It really is a distributed Ponzi. Kind of like the company MMM in Russia in the 90s, everybody knew it was a scam but people hoped they would get out before it collapsed and take profits from the later suckers.
The innovation of crypto in this space is that it makes the Ponzi scheme genuinely fair. Unlike MMM, there is no founder at the top who can run off with all the funds at once.
The scheme lasts until the last fool is found, the losses are distributed amongst the late arrivals (or early adopters with diamond hands) and the gains are distributed amongst the early adopters who sold high. There is nobody to go after as a criminal. Best of all, the "company" survives despite losing its value, and the cycle can repeat again in a few years. If you didn't get out this time, you can hope for another round of the game later on in which you can unload your position.
Doge coin is getting adopted as a Tip Currency. Pornhub already add that functionality, reddit and other websites. But yeah any currency can be seen as a ponzi. This one is just descentralized. 40% of all dollars in circulation were printed in 2020. At least doge "printing" is limited to 5B per year. Things have the value we want to give to them.
What technical property gives Doge an advantage over any other crypto for tipping?
Seems like the main advantage for tipping currency is small transaction fees -- i.e. you use Doge instead of BTC because with BTC, the current median fee is around $8, so it makes no sense to send somebody a $1 tip. But with Doge, it's much lower, like 4 cents. So it seems a lot better.
Except that the only reason fees are so low is that network usage is so low. By design, with 1MB blocks generated every minute, the doge network can only process something in the ballpark of 30-40 transactions per second (depending on transaction size). Currently it's not anywhere near that level of load. But as load approaches or exceeds that level, it will cost increasingly more to get your transaction included by a miner in the next block.
That's exactly why bitcoin fees are high and the only reason Doge isn't seeing the same problem is 1. it isn't that big yet, and 2. it has a faster block rate (every minute instead of every ten minutes) so it pushes the problem a bit further back, but still doesn't solve it. The more people use the coin, the worse using it gets.
If Doge was actually adopted widely for tipping -- which it isn't really right now -- it would see a huge increase in transaction volume and quickly become unsuitable for that purpose due to the increase in fees.
It's much more honest to simply tell people that it's going up and you can potentially get rich quick by buying low and selling to somebody else before the bubble pops again. Pretending Doge is actually going to be widely adopted as a medium of exchange is just sad.
The innovation of crypto in this space is that it makes the Ponzi scheme genuinely fair. Unlike MMM, there is no founder at the top who can run off with all the funds at once.
The scheme lasts until the last fool is found, the losses are distributed amongst the late arrivals (or early adopters with diamond hands) and the gains are distributed amongst the early adopters who sold high. There is nobody to go after as a criminal. Best of all, the "company" survives despite losing its value, and the cycle can repeat again in a few years. If you didn't get out this time, you can hope for another round of the game later on in which you can unload your position.