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kleinbl00  ·  925 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Bitcoin is a Ponzi

Ponzi schemes are intentional frauds. You can be as mad as you want at the idea of Bitcoin. You can even be mad that you didn't buy it early. But "Satoshi Nakamoto" has been sitting on 1.1m BTC since like 2009 or so which as of this very moment is about $55b worth. That's around the GDP of Croatia or Uruguay. Now granted - that is, in fact about $10b less than Madoff scammed but I mean, Madoff didn't publish a whitepaper or source code. And most bitcoin doesn't move.

Contrary to your author's definition, here's what a Ponzi scheme actually is:

    In a Ponzi scheme, a con artist offers investments that promise very high returns with little or no risk to his victims. The returns are said to originate from a business or a secret idea run by the con artist. In reality, the business does not exist or the idea does not work. The con artist actually pays the high returns promised to his earlier investors by using the money obtained from later investors. In other words, instead of engaging in a legitimate business activity, the con artist attempts to attract new investors in order to make the payments that were promised to earlier investors.

The initial promise of Bitcoin was that it would overturn the world financial order. It was described as extraordinarily risky. The idea wasn't secret at all - there's a developer page. And nobody has ever gotten "paid" - the buying and selling of Bitcoin is entirely within the power of the individual, rather than the manager.

So I mean... be mad? And to be clear, I own zero bitcoin. But the more time you spend being angry for the wrong reasons the less time you can spend being angry for the right ones.