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Show me a stock anyone is interested in that isn’t expected to go up and reward early adopters. “If the stock community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a gi

Show me a stock anyone is interested in that isn’t expected to go up and reward early adopters. “If the stock community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary stock, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity?”

ethanbond 5y ago
Then stop acting like it’s a currency and/or infrastructure. If it just spirals indefinitely in value then it can’t be used as either. Pretty straightforward.
- pas 5y ago
  It's value is exactly determined by supply-and-demand. It's just as much a "foreign currency" as let's say Vatican Angelbucks. (We know that only a fixed amount of angelbucks will ever exist. So it's deflatory, and it has no earthly uses. But you can send it to your pals via PrayWire, so you can buy coffee with, and so on.) And if you look at the price graphs it's not always going up. It's a synthetic currency with no real backing economy (and the transaction costs are insane). Pretty straightforward.
  - ethanbond 5y ago
    Sorry, let me clarify. Stop acting like it’s a viable currency/infrastructure. I get that you can arbitrarily label anything as these.
    - tata71 5y ago
      Right, because I should wait days for banking wire transfers to get rescued out of the slush pile underneath a fax machine somewhere if I want to pay someone with a different bank. Literal tens of billions of dollars are using these systems to great success. The numbers are refuting your arguments, and will continue to. When we are all carrying counterfactual wallets, able to hold any number of cryptocurrency, or NFT ownership tokens (of the deed or lease to your house, social club entry etc), with social recovery from your closest family/friends when you smash your iPhone, then what will your argument against technology be, I wonder?
      - ethanbond 5y ago
        There was plenty of money working successfully in Enron, Madoff Investment Securities, and Evergrande, too. The traditional systems that are apparently inscrutable to you move, in SWIFT’s case, $5 trillion (with a T) per day. These generally settle in a few minutes. P.S. Transparently resorting to straw men like “if you doubt crypto then you just don’t like technology” is the sort of stuff that prevents people from taking this movement seriously.
        tata71 5y ago
        > The traditional systems that are apparently inscrutable to you move, in SWIFT’s case, $5 trillion (with a T) per day. These generally settle in a few minutes. Not open to you.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  Gold has spiraled indefinitely in value and has been used as currency and/or infrastructure for thousands of years. https://www.thebalance.com/gold-price-history-3305646 https://www.thebalance.com/gold-price-history-3305646
chewbacha 5y ago
Stocks (aka securities) and other products also suffer from Ponzi schemes though. Hence the bureaucracy of the SEC and other governments tasked with regulating and policing the industry.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  The SEC could be called many things, but “massive” isn’t one of them. They have fewer than 5,000 employees, which makes them microscopic on the federal government’s scale and virtually nonexistent proportional to the size of market they’re tasked with regulating.
  - chewbacha 5y ago
    Thanks for that. I had thought they were bigger based on their impact but compared to the FDA (14k) and USDA (100k) they are much smaller by head count. I’ve edited that adjective out of the original post. I’m disheartened by how small the FTC and SEC actually are upon review.
fivea 5y ago
> Show me a stock anyone is interested in that isn’t expected to go up and reward early adopters. Eve though you framed your challenge as a "no true Scotsman" argument, history is packed with IPOs that tanked after the companies went public. https://money.howstuffworks.com/10-biggest-ipo-flops.htm https://money.howstuffworks.com/10-biggest-ipo-flops.htm Last year Uber dropped considerably when it's IPO got out of the gate. The main mistake of your argument is trying to compare something with tangible value with schemes driven by speculation and fear of missing out.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  No one was interested in it. :) I don’t see why stocks have tangible value and tokens used to interact with a network don’t. A stock is a vacuous unverifiable virtual piece of paper. At least if you have a Bitcoin or Ether you can prove what you have and know how many there are. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-02-17/dole-food-had-too-many-shares https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-02-17/dole-f... Most stocks don’t even have dividends any more so what else is a stock for other than selling to the next greater fool?
  - realce 5y ago
    A stock represents ownership in a company that makes things. The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company, not the amount of fools available to sell to. Crypto represents nothing and is backed by nothing other than sunk-cost.
    - throwaway6977 5y ago
      "The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company" This is one of the big lies.
      - fivea 5y ago
        > "The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company" That's true if companies are evaluated on their fundamentals. If you start to deal with stocks as if they were meme coins, with no concern of cash flows or business models or profitability, and you add a decade of quantitative easing, then you get stocks like Tesla, and a stock market that's driven by the need to park free cash no matter how risky and absurd the investment is.
BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
Although some stocks have pyramidal like behaviors, these are generally considered fraudulent and collapse in the long run. Legitimate stocks are expected to be backed by the efficient creation of valuable products or services the company can sell at a profit. These profits are distributed to stock holders as dividends or reinvested in growing the profit potential. The value of a stock crucially stems from the rights to the future profits they give their holders. Legitimate stocks are not just about giving the money of late buyers of stocks to early buyers of stock.
skeeter2020 5y ago
The price of the stock reflects the underlying value though, out of a increasing pool of resources. Companies transmute inputs into outputs of greater future value. Every stock is not a GameStop competing to extract a bigger share of a limited pool of tullip investors.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  The price of a stock reflects beliefs about the prospect for price growth [0]. Since these beliefs may be nth-order derivatives (i.e. I believe that other people believe that other people believe that ....), those beliefs have varying levels of connection to "underlying value". [0] or, alternatively, dividend payouts, but that's a totally different story.
nycdotnet 5y ago
Stocks of boring but profitable companies that pay dividends.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
Early adopters in stocks are mostly the risk takers who funded or worked on the business to succeed. That's not the same as forking something to do a pump and dump scheme. Except DWAC perhaps, but that's already under investigation by the SEC. Which has no alternative in crypto land.

ethanbond 5y ago

Then stop acting like it’s a currency and/or infrastructure. If it just spirals indefinitely in value then it can’t be used as either. Pretty straightforward.

pas 5y ago
It's value is exactly determined by supply-and-demand. It's just as much a "foreign currency" as let's say Vatican Angelbucks. (We know that only a fixed amount of angelbucks will ever exist. So it's deflatory, and it has no earthly uses. But you can send it to your pals via PrayWire, so you can buy coffee with, and so on.) And if you look at the price graphs it's not always going up. It's a synthetic currency with no real backing economy (and the transaction costs are insane). Pretty straightforward.
- ethanbond 5y ago
  Sorry, let me clarify. Stop acting like it’s a viable currency/infrastructure. I get that you can arbitrarily label anything as these.
  - tata71 5y ago
    Right, because I should wait days for banking wire transfers to get rescued out of the slush pile underneath a fax machine somewhere if I want to pay someone with a different bank. Literal tens of billions of dollars are using these systems to great success. The numbers are refuting your arguments, and will continue to. When we are all carrying counterfactual wallets, able to hold any number of cryptocurrency, or NFT ownership tokens (of the deed or lease to your house, social club entry etc), with social recovery from your closest family/friends when you smash your iPhone, then what will your argument against technology be, I wonder?
    - ethanbond 5y ago
      There was plenty of money working successfully in Enron, Madoff Investment Securities, and Evergrande, too. The traditional systems that are apparently inscrutable to you move, in SWIFT’s case, $5 trillion (with a T) per day. These generally settle in a few minutes. P.S. Transparently resorting to straw men like “if you doubt crypto then you just don’t like technology” is the sort of stuff that prevents people from taking this movement seriously.
      - tata71 5y ago
        > The traditional systems that are apparently inscrutable to you move, in SWIFT’s case, $5 trillion (with a T) per day. These generally settle in a few minutes. Not open to you.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
Gold has spiraled indefinitely in value and has been used as currency and/or infrastructure for thousands of years. https://www.thebalance.com/gold-price-history-3305646 https://www.thebalance.com/gold-price-history-3305646

chewbacha 5y ago

Stocks (aka securities) and other products also suffer from Ponzi schemes though. Hence the bureaucracy of the SEC and other governments tasked with regulating and policing the industry.

woodruffw 5y ago
The SEC could be called many things, but “massive” isn’t one of them. They have fewer than 5,000 employees, which makes them microscopic on the federal government’s scale and virtually nonexistent proportional to the size of market they’re tasked with regulating.
- chewbacha 5y ago
  Thanks for that. I had thought they were bigger based on their impact but compared to the FDA (14k) and USDA (100k) they are much smaller by head count. I’ve edited that adjective out of the original post. I’m disheartened by how small the FTC and SEC actually are upon review.

fivea 5y ago

> Show me a stock anyone is interested in that isn’t expected to go up and reward early adopters. Eve though you framed your challenge as a "no true Scotsman" argument, history is packed with IPOs that tanked after the companies went public. https://money.howstuffworks.com/10-biggest-ipo-flops.htm https://money.howstuffworks.com/10-biggest-ipo-flops.htm Last year Uber dropped considerably when it's IPO got out of the gate. The main mistake of your argument is trying to compare something with tangible value with schemes driven by speculation and fear of missing out.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
No one was interested in it. :) I don’t see why stocks have tangible value and tokens used to interact with a network don’t. A stock is a vacuous unverifiable virtual piece of paper. At least if you have a Bitcoin or Ether you can prove what you have and know how many there are. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-02-17/dole-food-had-too-many-shares https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-02-17/dole-f... Most stocks don’t even have dividends any more so what else is a stock for other than selling to the next greater fool?
- realce 5y ago
  A stock represents ownership in a company that makes things. The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company, not the amount of fools available to sell to. Crypto represents nothing and is backed by nothing other than sunk-cost.
  - throwaway6977 5y ago
    "The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company" This is one of the big lies.
    - fivea 5y ago
      > "The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company" That's true if companies are evaluated on their fundamentals. If you start to deal with stocks as if they were meme coins, with no concern of cash flows or business models or profitability, and you add a decade of quantitative easing, then you get stocks like Tesla, and a stock market that's driven by the need to park free cash no matter how risky and absurd the investment is.

BenoitEssiambre 5y ago

Although some stocks have pyramidal like behaviors, these are generally considered fraudulent and collapse in the long run. Legitimate stocks are expected to be backed by the efficient creation of valuable products or services the company can sell at a profit. These profits are distributed to stock holders as dividends or reinvested in growing the profit potential. The value of a stock crucially stems from the rights to the future profits they give their holders. Legitimate stocks are not just about giving the money of late buyers of stocks to early buyers of stock.

skeeter2020 5y ago

The price of the stock reflects the underlying value though, out of a increasing pool of resources. Companies transmute inputs into outputs of greater future value. Every stock is not a GameStop competing to extract a bigger share of a limited pool of tullip investors.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
The price of a stock reflects beliefs about the prospect for price growth [0]. Since these beliefs may be nth-order derivatives (i.e. I believe that other people believe that other people believe that ....), those beliefs have varying levels of connection to "underlying value". [0] or, alternatively, dividend payouts, but that's a totally different story.

nycdotnet 5y ago

Stocks of boring but profitable companies that pay dividends.

NicoJuicy 5y ago

Early adopters in stocks are mostly the risk takers who funded or worked on the business to succeed. That's not the same as forking something to do a pump and dump scheme. Except DWAC perhaps, but that's already under investigation by the SEC. Which has no alternative in crypto land.