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Comment by themafia | Hacker News Reader

That's not how Ponzi schemes work. Yahoo had a defacto _monopoly_ and the market had bad discovery leading to bad price information. There was no point at which the internet was /not/ worth investing in and everyone who had experience with it knew that.

The real problem seemed to be that you can only put so much money into pets.com before it becomes stupid. You had more short term investment capital than could be _effectively_ spent at the time. The long term players, as usual, avoided the Archimedian idealism, and were heavily rewarded anyways.

pg has startup brains.

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Same issue with LLMs - there probably is real value there, but investors have rammed 10 years' worth of investment into the market in 10 months.

That means: 1) Late investors end up taking a bath because it will actually take 10x longer to get a return than they thought. 2) Investment becomes inefficient - there are lot of GPUs being bought in 2025 that should have been bought in 2030. By the time 2030 comes along, those 2025 GPUs will be outdated, so the value they will provide will be less than if they had been purchased at the correct time

pg has completely clairvoyant vision, if only about historical events

>There was no point at which the internet was /not/ worth investing in and everyone who had experience with it knew that.

I don't get this. Of course there was. Specifically, March 10, 2000.

To declare that something is not worth investing in doesn't imply that it's useless. (and actually, swing investors will argue something can be worth investing in even though it is in fact useless, e.g. web3 and most crypto).

I'd take some Amazon shares at the March 10, 2000 price (inflation adjusted). Merci.

Why is it so popular to "akshually, Ponzi schemes are different!" these days?

Words have meaning in context, and calling something a "Ponzi scheme" these days means any pyramid-like system that only works as long as new investors come to the table, because that new investor money is the sole source of gains for earlier investors. But once you run out of new investors, which is inevitable, the whole thing collapses. What pg described was exactly a Ponzi scheme in that sense, even if it wasn't a deliberate scam. And that's very different from other types of business ventures that eventually fail because of the more "normal" reason that they just don't gain traction.

> Words have meaning in context

And you do recognize the context of those words was 15 years ago at this point?

> was exactly a Ponzi scheme in that sense, even if it wasn't a deliberate scam

There are better terms of art to describe the scenario. If we lacked for those words I might grant you this point, but since we don't, I find the description lacking in precision if not completely faulty.

> the more "normal" reason that they just don't gain traction.

Is that actually the "normal reason" most businesses fail? I'm not sure it is.

Agree, people became extremely pedantic with words and it's incorrect to assume they only mean what is described in a dictionary, as if we are in a court.

Language is fluid, and many of words got their very known & popular meanings later, when people used for things that it didn't exactly mean what it was initially intended to, and it got popular.

People are ever less empathetic and sociable, this being the reason for such comments.

People become pedantic when it's the only way to defend themselves and their friends or to argue against someone.

In this case dotcom investing was so stupid that it should have been recognized as stupid at the time, without hindsight. For someone who lost money, gave bad advice etc. insisting that they didn't fall for a Ponzi scheme means representing themselves as less terrible investors, regardless of facts.

This time it's different?

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