Is Bitcoin basically a ponzi scheme?

ACL Thief wrote:

You are aware that the United States currency isn't backed by gold or any physical value anymore, right?

US dollars are backed by the oil lubed war machine..

jaminspotter wrote:

jamin = Libertarian vegan ??

I don't think so...Libertarian vegan is obsessed with different things.

How do I tip strippers with bitcoin?

It’s basically like a less secure, more volatile form of offshore banking. It’s great for money laundering and criminal states like North Korea...

Karl Hungus wrote:

How do I tip strippers with bitcoin?

I bet they'll think of something, electronic g-strings perhaps.

xlev2 wrote:

People saying crypto is a Ponzi scheme really should not be investing period. Its like saying a junk bond is so named because it's junk aka trash.

Millenials like this area as they think the Gen X is too addled to understand "digital"

Bitcoin is technically very different from a Ponzi scheme. (And you can buy some things with Bitcoin.) But the similarities in effect to a Ponzi scheme are great. As long as the number of investors purchasing Bitcoins increases (just in a Ponzi scheme) the value increases. As soon as people get scared and realize that there is no real intrinsic value in bitcoin, the value will fall very quickly. It will crash and the jig will be up.

No one should invest in Bitcoin unless they can predict the crash and take their profit and sell before it starts.

Fonzie meme??? Ayy......

how is it a ponzi scheme when everyone knows where the money is coming from? It's fairly transparent like most trading markets. Theoretically, BTC's price can climb up as infinitely high as long there are investors willing to bid up the price. Realistically, it's not going to happen and a correction will occur and some fools that bought during the hype will be left holding the bag.

Countries that dont have dominant fizt currencies are moving towards Crypto Currencies. But not necessarily Bit Coin. That way rouge nations line North Korea, Egypt, Israel, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, etc can maintain their illicit regimes.

I compare Bitcoin more to a political campaign. What they have in common:

-Proposed ideas to change the current state of society

-A grassroots backing that includes zealous promoters

-A spot in major news headlines

-Ultimately very little substance

Bitcoin originally appealed to a younger, anti-establishment crowd (the grassroots backing). Your typical Bitcoin holder in 2014 was a 20- or 30-something male, usually well-educated, who was smart enough to understand the technology but not yet wise enough to look at Bitcoin's place in the context of financial history. Generally, this demographic is very vocal (the social media generation), so Bitcoin got loads of word-of-mouth promotion that ultimately launched it into major media headlines.

What has made Bitcoin explode in 2017 has been the spread of enthusiasm from that original group to the mainstream. These days, your 32-year-old programmer friend isn't the only person you know who's logging into his Coinbase account. Now, you probably know a good six or seven Bitcoin investors, including your meathead brother in law, your hard-working, yet naive friend, and your idiot 20-year-old cousin. These new investors share the enthusiasm with Bitcoin's original adopters, only they understand very little about the technology. What they all share in common, however, is an inability to see the bigger picture.

If you invested in Bitcoin in the past few years and cashed out, then congratulations, you're smarter than most of society (myself included). But I don't believe many Bitcoin adopters fit that description. I know a guy who put all of his money into Bitcoin in 2014. On paper, he's rich now. But like many Bitcoin investors, he's a true believer in the technology who is holding onto every fraction of a Bitcoin he owns with the hope of a much larger payout down the road. It is this flawed mentality that will lead many investors go broke when the floor inevitably falls out from the Bitcoin craze.

lol @ all those angry posters being angry that they think they missed the crypto train. (hint: you don't. you just missed the start and now you won't be millionaires with a 100 $ investment, but you can still be in it for a good gain.)

bitcoin is not necessarily going to be big in 10 years, but crypto will be. we're still early, and some of the most important crypto assets probably don't even exist yet. stop looking at the price and start understand the fundamentals, read the whitepapers, evaluate use cases. there is a lot of shlt out there, but the technology is the future.

Conundrum wrote:

As long as everyone believes and buys Bitcoin it is a great investment, as soon as people realize the emperor has no clothes the bottom will fall out.

I know the currency we currently use does not have intrinsic value too, but it has a thousand years of history and governments behind it.

It's not a ponzi scheme in the literal sense. There is no notion of a tree, you are not requested to recruit, etc. It might be a gigantic bubble ready to pop, but when it does it will fvck everyone up, not only the bottom tier of a ponzi scheme.

Whether or not I'd classify it as a Ponzi scheme might depend on whether the price is being manipulated in any way, and by whom.

It probably isn't a classic example of a Ponzi scheme the way that Madoff was, but it seems that a lot of people are seeing it as a way to make easy outsized returns.

I think a better title for the thread would have been:

"Is Bitcoin basically a scam?"

I don't think so. No doubt there's market manipulators, and even the exchanges may be involved since it's in their interest for people to invest/make trades. But not much different from the stock market.

I do think many of the newer, "improved" cryptos are very much designed with the pure motivation to make a few people a lot of money. They sell with a marketing team expounding on why they're the best, making a push to be a Bitcoin killer. A few have made a dent, including Ether and Litecoin. The thing that's scary about Litecoin is how large a percentage of it is held by just a few people. Top 20 wallets all hold at least 1%. If anyone of those wallets decide to liquidate it'll be a huge flood of supply and would likely cause a crash.

https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-litecoin-addresses.html

While some Bitcoin wallets are mega wealthy, the top wallet hold 0.74% of all Bitcoins. It drops pretty steadily from there.

https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html

Is anything keeping a large BTC holder from having multiple wallets? Kind of like having multiple FDIC or SIPC insured accounts (though none of the bitcoin wallets have such protection to my knowledge)

Investing in bitcoin relies on the idea of the 'greater fool' which is similar in principle to a ponzi scheme.

Using bitcoin as it is intended is different, but nobody is doing that, and nobody will do that. Bitcoin is winning as a speculative asset but other coins will establish themselves better as usable currencies.

Maybe more like a confidence game. The only real value of bitcoin is being able to have a currency that is outside of the banking system and does not fluctuate with national currency markets. If bitcoin becomes accepted as the currency of choice for international trade, it would be worth a lot because people using bitcoins to buy and sell things would not have to worry about fluctuations in national currencies. A diesel engine for your container ship will cost the same in bitcoin from a manufacturer in Germany as it would from a South Korean manufacturer even if the Euro was strong against the won. If you deal in bitcoin exclusively and your home country has a currency crisis, you will be protected.

The problem with this is that the dollar has been very reliable for decades to do what bitcoin is proposing to do. So, the big bet on bitcoin is that there will be sufficient turmoil in currency markets that bitcoin will eventually take over. That may never happen and if it never does, bitcoin will bust.

sayyyy what??? wrote:

how is it a ponzi scheme when everyone knows where the money is coming from? It's fairly transparent like most trading markets.

You are probably an American stuck in the 1970's transaction technology and are not aware most of the rest of the world already has electronic currency.

And then there's the simple fact these crypto currencies cannot possibly scale to millions of currency holders.

There are a dozen more reasons this is a pump and dump fraud scheme.