I appreciate the idea that the ledger is public, so you don’t have to trust some random internet stranger. You are basically trusting a large, distributed group of internet strangers, which isn’t quite zero risk but I think the ledger mitigates a lot of it.
Now, a lot of the coins that have come out in the past few years feel super sketchy. Shiba was a meme of a meme, for crying out loud.
Most crypto currencies are decentralized, so you aren’t “trusting” anyone, you have access to the ledger of transactions that exists simultaneously in hundreds or thousands of different locations.
Yeah a lot of them had no ledger and no mining. Basically just someone saying buy this from me it’s crypto.
And people did NOT want to lose that deal.
In theory sure, but in reality you have to trust whoever created the exchange you’re buying from. How many normal people have any clue how to access the Bitcoin ledger?
You have to trust the exchange only to the extent you actually store your coins on that exchange. There are numerous options that don’t require you to use an exchange, especially when it comes to actually holding the currency.
You are correct, it does not make any sense to claim you are buying crypto bc you don’t trust the government and then store your crypto on an unregulated exchange owned by someone living in a tax-haven who can easily travel to a non-extradition country. But the average Joe who makes those claims rarely understands why they don’t trust the government either.
Certainly agree with this. I think it’s more I don’t like the government. The trust part is just an internal justification because they see the government doing important things but don’t want to change their minds.
Many of those people made bank and probably retired.
Many more didn’t.
Can’t say it’s a scam if you’re winning. Life is a scam.
Eh, lots of people create scams to win. They know it’s a scam but they don’t care as long as they are winning.
Isn’t that the game of speculation in general? It lives in the stock market, played by hedge funds, futures, etc.
They don’t care about the products, just the indices. It’s all a scam when it’s a numbers game, and the last one out loses.
Are we coming back to litigating investment vs gambling? Maybe. I suppose speculation has a lot of overlap with scams. Right?
Where there are winners, there are losers. For the losers everything is a scam.
Better than the alternative!
Nice blog, thanks for posting
My former brother in law cashed out of one of those pyramid schemes years ago. You chip in 100 bucks then recruit 10 people or something. When theres enough people, everyone at the top gets 100 bucks time 50 or something. Total scam, but he was a winner. Got 5000 iirc. A lot.of money back then.
Did he win
Isn’t our standard valuation a pyramid scheme?
Company value = latest share price * number of shares
That latest share price is built on the last share price, which is built on the previous share price. it all collapses into thin air. Yet we have no problem saying Apple is a trillion dollar company.
Apple is worth something, right? They have a lot of patents, lots of revenue, and presumably (I’m not an Apple expert) they make money on each phone or computer they sell. Like, you could do a valuation, and you may not agree with the stock price but it should be nonzero, I think.
I don’t think that’s a pyramid scheme.
Oh yes it has value. I just don’t think it has a trillion dollar value. The valuation method is the pyramid scheme, built to attract the next highest bid.
No. No. No. You cannot say that you think the market cap might overstate the intrinsic value of a company and then conclude that if so, the intrinsic value of a company must be zero.