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by ___q 1658 days ago
> Explain how pump and dumping penny stocks doesn't apply?

That's just market manipulation. Going on Twitter and saying "BTC to the moon!" isn't a Ponzi. It requires an actor (like Charles Ponzi) to take new investors' money and pay it to old. Bitconnect was Ponzi scheme, not in some abstract sense.

> You get in early, you win, you get in late, you lose.

So vague it applies to everything that pays interest...

1 comments

Not true.

If I buy a stock or a bond, I get the dividend payment regardless of when I get in. It doesn't require you to be early, just to accept what the current value proposition is.

You'll make more money if you time it right, but you get some intrinsic value from it even if no future investors ever come along.

Or more obviously, buying rental property. Cap rates change over time, but you always get some real return.

And "pump and dump" implies a coordinated scheme. Usually they'll create groups/networks and call for everybody to buy in. But they tend to frontrun the group. We can call that something other than Ponzi, but at the end of the day, the later buyers are paying off the earlier buyers, and it's zero sum.. the underlying relationship is the same