crypto is a Ponzi because 1) people invest into it because they expect good profits, and 2) that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. However, 3) there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead, 4) the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, 5) while the operators take away a portion of this money. Our argument in the previous section was 3-5, you need to add 1 and 2 for it to become a Ponzi. https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon...

Who's we? Cause I didn't see gp making this point.

The little club derisively called "crypto antagonists", I guess.

Gold.

Actually, all commodities and it is a known issue with commodity investments (which maybe are more like trading positions therefore).

Y'all really should read Stolfi because he carefully addresses all these, gold stock etc

> gold has a source of revenue besides the investors; namely, the purchases by consumers like jewelers and industry, who take gold out of the market (2/3 of the production) for uses other than re-sale. When one buys 1 oz of gold, one gets a chip of a metal that one can sell to those consumers, and thus obtain some money that does not come from other investors.

This is simply mentally reclassifying "consumers" outside the category of investors.

The argument for crypto, etc is the same. There are consumers who want to make purchases, use contracts, etc.

No, it's saying that gold has value as a commodity as well as a currency. You can't melt down a bitcoin and sell it as jewellery.

The commodity use of gold is very minor. It's liked in jewelry not for its utility, but its prestige. So once again gold jewelry holders look an awful lot like investors. Just like how ETH enthusiasts do, even if they also use it to perform tasks with smart contracts.

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