Comment on Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin
General_Effort@lemmy.world 4 months agoNo. There is no out.
Charles Ponzi pretended that he had a way of getting extremely high yields on investments, so people gave him their money. In reality, he simply paid out early “investors” with money he got from new “investors”. That means he needed more and more money/more and more investors. That couldn’t work very long.
This is like bitcoin, in that any profit must come from new people. If someone bought bitcoin for $1000 and sold it for $1 million, that means that 1000 people must have paid them $1000 each. Even more people than that must have paid in, because the electricity bill and the hardware also need to be paid. To pay these people the same profit, you need over one 1 million people to pitch in $1000 and so on.
The cash flow structure is a lot like a Ponzi scheme. It’s not so much risky as unsustainable. That’s the point of calling it a Ponzi scheme. It’s all out in the open, so maybe it’s not a scam, as such.
Mind that the crypto space is full of unregulated and unaudited exchanges (=banks), beyond the reach of regulators or police.
I’ll grant that it does provide a service by facilitating money laundering. We couldn’t have ransomware without crypto.
Yeah the out is that you can buy goods and services with it. I could’ve paid for my VPN (Private Internet Access) with Bitcoin, Overstock takes Bitcoin, those ATMs exist.
If everyone suddenly wanted to cash out, it would crash and very few people would get money for it, but that’s also what separates it from a Ponzi scheme, the fact that I don’t need to transform it to USD to spend it. There was a hard push by Bitcoin enthusiasts to get some places to accept it directly for exactly that reason.
Yes, just like in a Ponzi, you can cash out as long as new money comes in.
Whether one exits the scheme by taking goods or money is a distinction without a difference. Involving goods may make MLMs legal but they are still pyramid schemes.
If everybody suddenly sold all their USD, EUR, or other currency, that currency’s value relative to other currencies would also crash. That’s not unique to Bitcoin.
Um… we very much had ransomware before crypto.
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
I mean it supposed to be a currency, so the point is supposed you spend it on actually good and services like at overstock.com or whatever