[potatototoo99]

I usually brush aside these doomsday articles about crypto, but the linked article is really depressing:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm...

I remember nicer days when crypto had some value, and yes exchanges were already shady and did a lot of washing, but there was clearly a closer approximation to market sentiment and real world use cases. Nowadays everything seems to be revolve around derivatives, margin lending, yielding and staking to be margin lent again. The problem, IMO, might actually have been smart contracts.

[peterlk]

A family member started getting pretty deep in the crypto game, and went to one crypto conference. Afterwards, we hung out and he was really deflated. He just said, "none of these people understand what's going on. I asked what would happen when the underlying asset values went down, and they tied themselves in knots trying to unravel their own cleverness".

Crypto is interesting to me in the way that algotrading is interesting. Lots of interesting math doing fun things, but not worth really doing unless you have _massive_ resources. To me, there is 1 huge potential win for crypto - replacing clearing houses and banking infrastructure. Winning that is going to make a small number of investors extraordinarily wealthy.

There is 1 other interesting case for crypto, which is a common API that doesn't care who the winner is. But that's a questionable win.

Everything else in the crypto/defi/web 3.0 world is just a scaled MLM ecosystem.

[forum_ghost]

> I asked what would happen when the underlying asset values went down

There are no underlying assets.

You are literally conflating one tokenomic example to the entire space.

[scotty79]

The thing they describe as the box is literally a Ponzi scheme. You put in some money and you get high guaranteed return.

You have money, and you even can cash out some unless too many people try to cash out at the same time. Then it turns out there's no money to cover the returns.

Key innovation that further obfuscates this is that instead of cashing out directly you might use IOUs from the Ponzi scheme as a collateral to borrow some money and never pay it back leaving your Ponzi collateral with person that borrowed you money.

Noone has an incentive to cash out direclty to not endanger percieved valuability of Ponzi box. And everybody has incentive to push as much IOUs to as many new people as possible in exchange for hard currency.

[jkepler]

Many---nearly all---altcoins are dangerously close to ponzi schemes, except bitcoin. Bitcoin stands apart as the sole protocol that's really decentralized and doesn't promise ridiculous returns.

However, given that Bitcoin is jn the process of monetizing and may become the world's base layer of money, it stands to gain a lot of value the long term compared to the melting icebergs of central bank and commercial bank created fiat currencies.

If this doesn't make sense, please read "The Bitcoin Standard" and "Inventing Bitcoin" to understand this technological advance.

One can prefer sundials to watches, but reality was changed when the watch was invented.

[peyton]

It’s not a Ponzi scheme. It’s a bubble—the belief is that prices will rise on the open market.

You get tokens for putting money in the box. You can sell the tokens on an exchange later for cash. The cash comes from exchange participants, not box people. All the box people receive the tokens they expect. They don’t receive tokens from new box people.

If it’s 1995 and Toys R Us is giving away Beanie Babies to the first 250,000 Elmo buyers, that’s not a Ponzi. If somebody buys lots of Elmos to flip Beanie Babies knowing 250,000 Beanie Babies are going to hit the market, they are delusional. It’s still not a Ponzi. It’s a bubble.

[scotty79]

Bitcoin is a bubble. Protocol that arbitratily rewards holding is what makes this Ponzi.

Awarding tokens without efficient mechanism to destroy them causes inflation when speed of printing exceeds the speed of raising demand for them. And there's no way to correct it so inflation can turn into hyperinflation and run on bank and collapse of the whole scheme.

[tim333]

If bitcoin is just a bubble why is it still here after 'popping' like five times. And if the protocol that rewards the token holders is a Ponzi who is the Ponzi schemer?

It seems to me much more like the beanie baby thing.

[scotty79]

> If bitcoin is just a bubble why is it still here after 'popping' like five times.

Because it is built to be infinitely reinflatable. Bitcoin bubble popping changes nothing about Bitcoin and human greed.

> And if the protocol that rewards the token holders is a Ponzi who is the Ponzi schemer?

People who create the protocol and set the rewards for themselves and others and cash out before the whole thing collapses.

[_aavaa_]

I disagree with you on the smart contracts being the problem. a) Bitcoin doesn't use them, b) none of the issues you raise are caused by smart contracts. ALL of those are caused by large exchanges luring people in on the promise of free money.

The margin lending, staking, and all the rest are not Bitcoin, but Bitcoin!TM [1]. This isn't a "real bitcoin hasn't been tried" argument. It's a "if you treat it as any other asset or stock and play the Wall Street game, then of course it will look like Wall Street".

[1]: https://www.epsilontheory.com/in-praise-of-bitcoin/