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The Monero devs are quite proud of the fact that it's the best cryptocurrency for scamming. It doesn't surprise me it's propped up by even more illicit work.
There are plenty of other shitcoins, like Ethereum, which started out with the creators giving themselves free coins during the early mining stages just so any popularity of the coin would make them rich. The incentive to be an early adopter definitely applies (as well as an incentive to be the creator that gets a mining head-start), and that aspect of Ponzi schemes is relevant for most shitcoins.
Whether it's a hype bubble or an explicit Ponzi scheme, Gravel is right about the need for more people to buy in all the time to fuel the speculation. It's a bit misleading, as Bitcoin wasn't designed to be a speculative bubble from its outset. It's still important to describe Bitcoin by what it has become: a devastating international pump-and-dump scheme with a benign beginning.
the upside to calling it a ponzi scheme is that lots of people know how ponzi schemes work and they get the gist that bitcoin could "leave them holding the bag" in the future
I bought 10 Dollars of Bitcoin in April and now its 15 Dollars, how dare you call it a scam! I'll be a billionaire soon! :porky-happy:
spoiler
I can't withdraw it from exchange unless i buy more lol
You're a libertarian so you believe that all the world's problems are caused by central banking. You want currency to be decentralized, not controlled by a government, and more like the gold standard. These are bullshit problems that don't actually matter, but bitcoin solves them fairly elegantly.
A bank is mostly a ledger (list of transactions and when they happened). A whole bunch of bullshit can happen if the ledger is inconsistent, like if you receive money then send it, and in one ledger it's send then receive but the send bounces because you didn't have the balance to do that. This is a problem for a distributed system, because the order of events in those is never consistent. Bitcoin solves this.
When you send a transaction via bitcoin, you broadcast it to the network, and a bunch of computers try to add it to their ledgers and broadcast the new ledger to each other, then use those going forward. To make this less of a chaotic clusterfuck, the longest ledger wins, so they'll end up more consistent in the long run. To slow this down, they have to do an arbitrary hard computing task before sending the new ledger, so globally new ledgers get sent about once per half hour. To incentivize people doing this, whoever makes the new ledger gets to add one bitcoin to their account. So that's what bitcoin mining is - computing new ledgers and doing arbitrary hard computing tasks to sign them, so you get rewarded a bitcoin.
So now you have some pile of cryptography and game theory that allows you to have a distributed ledger. It's decentralized and not controlled by the government. One bitcoin is printed every half hour, so the rate of currency creation is linear, like a gold mine. Everything the libertarian wanted is done.
Word of mouth is exponential and bitcoin is linear, so weird libertarians found out about this and decided to buy in faster than bitcoins were created, and the price kept going up. Eventually actual groups with money started buying in, because if it's stupid and it keeps going up it's still a good investment. This makes it go up, which makes it a better looking investment, so the price just spikes occasionally.
This is mostly accurate, but incorrect on a couple points:
- The target time between "blocks," as new sections of the ledger are known, is 10 minutes, not half an hour.
- The block reward is not 1 Bitcoin. It was originally 50 bitcoins, and is cut in half every 210,000 blocks. Eventually the block reward will be zero and mining will earn only transaction fees, at which point the maximum of 21 million bitcoins will have been mined.
It's an arbitrary limit for the sake of having an arbitrary limit, just like there's an arbitrary limit to the amount of gold on earth. This is part of the libertarian ideology baked into Bitcoin.
As for the latter question, the theory goes that transaction fees (which are paid to miners) will be sufficient to support mining as the block reward diminishes. In reality it's more likely that hashing power on the network will decrease as miners go bust, but that won't impact the overall system very much, really (the network adjusts to adapt to changing hashing power to ensure a 10 minute block time). It makes a specific type of attack on the overall system (51% attack, it's called) easier, but the value to an attacker of committing such an attack is, in my view, not well established (beyond having a short position in Bitcoin I suppose, but if you're going to break the law, a simple pump and dump is a much easier scheme to make money in crypto).
Yeah, that's why we're going to adopt the Chinese state crypto to use for illicit funding instead
I don't think China has a "cryptocurrency". They have a digital currency, but it works like a regular currency (I think) and does not use a blockchain.
Years ago I bought bitcoin and then ethereum when I was a libertarian Joe Rogan fan, at the time I was just interested so I could buy drugs on the internet (would never think of breaking the law today) now it’s worth enough to buy a house. Ever wonder why the right wing (mostly white guys, the people who have always had the money and power) are getting rich for doing nothing and the left just shits on each other for thinking about buying crypto?
When my daughter was born four years ago I started a crypto savings account for her because our bank’s savings account only pays 0.01% interest. Now that account is worth 10x what it was back then and maybe by the time shes 18 it really will be worth something. It’s really annoying to hear leftists shit on saving money because I’m “destroying the planet” somehow, just spouting the same talking points as Jamie Dimon… 🤔
It’s really annoying to hear leftists shit on saving money
Bruh.
You invested money in the hundreds of dollars and you'll retrieve money in the tens of thousands of dollars. Where do you think the difference comes from?
It’s really annoying to hear leftists shit on saving money because I’m “destroying the planet” somehow, just spouting the same talking points as Jamie Dimon…
On one hand the amount you are buying is literally irrelevant, you are not a billionaire or millionaire so 0.25 of a bitcoin is a meaningless amount when it comes to issues of power use and the environment.
On the other hand you can't pretend bitcoin isn't shit. It is like saying there is no ethical consumption under capitalism THEREFORE I should be able to fly around in a private jet everywhere 5 times a week because I won a lotery. At some point your personal choices do actually matter.
If you were someone buying thousands of bitcoin per month/year then I'd definitely say you are part of the problem no matter what ideology you claim to support.
When it comes to your crypto saving account what I'd say is that you are incredibly optimistic if you think that account will have anything of value 14 years from now(2035), all I can say is be careful with those expectations lol.
I mean...that's great for you, but if that video is right you are just part of a ponzi scheme.
Yeah, it can be annoying when people are right, especially when it's at the expense of your investments and savings strategies. But hey, that's why material concerns triumph ideology, and why these kind of financial bubbles arise and pop even though we've seen it happen hundreds of times. Feel free to keep gambling on crypto though, I can't think of a better way to spend your time and money in this system. But buying crypto does not seem to be a feasible method of praxis, which is why I don't see the point of discussing it as political strategy. And if it is to become a political strategy then we sure as shit shouldn't be discussing it on forums filled with the fbi. To my understanding of economics and theory, crypto is not a lever of power we can potentially utilize in the future but yet another consumer choice.
Which part of the right wing? The media whores or the capitalists? The libertarian fail-sons or wanna-be fascists? Small jetski dealership owners? Which ones are 'getting rich doing nothing'? Cause I guarantee you they are doing something. It's just that something doesn't lead to anything but their own personal enrichment, which will likely lead to catastrophic ecological outcomes for most people outside of the core of industrialized nations that can weather those changes.
You need a little more time in the oven my friend. Those brain worms aren't fully fried yet.
