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Topic: Re: [FAQ] Is BitCoin a Ponzi or pyramid scheme? (Newbie-Friendly) - page 3. (Read 5834 times)

sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_value_(numismatics)   OK, there seems to be different definitions for it.

Quote
Bitcoin speculation is a pyramid yes.

So are nearly all speculations, no news here.


But, what % of bitcoin activity is speculation vs trade?  This is the scary part.

Most people who are "doing well" equate doing well, as having lots of dollar-worth in BTC, not the BTC themselves.
hero member
Activity: 784
Merit: 1000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_value_(numismatics)   OK, there seems to be different definitions for it.

Quote
Bitcoin speculation is a pyramid yes.

So are nearly all speculations, no news here.
sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250
Bitcoin speculation is a pyramid yes.
hero member
Activity: 784
Merit: 1000
Re: old beaten topic of buying things with bitcoins (even though I do, even when I don't need to) - it is still a for-fun thing mostly, and maybe in some illegal cases it is the only way so it makes sense there, but until there are more unique things you can only buy with bitcoins, it will be an asset used for hoarding. Why? Because you can not buy anything with bitcoins yet. Bitpay and other converters just help you hide the fact of actually buying with fiat; you are using BTC as the transport (which is an intended method) but you as a merchant are stocking up using fiat and your buyers get BTC using fiat, so the coins are only a transport, you stil buy things with fiat.

And this will be slowly changing, over many years ahead. Don't expect everyone to suddenly start buying everything with bitcoins - because there's currently no need to, only if you don't have access to standard fiat transport methods or you want to anonymize them. Later, when we get more products which are produced and marketed using only bitcoins, which will have prices nominated in Bitcoins (not changing with USD exchange rate), that would be the real BTC market where people would have no choice but to buy with coins, and where salaries would be paid in coins, but it is, again, years from fruition.

The fiats saved in the transportation of my fiat purchases=bitcoin's intrinsic value.

That is not what intrinsic value means tho...
Take away the monetary uses of bitcoin and what you're left with is its intrinsic value.
It is all the other ways you can use bitcoin in when it cannot be used as a trade instrument.
Someone mentioned bitcoins could make a neat random number generator.

OK, how do we define the value of its possible application in intermediary-less escrow service? Sounds a bit tricky to me.

Nah, its simple.
Does this valuing have anything to do with the bitcoin being used as a currency? Yes?
Then it is not intrinsic.


Yea, I guess so, I was just randomly pulling things out of my brain.

Anyway, my point was something along the line of "cryptocurrency is as uniquely useful to people as PMs are", in fact you can even count it as something with "industrial applications".
hero member
Activity: 840
Merit: 1000
Intrinsic value is for example the weight of a pound of gold, or the shiny color of it. The amount of money you get by selling it to someone is not intrinsic to the pound of gold, it can be taken away.

That's the simplest explanation I can give. You can expand that example to anything, including bitcoin. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, it is just arbitrary data.

In any case, i think you are talking about intrinsic properties, not intrinsic value.
Any value needs a human to value it. Nothing has intrinsic value without a human to valuing it.
hero member
Activity: 840
Merit: 1000
Intrinsic value is for example the weight of a pound of gold, or the shiny color of it. The amount of money you get by selling it to someone is not intrinsic to the pound of gold, it can be taken away.

That's the simplest explanation I can give. You can expand that example to anything, including bitcoin. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, it is just arbitrary data.

In economy the distinction is subtly different.
We try to separate the economical value of a value holder (what you can get for it on the market) from what you can use the actual value holder for if you decide not to exchange it for something else in the economy.
An apple has an intrinsic value. You can eat it and it makes your hunger go away.
But you can also exchange it for something else. That is its economical value.
A dollar bill has intrinsic value. It is made from fibers and you could burn them, for instance, to get some energy.
But you can also exchange it for something else. That is its economic value.
(You can actually see situations where intrinsic value of paper money becomes greater than its economic value because of hyper inflation. In such situations you can find that people keep their houses warm with the by then pretty worthless money bills.)

Since bitcoin is pretty useless when not being used extrinsically you can say that bitcoin has (pretty much) no intrinsic value whatsoever.
KTE
member
Activity: 69
Merit: 10
Intrinsic value is for example the weight of a pound of gold, or the shiny color of it. The amount of money you get by selling it to someone is not intrinsic to the pound of gold, it can be taken away.

That's the simplest explanation I can give. You can expand that example to anything, including bitcoin. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, it is just arbitrary data.
hero member
Activity: 840
Merit: 1000
Re: old beaten topic of buying things with bitcoins (even though I do, even when I don't need to) - it is still a for-fun thing mostly, and maybe in some illegal cases it is the only way so it makes sense there, but until there are more unique things you can only buy with bitcoins, it will be an asset used for hoarding. Why? Because you can not buy anything with bitcoins yet. Bitpay and other converters just help you hide the fact of actually buying with fiat; you are using BTC as the transport (which is an intended method) but you as a merchant are stocking up using fiat and your buyers get BTC using fiat, so the coins are only a transport, you stil buy things with fiat.

And this will be slowly changing, over many years ahead. Don't expect everyone to suddenly start buying everything with bitcoins - because there's currently no need to, only if you don't have access to standard fiat transport methods or you want to anonymize them. Later, when we get more products which are produced and marketed using only bitcoins, which will have prices nominated in Bitcoins (not changing with USD exchange rate), that would be the real BTC market where people would have no choice but to buy with coins, and where salaries would be paid in coins, but it is, again, years from fruition.

The fiats saved in the transportation of my fiat purchases=bitcoin's intrinsic value.

That is not what intrinsic value means tho...
Take away the monetary uses of bitcoin and what you're left with is its intrinsic value.
It is all the other ways you can use bitcoin in when it cannot be used as a trade instrument.
Someone mentioned bitcoins could make a neat random number generator.

OK, how do we define the value of its possible application in intermediary-less escrow service? Sounds a bit tricky to me.

Nah, its simple.
Does this valuing have anything to do with the bitcoin being used as a currency? Yes?
Then it is not intrinsic.
hero member
Activity: 784
Merit: 1000
Re: old beaten topic of buying things with bitcoins (even though I do, even when I don't need to) - it is still a for-fun thing mostly, and maybe in some illegal cases it is the only way so it makes sense there, but until there are more unique things you can only buy with bitcoins, it will be an asset used for hoarding. Why? Because you can not buy anything with bitcoins yet. Bitpay and other converters just help you hide the fact of actually buying with fiat; you are using BTC as the transport (which is an intended method) but you as a merchant are stocking up using fiat and your buyers get BTC using fiat, so the coins are only a transport, you stil buy things with fiat.

And this will be slowly changing, over many years ahead. Don't expect everyone to suddenly start buying everything with bitcoins - because there's currently no need to, only if you don't have access to standard fiat transport methods or you want to anonymize them. Later, when we get more products which are produced and marketed using only bitcoins, which will have prices nominated in Bitcoins (not changing with USD exchange rate), that would be the real BTC market where people would have no choice but to buy with coins, and where salaries would be paid in coins, but it is, again, years from fruition.

The fiats saved in the transportation of my fiat purchases=bitcoin's intrinsic value.

That is not what intrinsic value means tho...
Take away the monetary uses of bitcoin and what you're left with is its intrinsic value.
It is all the other ways you can use bitcoin in when it cannot be used as a trade instrument.
Someone mentioned bitcoins could make a neat random number generator.

OK, how do we define the value of its possible application in intermediary-less escrow service? Sounds a bit tricky to me.
hero member
Activity: 840
Merit: 1000
Re: old beaten topic of buying things with bitcoins (even though I do, even when I don't need to) - it is still a for-fun thing mostly, and maybe in some illegal cases it is the only way so it makes sense there, but until there are more unique things you can only buy with bitcoins, it will be an asset used for hoarding. Why? Because you can not buy anything with bitcoins yet. Bitpay and other converters just help you hide the fact of actually buying with fiat; you are using BTC as the transport (which is an intended method) but you as a merchant are stocking up using fiat and your buyers get BTC using fiat, so the coins are only a transport, you stil buy things with fiat.

And this will be slowly changing, over many years ahead. Don't expect everyone to suddenly start buying everything with bitcoins - because there's currently no need to, only if you don't have access to standard fiat transport methods or you want to anonymize them. Later, when we get more products which are produced and marketed using only bitcoins, which will have prices nominated in Bitcoins (not changing with USD exchange rate), that would be the real BTC market where people would have no choice but to buy with coins, and where salaries would be paid in coins, but it is, again, years from fruition.

The fiats saved in the transportation of my fiat purchases=bitcoin's intrinsic value.

That is not what intrinsic value means tho...
Take away the monetary uses of bitcoin and what you're left with is its intrinsic value.
It is all the other ways you can use bitcoin in when it cannot be used as a trade instrument.
Someone mentioned bitcoins could make a neat random number generator.
hero member
Activity: 840
Merit: 1000
@ HBBZ

I won't deny Bitcoin could be a ponzi.

For a little history peoples masks chang with the tide. At the moment it is the permabulls v the bears, but it wasn't long ago it was all about economic principles - Austrians v Keynesians.

Before you make up your mind consider the following topics for research.

1) the economic benefits of having a fixed amount of money in an economy (Austrian economics)

2) what is the best way to distribute that money (Addam Smith and for intrest Mises money regression theorem)

3) preventing the copying of digital information - no double spending (the blockchain and cryptography)

In my opinion you need to think of the Bitcoin community as an economy. It can be a store of wealth like Switzerland, or gold of today, or it can be a currency.

At the moment it is growing as a store of wealth, and is susceptible to your concerns as a ponzi, but there are the fundamental principles that make it strong.

On the other hand using it as a currency is premature, prices are deflating, very fast, making it more profitable to save than to invest or spend.

There are problems in the distribution that I can see but then again assess the fundamentals give it a value and see if you are willing to risk it. It could all go up in smoke tomorrow.



In a cryptocurrency world there will be no limit to the ammount of money in the world.
Atcoins will pop up and become coin reserves of their own.
Altcoins can compete on any front with bitcoin and so bitcoin itself will never be a magical safe store of value.
hero member
Activity: 784
Merit: 1000
The fiats saved in the transportation of my fiat purchases=bitcoin's intrinsic value.

Quote
I agree, bitcoin is an excellent transport. However until prices are set in BTC the double conversion process equals out the transportation efficiency.

Not for Chinese whose credit cards are usually not even accepted by American online stores. Wink


Quote
Also, there's a hanging shadow of having to completely trust the business, especially for large purchases, which tips the scales in fiat's favor now. I would never buy an MBP using bitcoins, for example.

With multisigs implemented, everyone can conduct a third-party less escrow transaction, I suspect this maybe tempting for those merchants who do not want to pay paypal fees.


legendary
Activity: 1176
Merit: 1010
Borsche
The fiats saved in the transportation of my fiat purchases=bitcoin's intrinsic value.

I agree, bitcoin is an excellent transport. However until prices are set in BTC the double conversion process equals out the transportation efficiency. Also, there's a hanging shadow of having to completely trust the business, especially for large purchases, which tips the scales in fiat's favor now. I would never buy an MBP using bitcoins, for example.
hero member
Activity: 784
Merit: 1000
Re: old beaten topic of buying things with bitcoins (even though I do, even when I don't need to) - it is still a for-fun thing mostly, and maybe in some illegal cases it is the only way so it makes sense there, but until there are more unique things you can only buy with bitcoins, it will be an asset used for hoarding. Why? Because you can not buy anything with bitcoins yet. Bitpay and other converters just help you hide the fact of actually buying with fiat; you are using BTC as the transport (which is an intended method) but you as a merchant are stocking up using fiat and your buyers get BTC using fiat, so the coins are only a transport, you stil buy things with fiat.

And this will be slowly changing, over many years ahead. Don't expect everyone to suddenly start buying everything with bitcoins - because there's currently no need to, only if you don't have access to standard fiat transport methods or you want to anonymize them. Later, when we get more products which are produced and marketed using only bitcoins, which will have prices nominated in Bitcoins (not changing with USD exchange rate), that would be the real BTC market where people would have no choice but to buy with coins, and where salaries would be paid in coins, but it is, again, years from fruition.

The fiats saved in the transportation of my fiat purchases=bitcoin's intrinsic value.
legendary
Activity: 1176
Merit: 1010
Borsche
Re: old beaten topic of buying things with bitcoins (even though I do, even when I don't need to) - it is still a for-fun thing mostly, and maybe in some illegal cases it is the only way so it makes sense there, but until there are more unique things you can only buy with bitcoins, it will be an asset used for hoarding. Why? Because you can not buy anything with bitcoins yet. Bitpay and other converters just help you hide the fact of actually buying with fiat; you are using BTC as the transport (which is an intended method) but you as a merchant are stocking up using fiat and your buyers get BTC using fiat, so the coins are only a transport, you stil buy things with fiat.

And this will be slowly changing, over many years ahead. Don't expect everyone to suddenly start buying everything with bitcoins - because there's currently no need to, only if you don't have access to standard fiat transport methods or you want to anonymize them. Later, when we get more products which are produced and marketed using only bitcoins, which will have prices nominated in Bitcoins (not changing with USD exchange rate), that would be the real BTC market where people would have no choice but to buy with coins, and where salaries would be paid in coins, but it is, again, years from fruition.
legendary
Activity: 1176
Merit: 1005
@ HBBZ

I won't deny Bitcoin could be a ponzi.

Then either you don't know what Bitcoin is, don't know what a Ponzi is, or know what both are, yet are not able to determine why they're not the same thing, or you do know what both are, yet are unwilling to tell the truth.

Bitcoin is not a Ponzi by any possible definition of either term.
legendary
Activity: 1372
Merit: 1000
@ HBBZ

I won't deny Bitcoin could be a ponzi.

For a little history peoples masks chang with the tide. At the moment it is the permabulls v the bears, but it wasn't long ago it was all about economic principles - Austrians v Keynesians.

Before you make up your mind consider the following topics for research.

1) the economic benefits of having a fixed amount of money in an economy (Austrian economics)

2) what is the best way to distribute that money (Addam Smith and for intrest Mises money regression theorem)

3) preventing the copying of digital information - no double spending (the blockchain and cryptography)

In my opinion you need to think of the Bitcoin community as an economy. It can be a store of wealth like Switzerland, or gold of today, or it can be a currency.

At the moment it is growing as a store of wealth, and is susceptible to your concerns as a ponzi, but there are the fundamental principles that make it strong.

On the other hand using it as a currency is premature, prices are deflating, very fast, making it more profitable to save than to invest or spend.

There are problems in the distribution that I can see but then again assess the fundamentals give it a value and see if you are willing to risk it. It could all go up in smoke tomorrow.

full member
Activity: 238
Merit: 100
RMBTB.com: The secure BTC:CNY exchange. 0% fee!
I figured everything out when I took a walk this afternoon. Cool

When new participants flood their dollars in Bitcoin exchange, the price of bitcoin goes up, hoarders who spread the hypes dump their coins and make their profit, in a colletive and indirect way. You can't see the individual who snaped away your money as a newbie. This is nature of bitcoin exchange as a tool of ponzi scheme. The hypers work in a team that no one exposes his face as a schemer. Is this a ponzi scheme? simple and clear yes, a subtle hidden and intricate one.


No, you didn't figure anything out.

An increasing exchange rate and early adopters profiting does not make a ponzi scheme. By your definition anything that went up in value would be a ponzi scheme. Google stock is a ponzi scheme. Gold is a ponzi scheme. Land is a ponzi scheme. Oil is a ponzi scheme.

So for your world to be without ponzi schemes, nothing could ever change value. That sounds like prison because someone is going to have to enforce it. The fact is things change. People change. What they value changes. The free market is all about price discovery. Bitcoin doesn't only go up, it goes down as well. Anyone who purchased any Bitcoins at any point from the very start has taken the risk of losing value. That is not a scheme, the risk is, and always will be, there for everyone.

The ponzi operator takes no financial risk (beyond punishment if caught obviously)!

Also, I have no idea what you are going on about with the "divided more than a million times" idea. You can divide it as much as you want, everyone still holds the same percentage of the total. It makes no difference what-so-ever as far as scarcity is concerned. Only how you perceive it. There are either 21 million Bitcoins or 2.1 quadrillion satoshis, I still have the same amount in my wallet and can affect the market equally in either scenario.

Someone came into my home and took my TV. They are a thief! (I forgot to mention that I placed an AD in the local paper offering my TV for sale and then accepted their money in exchange for it.)

It's an honor to have you enaged in a serious discussion. Sorry to hear the theft in your house, has the police done something with that?

I'd like to draw a timeline to determing whether bitcoiners are legally ponzi schemers or not. If 50% of available bitcoins are actively traded in exchange between dollars or euros etc yet less than 5% are used as currency serving as medium of transactions and bitcoin is in perilous situation.

That is not speculation any more.

I'll tell you some of my observations. Bitcoin in mainland China is absolutely a ponzi scheme and gambling with possibly less than 1 BTC used as currency per day. Everyone in a user discussion group is talking about mining, hoarding, buying, selling bitcoins, the daily volume of exchange at BTCCHINA is approximately around 1k.



The market is not yet developed in China -- but that doesn't mean it won't develop. People said the same thing about the property market in China. And the coffee market... and numerous others, far too many to mention.

I think BTC is *particularly* attractive in China, given the non-convertibility of the renminbi.

Either way, you can't divorce the reality in China from the reality in the rest of the world. Despite apparent authoritarian efforts to the contrary, the Internet is global. Bitcoin is global. Demand in one country will increase the value for all holders and all within the ecosystem.
donator
Activity: 1736
Merit: 1014
Let's talk governance, lipstick, and pigs.
The difference between Bitcoin and a Ponzi scheme:
A Ponzi scheme requires a person lying about what is backing the investment.
Bitcoin only requires the truthful answer to a math problem to back the investment.
Otherwise they are very similar. The real question is why people invest in anything?
sr. member
Activity: 570
Merit: 250
Thanx gentlemen, I've completed my own questioning whether bitcoin is a ponzi scheme or not. Thanx a lot for crowd-proving it false that bitcoin is a ponzi scheme Cool.

Dare to question,

Dare to trust,

Dare to be foolish,

And dare to do all,

That is a bitcoiner Grin
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