[chrisco255]

- Create a large number of worthless C-corp shares for a company with zero revenue - Distribute 100% to the founders - Onboard new investors through a series of progressively higher valuations, diluting less and less with each subsequent round - Go public at a lofty, inflated valuation that leaves retail with little to zero chance at producing the 100x gains that early investors got to experience - Profit!

Money is simply a representation of value. If you can create value out of "thin air", or even the perception of value out of thin air, then you can make a profit. That much has always been true.

What gives the C-Corp shares value, particularly the ones that trade at very high P/E ratios? Speculation on future growth, speculation on potential dividends, speculation on favorable market conditions, speculation on quantitative easing bringing yet more trillions flowing into stock market, etc.

What's interesting to me, is that people think our US Federal Reserve fiat monetary system is not an MLM scheme in the same way. We know who profits from the existing system: the older participants who got in early. We know who's been totally screwed by the current system: millennials and Gen Zers who can't afford housing, saddled with debt, living with their parents in their 30s:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...

[ac29]

> What gives the C-Corp shares value

A business is a productive asset. Cryptocurrency tokens are not.

[joshspankit]

Your definition of a business might be a “an organization that produces a product”, but that is not the legal definition. A business can even legally be a bundle of paperwork that owns someone’s nice car.

Business (noun) is not a productive asset.

[bradleybuda]

In the rare case that a business actually produces nothing, in bad faith, we call that a scam, and fraud, and people go to jail. The same standard does not exist for "tokens".

[joshspankit]

Sorry, this perspective is wrong on both counts:

1) There are literally millions of empty and bad-faith businesses that you never hear about because they successfully fly under the radar

2) People definitely (though, to your point: not the general public yet) call out some tokens as being scams. It’s much more of a “wild west” (aka: lots of dirty business going on that no one knows how to identify much less stop), but people in the space can pretty easily tell if a token has integrity or not. Look at Beeple, for example. I think most people who read the story would agree he’s not scamming.

[rsynnott]

No-one would buy shares in such a thing, tho. Unless they lied about what it was doing, but, well, ask Elizabeth Holmes how well that's going.

[drcongo]

Has Uber made a profit yet?

[JesseAldridge]

There is value in able to send and receive money more easily.

[nivertech]

That's a valid comparison.

The only difference is that C-corp shares are marketed to investors as securities, while Wordcoin is disguised as a so called cryptocurrency/tokens.