Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

The words gets thrown around a lot these days. Especially in the crypto world. Some say Bitcoin is a big ponzi. Funniest thing tho, some Bitcoiners say all altcoins are a Ponzi. The irony!!!
Some altcoiners say (only) ICO's are a ponzi. Beautiful.

The Wiki definition is quite easy to understand, but it was written pre-crypto.


What constitutes a Ponzi in this forum:
- Everything you, the smartest person in the world, don't understand
- Everything you, the smartest person in the world, believe is overvalued by your own personal metrics


Greater fools theory:
You could apply this not only to crypto but to all equities traded. In each equity trade, there is a greater fool. In the long run, the value of each equity goes to 0 (even apple!). Some equities/companies live longer, others live shorter.

But what about any network. A small network has very little utility, but if enough people use something, all of the sudden it does become very valuable. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Like many startups. Crazy ideas, in hindsight it was obvious that it would work and we forgot all the crazy ideas that did not work.

What if a "scammy" ICO token attracts enough "fools" to be actually used. You can say that these "fools" invested for the "wrong" reasons (get rich quick, greed). After all, you, the smartest person in the world, know the right reasons to do anything. You also need to protect others for their own good, thx for protecting us!

"I guarantee this will fail":
No ****. It's like saying "one day you will die". One day you'll be right. Statistics are also on your side, 90% of all companies die in the first 10 years (or something like that).
Like the people who know (!) that the USD will crash. You, also, will be right one day. You will also have missed many opportunities.
It's all about timing because one day, all of us die. At least you, the smartest person in the world, will be proven right.

"Intrinsic value" argument:
Gold less of Ponzi than Crypto. Gold trades however at a multiple of it's "intrinsic value". Nobody buys tons of gold so that one day they can make jewelry out of it. Weak insurance at best.
Gold has alternative uses, so what. In case gold crashes, you will only lose 95% instead of 100% if your Crypto crashes. Genius!
If I sell and resell my unique stamps for 1000x it's industrial value, is it a ponzi/scam? Hard to defend intrinsic value
If i create my own belief system it's a sect, but if millions do it, it's a religion.


Lesson to be learned:
More humility towards things you have no clue about. Value to others is not what you believe it should be, but what others assign it by their actions.



Fwiw, I have no stake in any ICO. I don't understand the investments good enough and the risk and incentives are not very well aligned for my taste. For this reason, I stay away.
I'm more playing devil's advocate than anything else. Just more careful than others throwing around words like scam or Ponzi at everything.

Almost no coins generate revenue and pay dividends so I don't see how they meet the definition of a ponzi. The scam coins are much more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump

wp

tho. if millions do it it has a stable utility for an organization/country....all religions are the same in their core, as they all target similar behavioral biases that apply to large scale population

Lesson to be learned:
all companies fulfill utility for the investors until they don't and fail...
Is crypto an adequate utility as an alternative money/value exchange? As for now it sure looks like it has a lot of risk involved backed by black market economy...

design wise it sure is a lot better then a lot of micro-stock options out there as a long-shot play....

The biggest or 2nd biggest religion started with 1 guy and 12 followers. At what point did they start to provide a stable utility... where was that magic moment where the bread turned into flesh (for our catholic friends) or the "cult" into a stabilizing religion?
The jews didn't agree about that aspect and killed him bc they thought he was a scam (or bc he demonized interest ).
Somebody claiming to rise from the dead might be the equivalent of a world computer today.

Enough analogies for today.

And let's make sure this stays ontopic before we drift into religion!

What separates a scam coin from a non-scam coin? The number of people using them? See analogy sect vs religion.

This is false statement. In the long run, the value of most equities is many times what you buy them for, thanks to dividends.

There's no point continuing if you can't grasp the most basic facts about the world around you. Are you really a coach? Yikes, man.

This has been addressed this before:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...0&postcount=44

Afaik no one has been able to produce a study (professional or otherwise) or rebuttal that constructs an actual argument which concludes that bitcoin functions as a ponzi

I look forward to reading your arguments, coach.

This thread is a scam and a Ponzi.

You seem to have a hard time understanding things today, buddy. Take a rest and improve your reading comprehension.

And yes, I have built a multi-million $ coaching business, among other things. This is not relevant, why bring it up?

Which arguments? Are you Toothsayers ******ed cousin? Read again.

As a BTC holder, i wish to hear from people why ICO etc are called Ponzis/scams. And if you are a BTC holder and believe ICO's/Alts are a scam, i'd like to know what the differentiator is.

Because it's impossible for him to spend time on this site unless he's being a complete d*** to someone?

BTC is the biggest because of game theory...first mover advantage...

as far as crypto goes it looks like from the utility perspective it is a temporary store of value if there is an enough transactions to facilitate that value

ICO is not a scam if the proposition is valuable enough to composite for risk of failing. Do we expect this to be the case in an extremely unregulated industry that attracts black market participants. No. To be precise, in the long run we expect ICO to be highly populated with scams where ICO value is marketed far above fair value.

Why? Because IPOs are the same. (google failed IPOs and research why. It's similar to 2000 bubble.) And ICOs due to less regulation should have an high order of magnitude more fraud.

There is no problem with my reading comprehension. You made a false statement that is clownishly, categorically false:
In the long run, the value of each equity does not go to zero. You gain dividends by holding equities which far surpass the initial capital you put in the equity. Equities are not bought for the "greater fool" theory, they are bought for dividends (i.e. the profits of an economically active business)'. You could have some room to wiggle if you hadn't said "all", but you did say all.

I think you should take your own advice:

lol

Is PONZI another coin I should buy? I can't keep up with all these new ones.

Seems like a good investment to me: https://ponzico.win

I hope you are not coaching on anything related to economics. Let's start with this:
The value of a currency is in how many people accept it and use it and how easy it is to exchange it into other currencies. So if you try to pay for something with alt coin number 39 on the list of alt coins, you will probably have a hard time.

The main value of a crypto currency is using it to make transactions. If you take that away, those crypto's have no economic value. Although the technology might have value, but that can be easily copied in a private system and says nothing about the value of bitcoin or lite coin specifically.

You are right about the first part, but wrong about the second part. Equities generate cash flows, they are valued based on future cash flows. So value does not return to zero. I mean if you cannot grasp this basic concept, how on earth did you build up a million dollar coaching business?

You are confusing several things here. Facebook is valuable because a lot of people use it. This basically means that they get a insurmountable competitive advantage once they get past a certain size, and allows them to capture the entire market. This is why google and facebook have such high market share of over 90% in some markets.

But this is not true for a start up selling health foods for exampel. That is why some industries are extremely fragmented (little to no network effect or economies of scale), and others are very concentrated like Uber Facebook or Google.

A crypto currency's value is not determined by how many people invest in it. The people who invested in it would have to cash out to realize their profits. But if nobody uses it for legit transactions, then they depend on other people buying into it hoping that it will be used eventually. If this cannot credibly happen, than that is the prime definition of a ponzi.

So a crypto currency's value is determined by how many people will use it AND how long they hold their coins.

Like 70% of gold is used for industrial purposes or for jewelry. And only about 40% of the value of jewelry is gold, so a terrible store of value. Since if you melt it down it loses 50%+ of it's value.

And since gold is a minable commodity, it trades near the marginal cost of production:


Also a commodity does not have intrinsic value. Intrinsic value means it generates cash flows without being consumed after the first transaction.

I suggest you follow your own advice here.

For further reading see this:
http://treasureinvesting.blogspot.co...e-bitcoin.html

So stocks that don't pay dividends, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), Facebook (FB), Alphabet (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), and Tesla (TSLA) to name a few, are greater fool/ponzi stocks?

I'd define a scam coin as one that enriches its creators with a very low % chance of enriching its investors.

Bitcoin is the gold standard for non scam coins because it was
-Extremely innovative tech and a clear value add to the world. Most of these new coins are just bitcoin forks with one minor tweak of the code. They provide no new innovations or technology and exist solely to enrich it's creators
-There was no premine. Satoshi did end up mining most of the early blocks, but that's only because no one else was interested at the time. BTC was open to the public and anyone could have mined coins. A lot of these scam coins mine the first 10% of the blocks and then release the code to the public. This is a scam because it's not decentralized and if one person or group controls too much of a decentralized currency/mining then what's the point?
-None of the mining fees/initial funding goes to the developers. Satoshi wrote the code for bitcoin for free. Bitcoin core is not funded by bitcoin mining fees. Some may see this as bad, because it causes a potentiall conflict of interest between what's best for blockstream may not be what's best for bitcoin, but at least 10% of all bitcoins were not designated to go to bitcoin core developers like most new coins are
-Scarcity. Only 21 million BTC will ever exist. Lately there is also a ton of greed in how these ICOs are funded. In a normal IPO, a fixed number of shares are offered up for sale to the public and the market determines the price. Lately some of these coins like tezos are offering unlimited funding so you have no idea what price you're paying and it almost guarantees you overpay. Also, 10% of the funds are earmarked for developers. When you go to a VC for funding you say I would like x dollars in exchange for y % of the initial company. Instead what a lot of these ICOs are doing is the equivalent of starting a kickstarter campaign and saying give me money, how much? As much as you can possibly give. I'm going to scrape 10% off the top for myself and use whatever's left to try and create something valuable for you.

Ideally the interests of the investors and of the developers and creators are aligned. Satoshi got rich because bitcoin was successful. If bitcoin did not become valuable Satoshi would not be rich. This is in direct contrast to most scam coins where the developers are making millions of dollars, and if the ICOs or scam coin goes to zero in two years, oh shucks we tried :/. The creators don't really care because they already cashed out millions and sold off their initial funding for fiat cash or btc.

Excellently worded, Andrew, and I'll add that not only did Satoshi mine all the early coins because nobody else bothered to, those early coins have never moved. The approximately 1 million ($2.5 billion) coins he mined early have NEVER BEEN TOUCHED. Can you even imagine some of these ICO founders waiting 8 years and not touching the money they got? It's insane

Hypothetically, if Satoshi moved his stash, or confirmed that he lost the private keys, would that change your opinion at all?

You buy equities to capture dividends, acquisition premium or various split/spin corporate actions or any liquidating event. Those companies could easily be paying dividends, be acquisition targets or be liquidating 10 years from now.

When ethereum goes to proof of stake and pays rewards to stakers is that equivalent to a earning a dividend?

Federal Reserve, lenders come in, lenders come out, can't ezplainit.com