While you might be arguing in good faith—it's still not clear—you absolutely are misinterpreting my responses pretty badly. I'll try once more to clear these misunderstandings up, but I'm not feeling like the effort put in thus far has been mutually respectful.
In what way have I not been respectful? I am presenting my arguments the same way you are. I am absolutely welcoming of your arguments and I genuinely request your side so I can understand where you're coming from and thus present my argument in the most concise way I can.
Now. I completely understood Telecasters point. Telecaster mentioned, in previous posts, that a promise of a return is a necessary component of a Ponzi. While this is, indeed, a common attribute—and a sometimes a necessary one in some jurisdictions—it is one attribute that Bernie Madoff's Ponzi failed to include. My point was simply: there are different legal definitions of Ponzis. Some of the biggest Ponzis of the past do not include all of the definitions from all legal jurisdictions. Failing to meet all the criteria of all legal jurisdictions is not sufficient to conclude a system is not a Ponzi.
What?! First off, that is factually not true at all. Madoff absolutely made promises of returns. Guaranteed returns in fact, as was already talked about in this very thread. While I agree that promises of returns are required for a ponzi scheme to exist, they absolutely did in Madoff's case. Like you, I don't care much about what the legal definition of a ponzi scheme is. Doesn't matter whether you go by a legal definition or just a commonly understood definition, I think you'd be hard pressed to have anyone feel that a commodity, scarce or otherwise, is a ponzi scheme. That is very much where bitcoin lies. It is an open market commodity.
This isn't necessarily true. If you sign a Terms of Service that is, for example, usurious, there are laws that protect you from that—even though you were "too lazy" to understand or read the terms. This happens all the times with businesses Terms of Service—many of the terms are often not legally enforceable.
I'd argue: the proof's in the pudding, as they say. Fraud runs so rampant, and the lion's share of Bitcoiners are completely clueless about how the thing they're invested in actually functions. Again, for proof, you needn't do much beyond read through this thread. Either Bitcoiners are colossally lazy and stupid, as a group, or they've been deceived. Who's doing the deceiving? Well, certainly a bunch of people I've already mentioned. But also the system, itself, is deceiving. That puts it on shaky legal ground for prosecution, I understand. But as I've tried to reiterate: I'm not very interested in talking about this from a legal lens. I think the interesting discussion is whether Bitcoin uses the same mechanisms to separate fools and their money as Ponzis.
You talk about me not arguing in good faith and that I am not being respectful, but in the same post you talk about how I am a "cryto-bro" and that bitcoiners are lazy and stupid and I am supposed to take that how?? I have no used name calling in any of my responses nor have I used generalizations in any derogatory way.
This is another case where my argument wasn't understood. I have no intention of arguing whether these things are happening, or if Bitcoin is capable of serving a good purpose for some people. My point is: all of this is completely irrelevant when it comes to answering: is this a good investment. It's a cynical distraction—deception.
I feel like you're being disingenuous here. Your exact words in the previous post was:
4. In addition to the tech-obfuscation, you have crypto-celebrities and famous investors constantly—based on literally nothing—predicting wildly optimistic future prices of Bitcoins (https://www.bitcoinprice.com/predictions/). You also have—as you've seen in this thread even very recently—wild claims about how crypto will one day "bank the unbanked", become a global currency, free citizens of repressive regimes, end corruption, etc.
This was in response to Telecaster rebutting your point as to whether bitcoin is fraud or not. That sentence makes claims (almost certainly directed to me) about people in this very thread making wild claims about bitcoin
"one day" doing these things. My counterpoint just now was that the things I brought up in this thread were not
"one day" things that I'm claiming will someday happen. They are factual events that are indeed taking place today. Regardless of whether you think they're irrelevant to your arguments that it is fraud, I don't understand why stating factual events that are taking place is cynical or deception.
Cool. We mostly agree here. I'd argue, you may have some blinders on about what "decentralized" means. You say it removes "trust", which is true. But importantly, it also removes accountability. Understanding this, I think, is key to understanding why fraud is so rampant. It's a feature, not a bug.
I don't think it removes accountability at all. Bitcoin is a neutral thing. Just like the internet or any other inanimate human creation. Humans have done a lot of good things using the internet to advance society, but in that same regard humans have used the internet to do a lot of bad things. The internet doesn't do these things though, humans do. Humans are ultimately accountable for their actions; accountability does not fall to the objects we choose to use, ever. Doesn't matter if it is bitcoin, the internet, cars, drugs, weapons, chemicals, energy, etc. Just because you have a new invention doesn't mean that invention removes accountability from humans in any way. I find you make generalized claims about things often in your arguments without any real world examples to back up what you're referring to when you say these things. Do you have any examples that might help illustrate your point about how bitcoin exactly removed accountability from a human?
Hah. I actually thought to include a piece about gold in my last rant, but thought it'd be too irrelevant. Kinda glad you brought it up! Let's go! Remember in my initial post, I outlined 5 characteristics that make a Ponzi a Ponzi. They were:
1. People invest into it because they expect large profits
2. That expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out—and are very vocal about this
3. However, there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs
4. Instead, the payoffs come entirely from new investment money
5. Meanwhile, the operators take away a large portion of this money
Gold investors do not expect to turn large profits. Gold bugs are gold bugs because they want to hedge against inflation or societal collapse, or communists, or whatever. They absolutely treat it as a store of value, in the old school sense. So right off the bat, that nixes #1.
Gold HAS a source of revenue besides other speculators speculating the price higher. About 2/3 of gold production is actually used/purchased by consumers as jewelry, electronics manufacturing, etc.
Now, I'm hardly a gold bug, so feel weird "defending" gold much beyond that. It's still a very stupid investment, in my opinion. Just less stupid than Bitcoin. And it certainly doesn't meet the Ponzi rules.
1) I already disagreed with your criteria for what makes a ponzi, but to go against point one I will say that a ponzi absolutely isn't required to promise outsized returns of any kind. You can just as easily have a ponzi with modest or minuscule returns to investors and it will still be a ponzi. So the fact that you exclude gold from being a ponzi scheme based on that merit is meaningless here.
2) Gold's source of "revenue" as you put it is gold's utility, which pales in comparison to the gold stocks in the world. Gold's utility is no more minuscule to its supply stocks as bitcoin's utility is to its own. Bitcoin's utility being that of a monetary good where people are using it as a hedge against local monetary inflation, against censorship, and as a means of exchange and store of value in daily life. Your other mistake is that you're measuring gold's utility against its supply, not its stock. However, gold's supply inflation rate is about 1.5% and Bitcoin's currently is at 1.8%, so they happen to be almost identical. So that means gold's utility is an extremely small portion of its stocks similar to bitcoin's utility to its stocks.
And as I mentioned, gold miners don't pay their expenses in gold, so #5 in your post still applies to gold here.
So with both my points in rebuttal to yours, I still fail to see how you have differentiated gold from bitcoin here and certainly failed to see how you've excluded gold from even your own loose definition of a ponzi scheme.
People can freely use the Internet without investing in it (whatever that would even mean?!). This analogy does not hold up.
I don't mean to be pedantic here, but you don't think people are invested in the internet? They may not be holding a certificate or token saying they "own some internet", but they absolutely are invested in it. Take away the internet and most businesses probably won't have a business. If that isn't being invested in something, I don't know what either. Regardless, my point about comparing the two still stands because your claim was that "technical obfuscation" is part of bitcoin's fraud.
Regardless, I think my point was once again misunderstood. My point wasn't: one must understand the complete inner-workings of Bitcoin before investing. My point was: Bitcoin's inner-workings are cited often (see how many tech reporters claim Bitcoin mining is "solving complex math problems"—a completely ridiculous statement) almost as a symbol that there must be something happening that's producing the value. The technological complexity is used to lull people into a false sense that it must be 1. too complicated for them to understand, and 2. doing something valuable. The number goes up because something is worthwhile is happening. Arrogance, I think, compounds this, because people are too embarrassed to acknowledge they don't understand it, and feel part of an in-group by participating to show off how smart and ahead-of-the-pack they are. Blockchain is Computer Science's String Theory—a largely useless bunch of malarkey that not-all-that-bright dipshits think is "super-interesting" despite understanding virtually 0 of it.
Your examples of bitcoin mining being described as "solving complex math problems" is hardly an apt description of this fraud your claiming exists. Media is simply writing articles for mass appeal and accurately describing bitcoin mining as running the SHA256 algorithm over and over again on bundled transactions with randomized nonce values until the output meets the current difficulty requirements is hardly going to help non-technical readers understand anything more than simply stating that it is "solving complex math problems" which is certainly accurate enough for the majority of people to get the gist. Claiming that simplifying something down is fraud is quite the stretch.
Whether you consider mining as something productive thus comes down to whether or not you feel bitcoin is of value to humanity as this is a required component for the bitcoin network's security. If you don't feel bitcoin is of benefit to humanity, then obviously you won't see that as being productive and vice versa.
Y'know, to be honest, you seem offended at the implication that you're a "crypto bro", but you parrot the same really absurd arguments as crypto bros. How is Nassim Taleb—himself a former bit of crypto bro—threatened by Bitcoin? Is the World Bank actually threatened by Bitcoin? You've drank some kool-aid if that's really your perspective here.
Again, I am not going to get into name calling here to prove points. My arguments will stand on their own without resorting to that. I'm also not going to appeal to authority like this either. The World Bank doesn't need to feel threatened to realize that bitcoin stands for everything the World Bank is not. No one expects the World Bank to say anything nice toward bitcoin seeing as how bitcoin stands for everything the WB isn't. Therefore it is hardly the unbiased take you should look for if you're going to appeal to any authority. That's like expecting an honest perspective on climate change from the oil industry.
For what it is worth, Nassim Taleb's change of heart almost certainly has to do with his beef with another bitcoin proponent (Ammous) with whom he wrote a foreword for and they had a falling out. So if Taleb's authority is who you're going to look to as evidence of bitcoin's fraud in this case, it falls flat when even many noted bitcoin critiques have called Taleb's paper criticizing bitcoin absolute "drivel" (which it is):
https://twitter.com/GeorgeSelgin/status/1407866340459884551George Selgin has been in moderated debates against bitcoin and even he sees through Taleb's non-sense, which quite frankly he has exhibited some very strange behavior and comments over the last year. I mention Selgin here not as an appeal to authority, but as a contrast to Taleb being seen as an authority on the matter at all. If your critiques of bitcoin fail to even garner praise from other critics of it, you're doing something wrong.
I could get into it myself as to why Taleb's take on bitcoin makes absolutely zero sense, but that's for another time.