Topic: Is anyone open to the idea that Satoshi invented a brilliant new... (Read 116 times)

Yes and also to this extent a ponzi scheme would involve using Peters money to pay Paul in which case this is not happening at all because every transaction is public on the blockchain and cannot be manipulated or in other words corrupted! Bitcoin is the all time anti ponzi scheme on inflation!

i really wouldn’t say it’s just a brilliant new type of ponzi because decentralization alone makes it a lot different from ponzi schemes and new money does not need to be coming in exactly as long as there are holders or just people who are making sure the money is circulating

"A pyramid of energy or pyramid of productivity shows the production or turnover (the rate at which energy or mass is transferred from one trophic level to the next) of biomass at each trophic level. Instead of showing a single snapshot in time, productivity pyramids show the flow of energy through the food chain."


You helped me learn something new about energy and food, thank you. Here is another interesting part:


"When an ecosystem is healthy, this graph produces a standard ecological pyramid. This is because, in order for the ecosystem to sustain itself, there must be more energy at lower trophic levels than there is at higher trophic levels. This allows organisms on the lower levels to not only maintain a stable population, but also to transfer energy up the pyramid. The exception to this generalization is when portions of a food web are supported by inputs of resources from outside the local community. In small, forested streams, for example, the volume of higher levels is greater than could be supported by the local primary production." 

How could it be a Ponzi scheme when the person who started it, Satoshi, never even benefitted from his one million bitcoins that were created?

The person(s) who started it has to derive a profit from it, thus bitcoin cannot be a Ponzi scheme. Comprende señor?

a ponzi scheme is where some dude, lets call him Mr Ponzi holds a central reserve of investors money and when people hand in a lump of money he only pays out small % as interest/divident/profit, hoping no one takes their initial lumps out too

bitcoin does not work like that.

when one person buys bitcoin he is buying it from someone else who is selling... its called trading.

yes services attached to bitcoin have evolved, where by users now end up treating exchanges as banks, whereby the exchanges hold onto peoples reserves and hopes everyone doesnt just withdraw their lumps+profit at the same time.. but thats a fault of the services acting as banks. not bitcoin

The only natural, sustainable pyramid scheme is this one.

No. As others have already said, Bitcoin is neither a ponzi nor a pyramid scheme.  The idea that new money needs to keep coming in is also a misconception.  Bitcoin's price can fluctuate, but it doesnt inherently require a constant influx of new buyers to exist or to function. 

Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme where to participate you must not buy any bitcoin. New participants who are short on bitcoin find themselves at the lowest levels of the hierarchy. The longer they stay short, the greater the financial damage they suffer when the pyramid eventually collapses!

Bitcoin cannot be a Ponzi scheme. People who call Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme either don't understand Bitcoin or don't know what a Ponzi scheme is.

Or they have twisted the meaning of "Ponzi scheme" to fit their story. Some critics call it a "natural" Ponzi scheme (or "sustainable"), but a "natural" Ponzi scheme is not a Ponzi scheme despite including "Ponzi scheme" in the name. Mostly, when people call Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme, they really mean to compare it to a pyramid scheme.

Ponzi schemes and pyramid schemes are similar in that they require both new investment to continue, but in a Ponzi scheme there is an operator who claims to invest the victims' money. Instead of investing the money and making real returns, the operator really just keeps it and pay fake returns.

In a pyramid scheme, new members pay old members to join in the hope of getting new members to pay them to join. In a pyramid scheme, the earliest members make money while everyone else loses money, but there is no fake investment or returns.

Some Ponzi schemes also include features of a pyramid scheme, so that might account for some confusion between the two.

It can be argued that Bitcoin is similar to a pyramid scheme in some ways, but Bitcoin cannot be a Ponzi scheme because it is 100% transparent and there is no operator pretending to invest the victims' funds.

I don't consider Bitcoin to be a pyramid scheme either, but Bitcoin does have a speculative bubble problem because its utility does not justify its current price. That makes it more like a game of Chicken or Hot Potato, but again not a Ponzi scheme.

Self-moderated topic: All decent posts will be left alone, thank you.


Is anyone open to the idea that Satoshi invented a **brilliant** new type of sustainable Ponzi scheme, unlike anything the world ever saw before? Please, turn off your "flame-throwers", and understand there are some obvious similarities - like extreme wealth for the early participants & the way new money needs to keep coming in, or prices will fall sharply, etc. Once you understand the similarities and the way BTC is apparently sustainable, is there anything wrong with being a brilliant new type of Ponzi?