a ponzi going on for 10+ year? ok Madoff lasted since the 70 to 2008, we still have time to get btc to the moon
Ponzi schemes are intentional frauds. You can be as mad as you want at the idea of Bitcoin. You can even be mad that you didn't buy it early. But "Satoshi Nakamoto" has been sitting on 1.1m BTC since like 2009 or so which as of this very moment is about $55b worth. That's around the GDP of Croatia or Uruguay. Now granted - that is, in fact about $10b less than Madoff scammed but I mean, Madoff didn't publish a whitepaper or source code. And most bitcoin doesn't move. Contrary to your author's definition, here's what a Ponzi scheme actually is: The initial promise of Bitcoin was that it would overturn the world financial order. It was described as extraordinarily risky. The idea wasn't secret at all - there's a developer page. And nobody has ever gotten "paid" - the buying and selling of Bitcoin is entirely within the power of the individual, rather than the manager. So I mean... be mad? And to be clear, I own zero bitcoin. But the more time you spend being angry for the wrong reasons the less time you can spend being angry for the right ones.In a Ponzi scheme, a con artist offers investments that promise very high returns with little or no risk to his victims. The returns are said to originate from a business or a secret idea run by the con artist. In reality, the business does not exist or the idea does not work. The con artist actually pays the high returns promised to his earlier investors by using the money obtained from later investors. In other words, instead of engaging in a legitimate business activity, the con artist attempts to attract new investors in order to make the payments that were promised to earlier investors.
The genesis block cannot be sold because it's not in the transaction database. Regardless if it was intentional, or not, it would require a hard fork in order to change the code base, which won't happen. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10009/why-can-t-the-genesis-block-coinbase-be-spent
I'm not angry.. the mere existence of exploiting-worldwide-user's google anger me, losing money doesnt: I'm used to it. Crypto is just so absurd and damaging.. at least NTF pretend to be art, and defining art is just another can of worms. Dont we all agree, that Satoshi is that french engineer turned mobster who is in jail since 2009? Or he would have cashed out long ago. 2nd counter argument from the article : A definition of "TV" a few decades ago could be "a device that converts electrical signals into an image on a cathode ray tube (CRT) screen." But when flat screen TVs appeared, it would have been silly to say "those are not TVs,because they have no CRT." Instead, people would have seen that the mention of CRT in that definition was spurious, and that a useful definition should capture the effect of the device, regardless of the technology. The point stay: the only value of BTC is from flux of new investor.... oh! and the service of anonymously buying drugs. THAT might be the thing that let crypto stay relevant for so long. Any business model based around some type of physical addiction, is always a good idea. Still a scam But "Satoshi Nakamoto" has been sitting on 1.1m BTC since like 2009
here's what a Ponzi scheme actually is:
That is not the definition of ponzi from source X. Indeed there are many variants of the definition, and they may include other spurious requirements (see below). But those requirements were incidental features of almost all ponzis before bitcoin, not essential features. They are not the reason why investing in a ponzi is a very bad idea, nor the reason why ponzis are frauds rather than just bad investments.
Let's not move the goalposts. Your author can argue that there are "many variants of the definition" until he's blue in the face, it doesn't make him correct. The fact of the matter is, there are legal definitions of fraud. Every country with a legal system has one. They all hinge around an intentional action taken to cause financial harm to another. You'd have an easier time arguing that Pepsi Points are a Ponzi scheme than that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme. But since people enjoy being mad at cryptobros, furries and social justice warriors, you can call'n'response "Ponzi" "Rabble rabble" on Wordpress all day long. MONEY is absurd and damaging. It isn't limited to crypto. Why is "X" worth "Y?" Because someone makes it so. This is why the Chinese were able to invent paper currency in 1100BC while the Europeans were at "whoa, fractional reserve banking" during the Medicis: if the Emperor is literally god on earth, he can say pigeon feathers are worth two peasants and poof it's true. Meanwhile it took until the Renaissance for the Europeans to realize that you don't need 1:1 reserves of precious metals in order to get the economy moving. Know why I linked this? I did it for this graph: Compare and contrast. The EU has a ONE PERCENT required reserve ratio while BinanceCoin is at NINETY FIVE PERCENT. I fully agree - Paul Calder LeRoux is Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin hasn't evolved since 2012 'cuz he's been in jail. Satoshi's bitcoin hasn't moved 'cuz he's under proffer, which means legally, any money he's got belongs to the US Government. But LeRoux didn't invent Bitcoin to defraud people, he invented it to move money without taxation. It's a virtual bearer instrument. It functions very well for that purpose, presuming technology stands still in 2012. This is the reason it was adopted so heavily in China: the underworld economy in China is substantial and very wink,wink nudge,nudge and BTC allowed the Nomentklatura to tuck their profits away in a better instrument than offshore holdings, precious metals or jewelry. It's also the reason China jumped into surveillance currency so hard: as soon as things get dicey you attack whoever threatens you the most, which in this case is the Nomenklatura. I don't like Bitcoin. I think it was a good starting point twelve years ago. But I don't think it's a scam, either. You absolutely do and part of it is that you steadfastly refuse to understand something you don't like.Crypto is just so absurd and damaging.
I definitely have a rarer perspective, but there are many stories and examples of banks, credit card companies, and bond issuers developing upon and using Ethereum as a settlement layer. IMO the crux of the issue is that for digital scarcity to exist, so must the value of the tokens that secure the network. But because digital things have always been infinitely replicatable, we aren't used to the concept and it feels magical and scammy. But the value of the token grows as the economy secured by it does. It's digital, but it is necessary and scarce.
One of the internal battles I fight while raising my daughter is DLC. I'm teaching her a proper Wahabi interpretation of downloadable content - "paying real money for in-game items is takfir"- and she definitely gets it. At the same time, she'll absolutely sit there for half a day waiting for her dragon egg to hatch or whatever. And the games she plays are the ones with ads for other games that make you wait half a day for your dragon egg to hatch, and she tells me things like "You know what's wrong with Township? You can't do anything without paying real money." Meanwhile, pretty much every game you've ever heard of has gone free-to-play. The "buy the game and play it" model is totally fucking done in the casual space. I'd buy her a copy of The Sims and she'd be happy, but you don't just buy a copy of The Sims anymore. You download The Sims and EA shoves DLC at you every ten minutes. Her best friend? Plays the shit out of Roblox, because of course she does, because her parents buy her whatever the fuck she wants in Roblox. Did you know you can pay $3k real dollars for a Roblox dress? So on the one hand I hope she's learning the difference between "currency" and "scrip" where "currency" is that thing that has value everywhere while "scrip" is that thing that has value within a limited system. But on the other hand "money" is basically "mark your chores down in the app and you can save up for a Beanie Baby at JoAnn Fabrics" and you can't buy anything for sticker price at JoAnn, it's all transformed through "how many other things are you buying" "what other things are you buying" "how many coupons do you have on your phone" and "how many coupons is the cashier lady going to use because you're a cute kid." It doesn't help that the game she learned early and loved was "store" in which trinkets temporarily change hands for numbers that are arbitrarily assigned. She has created not one, not two but three token economies in the past eighteen months, cornering the market in pine cones, small rocks and "pirate coins brought to school for the express purpose of making people give me pirate coins in exchange for goods I craft" respectively so I think that kid is gonna have a positively abstracted understanding of money no matter what I do.
It doesn't really matter, though. The guys building the Internet envisioned Borges' library, the guys using the Internet were happy with "you've got mail." There was no part of the Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchains that envisioned CryptoKitties; now the company that came up with them has built digital baseball cards for the NBA and NFL. "Can I use it" is not a question normies ask. The answer must be yes for the normies to bother. "What can you use it for" is a developer question. "vaguely sticky snot" does not become post-its without developers.