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In a Ponzi scheme, a fraudulent perpetrator takes your money (and the money of many others), gives some of that to early dropouts but takes the rest for himself

In a Ponzi scheme, a fraudulent perpetrator takes your money (and the money of many others), gives some of that to early dropouts but takes the rest for himself. Ponzi schemers profit from lying to you where your money goes. With a decentralized digital asset there is no sole person or company that profits from just lying to you about where your Dollar goes in exchange for digitals. Sure, miners and exchanges make profits based on fees when Bitcoin is created or sold, respectively — but they are only being rewarded for their legitimate efforts required to maintain and sell a digital currency. They do not pretend making your money work for you by some magical scheme. This whole confusion stems from a rather vague understanding of what the subjective theory of value means: Goods and services provided by humans have no intrinsic value but become precious simply there being demand by other humans. Gold can become worthless if nobody wants or needs it anymore. A stupid trading card may cost thousands of dollars costing pennies to make but is sought after by enough collectors. Edit: Yes, Bitcoins are just numbers stored in a computer memory around the world but so is software. And software ain’t cheap. While Bitcoin‘s value might be grossly overestimated due to rampant speculation but even then, these speculators are no victims in an investment fraud but they truly believe that Bitcoin will become much more useful in the future. They may be wrong but, currently, nobody knows. Only the future will show. Edit: Typos.

bb88 5y ago
> With a decentralized digital asset there is no sole person or company that profits from just lying to you about where your Dollar goes in exchange for the digitals. Ponzi schemes don't have to run by single individuals, but perhaps by multi-person organizations like the mafia. The mob was the reason the RICO laws came to be. And undoubtedly, the mafia organizations would collaborate to break up their crime into regions. Mafia group A would take the West, etc. Since they're a criminal organization, anti-trust laws were meaningless. There wasn't a requirement that the different mob bosses had to compete with each other.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  That's interesting. Can mobs sue each other for anticompetitive practices?
  - bb88 5y ago
    I think they would just kill each other, or take contracts out on each other for reneging on verbal agreements.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Actually, kind of. It would involve appealing to other organized crime outfits that the given mob interacts with to have them reign in their behavior. Group A might think they can bully group B, and maybe they can, but they can't bully groups C, D, E, and F, who all rely on each other to not attract unwanted attention from the authorities or the public. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apalachin_meeting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apalachin_meeting not quite suing, but it was a diplomatic way of resolving disputes and preventing them.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  The mob isn't running bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme. People who buy bitcoin are not mobsters. There are different waves of investors from the true believers who mined because the idea was powerful to the mt gox crowd, coinbase newbies, wall street / hedge fund crowd. Each group has a different reason. The latest groups are looking to make money and the earlier adopters have moved to a less popular more ideological coins with advantages over bitcoin. Mafia no.. something else yes.
  - bb88 5y ago
    I think you miss the point. Ponzi schemes can be run by multiple organizations, and agreeing to a scheme together without signing legal formalities. The big example of this would be the 2008 banking crisis where CDO's were bought and sold by multiple banks, but ended up being worth less than the pieces of paper they were printed on -- even though the banking industry should have known this were the case. Once it was known, they sought to protect themselves first -- "Too big to fail", TARP were common terms of the time.
  - gunshai 5y ago
    This isn't even true you can track wallet addresses and see their movement overtime. Look up a graph called hash ribbons. People hold btc for very long periods of time.
EastOfTruth 5y ago
> While Bitcoin‘s value might be grossly overestimated While Bitcoin‘s value might be grossly underestimated
graeme 5y ago
> They do not pretend making your money work for you by some magical scheme. No. They instead take your money, buy coal, and burn it. Nothing is left. As you say, Ponzi schemers take money for themselves and keep it. Most of what Madoff stole was recovered, for instance. Whereas virtually 100% of all money invested into crypto has been burned by miners. This is pretty easy to model. So there’s nothing left to recover if new money collapses. Bitcoin is worse than a typical ponzi in this respect.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Indeed this is a new form of Ponzi scheme, and I agree with the authors use of the "quacks-like-a-duck" model. > But if one wants to know whether bitcoin is a good investment, or just an old type of investment fraud with a new coat of paint, the legal definition is irrelevant. One must use a quacks-like-a-duck definition, that describes the mechanism through which fools and money are separated and the reasons why it is a fraud. It's the world's first decentralized Ponzi scheme, where each participant cell need not understand the whole picture to achieve the end result. It's a financial cancer.
- naruvimama 5y ago
  Where people choose to throw their own money should be left to them. However, I wish governments would ban regulated institutions from throwing peoples real money into non-governmental/undemocratic cryptocurrency. If banks/govts want to get in on the action, they should perhaps start their own cryptocurrency/blockchain.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    > ... Where people choose to throw their own money should be left to them. Yes, unless it causes harm to the broader economy. I explained this in a different reply lower down, but when enough people participate it can destabilize the entire financial system in the country. And if it takes down the USD, globally. Pardon the pasta, but in 1997, the entire economy of Albania collapsed because everyone started participating in Ponzi schemes. They even jailed their finance minister for trying to stop it, and it led to a civil war. The IMF had to air drop in big bags of money to bail the country out. [1] This is what is at stake. [edit] > At their peak, the nominal value of the pyramid schemes' liabilities amounted to almost half of the country's GDP. Many Albanians—about two-thirds of the population—invested in them. When the schemes collapsed, there was uncontained rioting, the government fell, and the country descended into anarchy and a near civil war in which some 2,000 people were killed. [1] [1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.ht...
pa7ch 5y ago
Its a ponzi because of how exchanges work. The exchange takes your money, gives it to some of the early dropouts. When you sell for a loss, you've been lied to about the utility of bitcoin. You likely never used bitcoin for any of the many advertised functions. You held it, and sold for a loss. Some will win, more will lose. Its a concentration of wealth with a little more class chaos than normal because it's accessible to a more diverse crowd. It still ultimately fails to incentivize useful work to society and it's still going to cause wealth to concentrate in the wrong direction.
amarant 5y ago
Rarely is it one person doing all the lying in a Ponzi scheme. Commonly they're labeled as multi level marketing, which then encourages more people to lie. And I disagree that bitcoin proponents doesn't claim they make your money with for you: there's a lot of talk about the "deflationary nature" of bitcoin, aka the "magical scheme". Miners haven't burned all the money invested in bitcoin, but I'll admit this particular scheme has an unusually high cost of business, for a Ponzi scheme. Most victims of a Ponzi scheme believe they're investing in something that will earn them money in the long run, otherwise they wouldn't have fallen for it. Bitcoins long-term value is clear by examining it's usefulness: it's a tulip, at best. I'll also freely admit that bitcoin is by far the most cleverly disguised Ponzi scheme yet, it's nature will probably only be obvious after the inevitable collapse.
- derangedHorse 5y ago
  A lot of people compare the Tulip craze to Bitcoin but the differences in the properties of each should make it clear why Bitcoin has a higher chance of maintaining value over time. The qualities that Bitcoin has, have typically been sought after in other high valued commodities. Things like longevity and (protocol enforced) scarcity are previously things attributed to gold and remains one of the reasons why gold continues to hold value. Tulips on the other hand can easily wither away and its amount can grow exponentially. There are more reasons on why Bitcoin should be valuable in its own right, but many people who can write a lot better than me have written about it. If you haven’t made up your mind on Bitcoin and still have an open mind to learning what it is, or even if you want more intelligent arguments to critique and debunk, I highly recommend reading The Bitcoin Standard written by Saifedean Ammous.
  - amarant 5y ago
    I agree that bitcoin has exactly one of the properties that makes gold valuable. It lacks the others though: you can actually use gold for a wide range of applications, from electrical to cosmetical, and it's rarity actually makes it even more useful as decoration, as it becomes a brag (look how much expensive gold I can afford). You can't build electrical circuits from bitcoin, nor can you wear them as a necklace(I guess you could print your keys on a shirt or something, but then they wouldn't be yours for very long) Scarcity alone isn't enough, you need a use for them too..
Helloworldboy 5y ago
My theory is that a lot of people here had the opportunity to be extremely early adopters of Bitcoin and make a hell of a lot of money, but most missed that boat and now hate bitcoin because of it
mftb 5y ago
> Goods and services provided by humans have no intrinsic value but become precious simply there being demand by other humans. This incorrect. I can purchase a home or food from humans and they have intrinsic value. If whatever market they were purchased on collapses, I simply live in the home and eat the food to realize their value, no further transacting required. Similarly with services I can pay for someone to build the home and harvest the food, the value is immediately realized because I can still eat, have a place to live and my time free to do other things. This is literally why the term "intrinsic" was uh, coined, to contrast these types of goods and services with things like precious metals which may have little intrinsic value.
- G3rn0ti 5y ago
  > If whatever market they were purchased on collapses, I simply live in the home and eat the food to realize their value If the market for food „collapses“ that means there is too much of it. Its value has gone down because your fellow humans do not want to buy any food from you anymore. Now, you can eat your own food, yes, but if you hoarded too much of it you will have to let the remainders rot away. In this extreme case the value of a good is only given by yourself. So your argument does not contradict the subjective theory of value at all. On the day nobody cares for Bitcoin anymore, its value will go to _almost_ zero. Maybe some former Bitcoin zealots will keep the blockchain on their hard disks anyway as a memory. Then some subjective value will be left to Bitcoin even then.
  - mftb 5y ago
    I am in agreement with you precisely because I wasn't trying to contradict the original comment. I did want to correct their statement about intrinsic value because others will accept it as fact without understanding that things can be evaluated in multiple value systems at once, and their intrinsic value can be more or less independent of their market value.
seoulmetro 5y ago
You do realise digital assets have to be created right? Your entire statement is wrong. I'm surprised you managed to write so much without realising how wrong it is. Sounds like you don't know what digital assets are, or what a ponzi scheme is. Trading cards are ponzi schemes too. From an entertainment point of view, they are created for the purpose of being fun to trade. From a monetary point of view, they are a ponzi scheme. Bitcoin is neither fun, nor solves a problem, nor has any use beyond monetary.
- nuerow 5y ago
  > Trading cards are ponzi schemes too. From an entertainment point of view, they are created for the purpose of being fun to trade. No, not really. You're confusing the concept of intrinsic vs perceived value, and completely ignoring the concept of utility. People who buy cards for fun do it because it's fun, just like we could spend money to rent a sports car, go on a vacation, or drive around a test track. The monetary value of a hotel say from last month is zero, but that does not make hotels any type of fraud. What would represent a Ponzi scheme would be, say, advertising Beany Babies as a safe and guaranteed investment to attract speculators, sell them Beany Babies for a hefty markup, and proceed to leave them holding the bag.
  - seoulmetro 5y ago
    Nope. Not confusing anything. They might make a range of beanie babies, or they'll suddenly start using the range that already exists. A ponzi scheme can start anywhere in the lifecycle.
nootropicat 5y ago
The only way to make profit on bitcoin is to make someone else poorer by that amount. That's what makes it a ponzi - anything with this property that pretends to be an investment is one. Implementation details are irrelevant. >Goods and services provided by humans have no intrinsic value but become precious simply there being demand by other humans. Nonsense that's easy to disprove: try to stop eating food and start 'valuing' dirt as food. You will, of course, starve to death. Why? Because actual value is objective and exists regardless of what people think. Intrinsic value objectively exists, but in most cases can only be estimated, correctly or not. It depends both on location and time coordinates. Civilizations that estimate objective value too incorrectly collapse or get conquered. Those that estimate it correctly enough prosper. The long term metric for any civilization is fortunately clear enough - energy use, also called the Kardashev's scale. It's a long term metric because foolish civilizations can waste energy in the short term (eg. by mining bitcoin) - but because it's wasted it results in less available energy in the future. In cases like bitcoin there are no unknowns - it objectively has negative value and destroys wealth. It's backed by nothing and generates no income. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying don't play in crypto. Never in history was it so easy to get rich by extracting wealth from others - which is what bitcoin and 99% of crypto in general is for. Is it a scam to promote it? My personal definition is pretty simple: it's a scam when promotion involves lies. Telling people bitcoin has value, while being a developer (thus smart enough to know it's worthless)? Scammer. Telling people it may go up in price (because other people may buy it)? Not a lie. China was smart to ban crypto - they're too big to hope to profit at the expense of the west, and in fact most coins and tokens are held by Westerners, virtually guaranteeing it would end up as wealth transfer from China. Crypto tokens can have real value - if they monetize efficiency increase in the real world. A smart contract economy is a possibility and it can exist - but right now it's all in the proof of concept stage. Without the ponzi factor I think eth should be valued between $1B-$10B (based on future potential, not current income), other smart contract platforms collectively at 20% of it, some defi tokens like MKR in the upper 8 figures - lower 9 figures. Everything else - worthless.
- rnotaro 5y ago
  > The only way to make profit on bitcoin is to make someone else poorer by that amount. That's what makes it a ponzi - anything with this property that pretends to be an investment is one. Implementation details are irrelevant. I'm really far from an expert in economics so I could be wrong but ain't that how the stock market works for non-dividends stocks?

bb88 5y ago

> With a decentralized digital asset there is no sole person or company that profits from just lying to you about where your Dollar goes in exchange for the digitals. Ponzi schemes don't have to run by single individuals, but perhaps by multi-person organizations like the mafia. The mob was the reason the RICO laws came to be. And undoubtedly, the mafia organizations would collaborate to break up their crime into regions. Mafia group A would take the West, etc. Since they're a criminal organization, anti-trust laws were meaningless. There wasn't a requirement that the different mob bosses had to compete with each other.

DeathArrow 5y ago
That's interesting. Can mobs sue each other for anticompetitive practices?
- bb88 5y ago
  I think they would just kill each other, or take contracts out on each other for reneging on verbal agreements.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Actually, kind of. It would involve appealing to other organized crime outfits that the given mob interacts with to have them reign in their behavior. Group A might think they can bully group B, and maybe they can, but they can't bully groups C, D, E, and F, who all rely on each other to not attract unwanted attention from the authorities or the public. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apalachin_meeting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apalachin_meeting not quite suing, but it was a diplomatic way of resolving disputes and preventing them.
ipaddr 5y ago
The mob isn't running bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme. People who buy bitcoin are not mobsters. There are different waves of investors from the true believers who mined because the idea was powerful to the mt gox crowd, coinbase newbies, wall street / hedge fund crowd. Each group has a different reason. The latest groups are looking to make money and the earlier adopters have moved to a less popular more ideological coins with advantages over bitcoin. Mafia no.. something else yes.
- bb88 5y ago
  I think you miss the point. Ponzi schemes can be run by multiple organizations, and agreeing to a scheme together without signing legal formalities. The big example of this would be the 2008 banking crisis where CDO's were bought and sold by multiple banks, but ended up being worth less than the pieces of paper they were printed on -- even though the banking industry should have known this were the case. Once it was known, they sought to protect themselves first -- "Too big to fail", TARP were common terms of the time.
- gunshai 5y ago
  This isn't even true you can track wallet addresses and see their movement overtime. Look up a graph called hash ribbons. People hold btc for very long periods of time.

EastOfTruth 5y ago

> While Bitcoin‘s value might be grossly overestimated While Bitcoin‘s value might be grossly underestimated

graeme 5y ago

> They do not pretend making your money work for you by some magical scheme. No. They instead take your money, buy coal, and burn it. Nothing is left. As you say, Ponzi schemers take money for themselves and keep it. Most of what Madoff stole was recovered, for instance. Whereas virtually 100% of all money invested into crypto has been burned by miners. This is pretty easy to model. So there’s nothing left to recover if new money collapses. Bitcoin is worse than a typical ponzi in this respect.

arcticbull 5y ago
Indeed this is a new form of Ponzi scheme, and I agree with the authors use of the "quacks-like-a-duck" model. > But if one wants to know whether bitcoin is a good investment, or just an old type of investment fraud with a new coat of paint, the legal definition is irrelevant. One must use a quacks-like-a-duck definition, that describes the mechanism through which fools and money are separated and the reasons why it is a fraud. It's the world's first decentralized Ponzi scheme, where each participant cell need not understand the whole picture to achieve the end result. It's a financial cancer.
naruvimama 5y ago
Where people choose to throw their own money should be left to them. However, I wish governments would ban regulated institutions from throwing peoples real money into non-governmental/undemocratic cryptocurrency. If banks/govts want to get in on the action, they should perhaps start their own cryptocurrency/blockchain.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  > ... Where people choose to throw their own money should be left to them. Yes, unless it causes harm to the broader economy. I explained this in a different reply lower down, but when enough people participate it can destabilize the entire financial system in the country. And if it takes down the USD, globally. Pardon the pasta, but in 1997, the entire economy of Albania collapsed because everyone started participating in Ponzi schemes. They even jailed their finance minister for trying to stop it, and it led to a civil war. The IMF had to air drop in big bags of money to bail the country out. [1] This is what is at stake. [edit] > At their peak, the nominal value of the pyramid schemes' liabilities amounted to almost half of the country's GDP. Many Albanians—about two-thirds of the population—invested in them. When the schemes collapsed, there was uncontained rioting, the government fell, and the country descended into anarchy and a near civil war in which some 2,000 people were killed. [1] [1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.ht...

pa7ch 5y ago

Its a ponzi because of how exchanges work. The exchange takes your money, gives it to some of the early dropouts. When you sell for a loss, you've been lied to about the utility of bitcoin. You likely never used bitcoin for any of the many advertised functions. You held it, and sold for a loss. Some will win, more will lose. Its a concentration of wealth with a little more class chaos than normal because it's accessible to a more diverse crowd. It still ultimately fails to incentivize useful work to society and it's still going to cause wealth to concentrate in the wrong direction.

amarant 5y ago

Rarely is it one person doing all the lying in a Ponzi scheme. Commonly they're labeled as multi level marketing, which then encourages more people to lie. And I disagree that bitcoin proponents doesn't claim they make your money with for you: there's a lot of talk about the "deflationary nature" of bitcoin, aka the "magical scheme". Miners haven't burned all the money invested in bitcoin, but I'll admit this particular scheme has an unusually high cost of business, for a Ponzi scheme. Most victims of a Ponzi scheme believe they're investing in something that will earn them money in the long run, otherwise they wouldn't have fallen for it. Bitcoins long-term value is clear by examining it's usefulness: it's a tulip, at best. I'll also freely admit that bitcoin is by far the most cleverly disguised Ponzi scheme yet, it's nature will probably only be obvious after the inevitable collapse.

derangedHorse 5y ago
A lot of people compare the Tulip craze to Bitcoin but the differences in the properties of each should make it clear why Bitcoin has a higher chance of maintaining value over time. The qualities that Bitcoin has, have typically been sought after in other high valued commodities. Things like longevity and (protocol enforced) scarcity are previously things attributed to gold and remains one of the reasons why gold continues to hold value. Tulips on the other hand can easily wither away and its amount can grow exponentially. There are more reasons on why Bitcoin should be valuable in its own right, but many people who can write a lot better than me have written about it. If you haven’t made up your mind on Bitcoin and still have an open mind to learning what it is, or even if you want more intelligent arguments to critique and debunk, I highly recommend reading The Bitcoin Standard written by Saifedean Ammous.
- amarant 5y ago
  I agree that bitcoin has exactly one of the properties that makes gold valuable. It lacks the others though: you can actually use gold for a wide range of applications, from electrical to cosmetical, and it's rarity actually makes it even more useful as decoration, as it becomes a brag (look how much expensive gold I can afford). You can't build electrical circuits from bitcoin, nor can you wear them as a necklace(I guess you could print your keys on a shirt or something, but then they wouldn't be yours for very long) Scarcity alone isn't enough, you need a use for them too..

Helloworldboy 5y ago

My theory is that a lot of people here had the opportunity to be extremely early adopters of Bitcoin and make a hell of a lot of money, but most missed that boat and now hate bitcoin because of it

mftb 5y ago

> Goods and services provided by humans have no intrinsic value but become precious simply there being demand by other humans. This incorrect. I can purchase a home or food from humans and they have intrinsic value. If whatever market they were purchased on collapses, I simply live in the home and eat the food to realize their value, no further transacting required. Similarly with services I can pay for someone to build the home and harvest the food, the value is immediately realized because I can still eat, have a place to live and my time free to do other things. This is literally why the term "intrinsic" was uh, coined, to contrast these types of goods and services with things like precious metals which may have little intrinsic value.

G3rn0ti 5y ago
> If whatever market they were purchased on collapses, I simply live in the home and eat the food to realize their value If the market for food „collapses“ that means there is too much of it. Its value has gone down because your fellow humans do not want to buy any food from you anymore. Now, you can eat your own food, yes, but if you hoarded too much of it you will have to let the remainders rot away. In this extreme case the value of a good is only given by yourself. So your argument does not contradict the subjective theory of value at all. On the day nobody cares for Bitcoin anymore, its value will go to _almost_ zero. Maybe some former Bitcoin zealots will keep the blockchain on their hard disks anyway as a memory. Then some subjective value will be left to Bitcoin even then.
- mftb 5y ago
  I am in agreement with you precisely because I wasn't trying to contradict the original comment. I did want to correct their statement about intrinsic value because others will accept it as fact without understanding that things can be evaluated in multiple value systems at once, and their intrinsic value can be more or less independent of their market value.

seoulmetro 5y ago

You do realise digital assets have to be created right? Your entire statement is wrong. I'm surprised you managed to write so much without realising how wrong it is. Sounds like you don't know what digital assets are, or what a ponzi scheme is. Trading cards are ponzi schemes too. From an entertainment point of view, they are created for the purpose of being fun to trade. From a monetary point of view, they are a ponzi scheme. Bitcoin is neither fun, nor solves a problem, nor has any use beyond monetary.

nuerow 5y ago
> Trading cards are ponzi schemes too. From an entertainment point of view, they are created for the purpose of being fun to trade. No, not really. You're confusing the concept of intrinsic vs perceived value, and completely ignoring the concept of utility. People who buy cards for fun do it because it's fun, just like we could spend money to rent a sports car, go on a vacation, or drive around a test track. The monetary value of a hotel say from last month is zero, but that does not make hotels any type of fraud. What would represent a Ponzi scheme would be, say, advertising Beany Babies as a safe and guaranteed investment to attract speculators, sell them Beany Babies for a hefty markup, and proceed to leave them holding the bag.
- seoulmetro 5y ago
  Nope. Not confusing anything. They might make a range of beanie babies, or they'll suddenly start using the range that already exists. A ponzi scheme can start anywhere in the lifecycle.

nootropicat 5y ago

The only way to make profit on bitcoin is to make someone else poorer by that amount. That's what makes it a ponzi - anything with this property that pretends to be an investment is one. Implementation details are irrelevant. >Goods and services provided by humans have no intrinsic value but become precious simply there being demand by other humans. Nonsense that's easy to disprove: try to stop eating food and start 'valuing' dirt as food. You will, of course, starve to death. Why? Because actual value is objective and exists regardless of what people think. Intrinsic value objectively exists, but in most cases can only be estimated, correctly or not. It depends both on location and time coordinates. Civilizations that estimate objective value too incorrectly collapse or get conquered. Those that estimate it correctly enough prosper. The long term metric for any civilization is fortunately clear enough - energy use, also called the Kardashev's scale. It's a long term metric because foolish civilizations can waste energy in the short term (eg. by mining bitcoin) - but because it's wasted it results in less available energy in the future. In cases like bitcoin there are no unknowns - it objectively has negative value and destroys wealth. It's backed by nothing and generates no income. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying don't play in crypto. Never in history was it so easy to get rich by extracting wealth from others - which is what bitcoin and 99% of crypto in general is for. Is it a scam to promote it? My personal definition is pretty simple: it's a scam when promotion involves lies. Telling people bitcoin has value, while being a developer (thus smart enough to know it's worthless)? Scammer. Telling people it may go up in price (because other people may buy it)? Not a lie. China was smart to ban crypto - they're too big to hope to profit at the expense of the west, and in fact most coins and tokens are held by Westerners, virtually guaranteeing it would end up as wealth transfer from China. Crypto tokens can have real value - if they monetize efficiency increase in the real world. A smart contract economy is a possibility and it can exist - but right now it's all in the proof of concept stage. Without the ponzi factor I think eth should be valued between $1B-$10B (based on future potential, not current income), other smart contract platforms collectively at 20% of it, some defi tokens like MKR in the upper 8 figures - lower 9 figures. Everything else - worthless.

rnotaro 5y ago
> The only way to make profit on bitcoin is to make someone else poorer by that amount. That's what makes it a ponzi - anything with this property that pretends to be an investment is one. Implementation details are irrelevant. I'm really far from an expert in economics so I could be wrong but ain't that how the stock market works for non-dividends stocks?