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Clearly you do not. You continually peddle lies and myths about crypto-CURRENCY (not crypto-investments, which you seem to think they are). You continually make the false presumption that cryptocurrencies are investments, and then proceed to berate a currency because you expect it to behave as an investment when there is no requirement anyone consider them as one (I certainly do not, and think only a moron would consider cryptocurrency is an investment. I wouldn't "Invest" in yuan or euros either, although I would happily use them as a currency.)

When I buy crypto, I EXPECT to lose at the very least the exchange fee(~0.25%). Why on earth would I expect any gains on a currency, or expect there to be little or no risk on something so new and relatively untested versus something like gold?

>> High returns with little or no risk.

This is not a requirement of cryptocurrency. And there is no guarantee they will have a high return. There is certainly no guarantee in anything like the bitcoin whitepaper that you will have no risk to fluctuations in exchange rate with fiat. [1]

>> Unregistered investments.

Currencies are not synonymous with investments. Cryptocurrencies do not have to be peddle as investments, and only a moron would use them that way. [1, look anywhere for the word investment, interest, or appreciation -- you will not find it].

>> Unlicensed sellers.

Whether the government approves of something has no bearing on whether it is a ponzi scheme or not.

>> Secretive, complex strategies.

The implementation of a number of cryptos are both open implementation and open white paper [1]. Hardly secretive. I do agree the closed source ones could certainly be ponzi schemes, and perhaps you could also make an open source ponzi scheme.

>[edit2] So with that in mind, it meets many (but not all) of the classic definition elements.

>1. All returns are generated by bringing new money into the system. The only way someone can make money on Bitcoin is if a new person invests. That money is then distributed to the earlier participant, net of miner fees.

Currencies aren't meant to provide a return. Some people even consider currencies more useful if they're slightly inflationary. But lets examine your statement anyway. All other bitcoin holders appreciate their asset when someone loses their keys (deflation). An individual can make a return at the expense of the others by mining (inflationary creation). Or I could make fiat money on bitcoin by arbitrage and work, like selling coffee for bitcoin in a circumstance where people want it and few others are offering it except in fiat.

>2. There is no actual business underlying.

Just as there is no actual business underlying commodity money? This doesn't make commodity money a ponzi scheme either.

>3. The constant flow of new money is required to keep the price from collapsing because miners extract something like $50M in welfare from the system per day.

Not at all. A constant confidence in the crypto we examine is required to keep the price from collapsing. If no transactions are happening, then we are simply slowly inflating. Some currencies have infinite tail emission (infinite slow inflation) like monero. For bitcoin most coins have already been mined, so the amount of remaining inflation is finite. Even under the fiction that 50 million per day were extracted, it would take about 54 years for the price to collapse (care to imagine how much you would lose on USD if you stuck it in a mattress for 54 years?)

>4. The entire space is unregistered investments hawked by unlicensed sellers.

Crypto-currencies are not generically investments. Yes I know some scam artists promise returns, but this is not a necessary feature of cryptocurrency. For instance, bitcoin and litecoin do not promise any sort of returns, and thus cannot be considered investment vehicle by anyone but speculators (speculators can call anything an investment, including USD).

>It's a negative sum wealth redistribution scheme the takes money from new entrants and gives it to miners and to old entrants. The miner portion is what makes it negative-sum.

The same is said of gold, all the way up to gold miners paying for electricity and workers by liquidating some of their gold which makes it negative sum. Yet gold has been a legitimate store of value, and often currency, for thousands of years -- certainly no ponzi scheme.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf