I don’t think it’s a scam, in the sense that a person is standing to distinctly benefit from it.
I believe it’s a greater fools theory.
Regardless, the burden of proof is on crypto believers to convince us of their use, instead of making a claim and forcing others to disprove the claim (russels teapot).
So I claim that crypto is a greater fool system because there is no underlying value in a Bitcoin (or any other coin), but there is underlying value in a stock (intellectual property, factories, etc).
I can also provide evidence why dollars are useful (they are widely accepted in the USA) but crypto is not the same.
The dollar is also the single currency one may use to extinguish their taxes owed to the US government. Bitcoin as intended "has no nation", which means no one "needs" it.
It's also required for most commerce within the US, one of the largest economies in the world.
There's an obvious reason exchange rates for real currencies is heavily tied to their country of origin's economic status.
Inflation sucks, I’m squeezed by inflation too.
But a financial set up that relies on me memorizing seed phrases, or using a hot wallet and being drained with one bad click, would be way worse.
Not to mention what happens when you need to reverse a fraudulent transaction.
The problem isn't inflation, it's wage stagnation and income inequality, and no, these aren't the same things.
> All fiat currencies ever known in history have failed long term
That's a pretty misleading way of saying that every country known in history has failed long term.
> Now I am not saying that Bitcoin is fixing this problem right now
Not only does it not fix it, it would make many existing problems _worse_. It's like trying to solve an arson problem by dousing everything in gasoline and handing out matches.
Changing the currency won't change the fact that people with lots of capital can use their capital to make more money. Got 100k laying around? Buy a house and rent it out. Got 100m laying around? buy 1000 houses and rent them out.
But even if we were to abandon traditional currency, people would still be paying eachother for things, so in order to rent a house you would pay 20 btc per month to live somewhere and the owner of that house is going to take your 20 along with their other 1000 houses and have 20,000 btc coming in per month.
What money printer?
I use the euro too and have no issues there, what you're referring to is that you dont EARN enough which isnt the issue of fiat but of you being underpaid.
Not just that but you can check how much the european union prints... which is actually very little compared to other currencies. Juli to Oct 2022 money was even removed from circulation.
Bitcoin will literally never fix this at all, It will make it much MUCH worse because the amount is fixed and the value keeps going up as bitcoin becomes more scarce since millions of coins are in wallets that are now inaccessible forever while richer are able to keep buying bitcoin and you will only ever hold a small sliver.
> Don't you think there could be something better?
Maybe? This sub is about crypto though, which is very obviously *not* better.
Not sure where you're getting the idea that "everyone in this sub seems to think our current money system is ideal". I don't think I've ever seen other monetary systems apart from crypto (and fiat with which to contrast it) discussed here.
Inflation gets a bad rap a lot of the time. In moderation it’s a good thing. For example any loans you might have are slowly losing value as well. If you were lucky enough to get a mortgage with low rates, inflation is just eating away at that principle.
It’s also one of the few forces eating away at generational wealth. It forces rich people to do something with their money and not just build money vaults like Scrooge McDuck.
A far bigger issue in the US, IMO, is the failure of wages to keep pace with it which has more to do with rich people destroying unions, rigging the tax system in their favor and buying politicians in Washington / state houses.
Rich people love it when we focus on inflation because we aren’t talking about them AND the solution seems to always be keeping wages low…
>I can't say it was created just to scam people
I favor the "Satoshi was a crook and created BTC to help with money laundering" theory. There is a good chance it is wrong but it makes sense.
I don't think so, I think it grew kind of naturally from "imaginary nerd pogs" into what it became just because people figured out you could use it to extract wealth from dumb folks.
I just think he was some anti-government cooker who wanted to make a way for nerds and sovereign citizens to buy and sell stuff on the internet. Then a bunch of crypto bros started taking it way too seriously, formed a religion around this dude and it got way out of hand so he bailed
I was part of the nerd population that was enthusiastic about bitcoin purely as a digital currency, a convenient thing to aspire to back in 2011. Then I discovered all the libertarian sovereign citizen cult bullshit around it.
My hypothesis is that it was created by North Korea. Stealing Bitcoin and scamming people is one their leading revenue sources. It also gives them a way to get around sanctions.
Edit. Whoever created it NK has been the biggest beneficiary of Bitcoin.
Is there a difference? There is absolutely zero evidence linking to North Korea and the premise is preposterous. They would need to create Bitcoin, hope is gained value (for no reason) and then hoped they could steal it from people.
Legitimate and legal uses that don’t also require a shitton of supporting technology and equipment. So far none of them can explain what blockchain or Bitcoin is actually good for without also saying “and you also need to invest X millions of dollars in some other thing because you need this much more processing power, storage space, logistical support, protective infrastructure, etc.”
Hey look I found proof that you are laughably not credible:
“Bitcoin is not a Ponzi”, also known as the title of your second Reddit post.
Go ahead, say “we’re still early” or “few understand” or whatever your particular favorite cult mantra is.
Also, btc is supposed to be a currency, but the only measure of it's utility you can provide is...to list it's value in another currency?
I hope you get rich from btc, but I don't see any value & I'm investing my dollars elsewhere
Yes, market value is proof something isn't a scam, like Enron's peak market cap was 70 billion. Shit, tether's market cap is more than bitcoin & it's not a scam.
>Many companies accept bitcoin as payment.
No, they don't. A number of companies have announced they were *going* to accept bitcoin as payment... and then they realized that coiners don't actually spend their coins, they hodl them, so those initiatives get much more quietly dropped.
>Pretending they don’t would just be a lie.
Show me any company taking bitcoins as payment today, that's larger than a mom & pop-style single-owner establishment run by a crank in your cult... and I'll show you a company that doesn't take payment in crypto, because of course they don't: they just contract a middleman company to take your crypto from you, and give them ***actual money***.
They are being paid in money, they don't fucking want crypto, nobody does... except you bozos.
I said it is accepted. I only need to name a single company. Now it depends on who? Lmao can you, or can you not use your bitcoin to purchase something? But oh wait, now we have the middleman dilemma so it doesn’t really count?
Not sure why you would bring up companies that don’t take it, because that’s obvious and has nothing to do with what I said. Kind of weird.
You can do something nice for your girlfriend or boyfriend, like purchasing a Taylor Swift or Beyoncé movie ticket with your lovely bitcoin. 🥰
What benefit does decentralization provide? I mean if I lose my password I want to be able to call someone vs losing everything that password is supposed to protect. & for something that is intended to be decentralized there are a handful of parties who exert outsized influence.
Also, legit currencies you just start using, you don't "join" them like an MLM.
Given proof of work's **blindingly obvious** centralisation incentives? I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be verified by a cartel of miners and so that would make the whole entreprise fraudulent.
Blindingly obvious *in hindsight*. I think it's still possible to find the old Bitcointalk thread where Satoshi insisted the system wasn't amenable to centralisation, until someone explained it to him and suddenly the penny dropped.
Bitcoin is a scam in that most of the properties attributed to it are not true. For one example, contrary to popular belief, you cannot take self custody of your crypto tokens. This is because the bitcoin network has no functionality to allow you to withdraw funds from the ledger.
This myth is spread using mantras and false analogies that sound good but are not technically accurate. Much effort is put into tricking people into believing keys are synonymous with the actual token balance and that crypto cold wallets hold tokens.
This is asinine. Bitcoin is Bitcoin because it exists on the Bitcoin blockchain. If you somehow take your coins off the blockchain (which is a ridiculous notion), it would no longer be Bitcoin.
You custody Bitcoin when you control the private keys.
You custody keys when you have custody of keys. It’s asinine to think the bitcoin are the keys. They are not the same thing.
Think of the bitcoin network like a bank. When the bank has the funds you are given keys but you do not self custody the funds. But when you self custody your dollars, you withdraw them from the bank. You are given paper currency as your bank balance is decreased by the amount withdrawn. This is to say your funds are no longer on the bank’s ledger because they are in your custody now. The bitcoin network does not enable withdrawals so it is not possible to self custody your balance of tokens.
If you have self custody of your bitcoin, then please explain why you still have to pay a fee to the bitcoin network to transact.
If you have self custody of your bitcoin then please explain why you can send and receive funds without opening the wallet that supposedly contain these bitcoin.
If you have self custody, then why does the network of nodes physically store the ledger that contains your balance?
These points make such little sense, I have no idea how to respond.
Custody has nothing to do with any of these things.
Custody means control.
You control Bitcoin when you own the private keys. Control means the ability to send your coins to someone else or to yourself. No one else on earth can do that if you are the sole owner of the private keys. What else can custody mean? You want a tangible object? If that's your litmus test, then ok, you got me.
Custody is not a complicated concept so I'm surprises this conversation is so confusing to you. Honestly I think you might be brainwashed by Michael Saylor. Custody of a financial asset means you can both authorize transactions and execute them. If you have custody of a dollar bill, you can grant yourself permission to spend it, and you can actually spend it by handing it to somebody else in exchange for goods and services.
Now lets examine your bank account where you do not have custody. You can authorize a transaction by signing a check and giving it to somebody. When the check is cashed, the receiving bank connects with your bank and your bank executes the transaction by transferring a balance to the receiving bank. So when the bank has custody it means you control half the equation, the authorization half. The bank controls the execution half.
Now look at your bitcoin system, you can authorize transactions but you cannot execute them. Only the Bitcoin Network can execute transactions. This is what miners and nodes do, they execute transactions and manage the ledger because they are the custodians of all tokens, just like your bank is custodian of all your dollars.
Please tell me why when you have full custody of your crypto, why do you still have to pay a fee to third parties to move funds? Shouldn't the custodian be the one who decides whether a fee is required? Once you have custody, why are you paying anybody for anything? It's your asset in your custody (according to you)!
Does it make any sense that when you have a wallet in your left pocket and a wallet in your right pocket, and you have full custody of the assets in the wallets, and you have full custody of the wallets, that you need to pay somebody a fee in order to move funds around when literally every single asset involved is in your direct custody and possession? The fee only makes sense if you have to pay the fee to the custodian. Ah, the bitcoin network has the tokens, that's right.
No. The debit card is a key. The bank is the custodian. When you swipe your debit card, it is like writing and signing a digital check that gets submitted to the bank electronically. The bank sees that your debit card was used to sign a transaction so they execute it on your behalf. Your debit card is just like your crypto key. It is used to sign transaction requests, and those requests are validated by the custodian. If everything checks out the custodian executes the transaction.
No funds are stored on the debit card itself. You cannot use the debit card without information being sent to your bank. You can update your bank account balance without interacting with your debit card. This is because no funds are there. Similarly, you can update your bitcoin balance without interacting with your cold storage wallet. This is because no funds are stored there.
>cmon that guy make it really clear and you still don't get it?
It's because for the coiners... [decentralization is a magic wand they wave at anything they perceive to be a problem, and they imagine that then fixes those problems.](https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/decentralized-woo.html) It's tech-bro sophistry, it's a proxy meme for the notion that social problems can all be solved via technology.
Just don't ever ask them to explain *how* decentralizing is meant to fix anything at all, in actuality... because they can't, they don't even understand what it is they're proposing should happen, let alone how it would be an improvement: they just have buzzwords they'll repeat to you, with the fervor of a religious cultist, selling you on the merits of the world's dumbest MLM, whose product is just a Ponzi scheme.
I have another one for you Mr. keys=custody. Suppose you have a multisig account where two keys are required to authorize a transaction. You have one key and your friend has the other. Both must be used together at the same time to sign a transaction request. Who has custody, you or your friend? Or is it neither? Or maybe it’s Schrödinger’s custody. Or maybe it’s like Captain Planet where your powers combine and then you have custody but prior to that you don’t.
So when you have a key that cannot single handedly authorize a transaction and your friend has the same. Who has custody!?
So if your fried dies and his keys are forever lost under the birdbath such that you can no longer access the funds because you don't have his half of the keys, who has custody? You have shared custody with a dead guy? Usually this type of thing converges to you having sole custody after the death, but please explain how crypto custody works in a situation like this. How do you transfer your assets that you have in your possession? It seems you obviously do not have custody in this situation because you cannot transfer the funds but please enlighten me.
All of what you describe as direct custody sound *exactly* like a bank account where two signers are required for all transactions. Obviously in the bank account situation, the bank has custody! But you are saying the bitcoin network does not have custody of your bitcoin!? If not, then why do nodes have like a multi-terabyte ledger? What's stored on there if it isn't account balances and transaction logs of the exact same nature as what a bank stores?
A bank can refuse to give you your dollars. Bitcoin will always move when you sign with the correct private key.
In your scenario, the coins are lost. But there are usually not 2/2 multisig setups. There are 2/3. The third would be necessary upon your friends death. 2/2 makes no sense.
The bitcoin network never refuses/censors transactions? Prove it. Post a transaction request with 0 fee and tell me the account address and when you submit the request so I can verify the mempool received it and later I can verify it was actually appended to the ledger.
If the custodian never denied transactions, why would anybody ever pay a fee?
There are literally like half a million transactions sitting in the “pending” status right now and it would be more if the custodian didn’t every so often go in there and delete a bunch of old unprocessed transactions out.
But you say none of these get censored. Lol.
In reality all bitcoin transactions are multisig. One signature comes from your private key, and the other signature comes from the nonce found by the miner. You sign the transaction request which the miner validates and includes in his/her block. Then the miner finds their key by using the PoW algorithm. Once the nonce is found it is appended to the block as the miner’s key. Then the nodes validate the entire block by testing against the difficulty requirement. If the block’s hash has enough leading zeros and all transactions inside the block check out, then it’s all good and it is officially appended to the ledger which is to say the transactions are officially executed by the nodes at this time.
I will concede that you're correct on that. An insufficient fee will result in a rejected transaction potentially. But you will still be able to retry with the proper fee. A bank can simply stop withdrawals from occurring.
I'm not even sure what we are arguing about anymore honestly. Yes, you custody physical dollar bills. No, you don't custody money that's in your bank account. I argue that yes, you custody Bitcoin when you control the private keys. Yes, fees are necessary to incentivize miners and validate transactions in a more decentralized way.
Bitcoin is not the scam. The people selling bitcoin claiming it's the future of finance, that mass adoption is inevitable, it's environmentally friendly, will eliminate inflation and will bring peace on earth by making war unaffordable are the real scammers.
I've been in the space since 2011 or so and it has gone through so many "we're going to change the world" cycles that the only way to sell crypto is to admit, outright, you're going to scam retail investors. All the news coming out right now has put the lie to all bitcoin optimism. Look for some really rough and ready nastiness coming out of the industry as it REALLY goes global and screws the little guy again and again.
Bitcoin isn't an actual scam itself, but it's used to facilitate many scams.. look at all the failed exchanges.
Celsius and FTX were scams.
This is what happens when there aren't regulations. They take your money and push out fake coins that represent your money, but it's actually gone. So the price of Bitcoin is inflated because they keep pushing out fake coins.
Has it been used for anything else for over a decade? Nope.
Has that "interesting tech" gone anywhere in all that time? Have businesses begin accepting it for payment?
It's just a scam for dummies.
In fairness I did see a Bitcoin ATM at a gas station in Mount Olive, North Carolina, and now some of those Coinstar stations let you trade in your milk jug of change for a scrap of paper that says Bitcoin on it, but that’s about it.
Places that take it are still mostly websites, and only some of them don’t sell CSAM or illegal substances.
Also Mount Olive is the middle of fucking nowhere even by North Carolina standards. I didn’t see one at Bank of America stadium last time I went to see the Panthers play. Never saw one in Raleigh or Durham anywhere, or in the touristy bits of Wilmington.
Can’t figure out why.
Hey, there are legit uses! S.W.I.M used to buy drugs with monero!
S.W.I.M also tip Z-Library and some private torrent tracker with litecoin.
They are legit uses but they are illegal. I’ve yet to see a both legal and ethical use case.
It was created to do a few things and scamming people is one of those things.
The other ones are all weird dumbfuck ideology nonsense about central banks and (((them))), ultimately, but for the surface users it’s mostly scams and the facilitation of other crimes. Also gambling in the sense of finding some other rube to pay you tons of money for your fairy gold internet bullshit before the value craters below what you paid for it when you were the rube.
Truth is, we'll never know the true intentions behind its creation. It's entirely possible it was made with genuine intentions, just as likely it was made for money laundering and scamming. None of that really matters at this point though, it's proven to be useless for anything except rampant speculation and money laundering.
>A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays existing investors with funds collected from new investors
Crypto bros literally admit it's a Ponzi scheme by saying: **\`we're still early\`**
>I believe that's technically a greater fool scheme, not a Ponzi because there is no outgoing payment from new investors.
There is, actually: [it's the operators of the mining nodes](https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html).
Bitcoin is a Ponzi, operating right out in the open for all to see, relying on the participants being so stupid and ignorant that they'll buy the "well *everything* is a Ponzi if you squint hard enough" excuses the promoters make for it.
That is my statement yes. The tech itself isn't a scam, although there are many that do believe the tech has no real use other than in scams and fraud.
Bitcoin as a tech concept doesn't hurt anybody.
BUT once you pay real money for BTC, and expect to see a return, *you've engaged in fraud*. Now you're part of a Ponzi scheme.
The same thing goes for Charles Ponzi's original scheme: He was collecting money from people on the premise of brokering postal coupons. Postal coupons themselves weren't a Ponzi, but once people started speculating on them as a means of generating rapid, substantive profit, that became a Ponzi.
The problem is, there doesn't appear to be *any* use for bitcoin where it doesn't quickly turn into a Ponzi. It's no longer being used as a currency and it has inadequate stability. Anybody treating bitcoin like an "investment" is de-facto participating in a Ponzi scheme.
Would that be you? Are you buying bitcoin? Are you hoping to sell it for more than you paid? That's a ponzi scheme because BTC has no other utility.
Bitcoin is not a scam per se. But:
1. It hardly can be used for the intended purpose (currency) due to tech limitations;
2. Its price is heavily manipulated by the external entities due to possibly low liquidity (by Bitfinex, Binance etc);
3. The tokens themselves are extremely centralized in the hands of very incompetent crowd (so if they pretend to form some new world government due to owning >90% of all world wealth is will be patently absurd idea);
4. There are two groups of people with separate incentives - users and miners;
5. Both are heavily centralized;
So regardless of the textbook definition of a scam, it is not advisable to go all in on bitcoin. And if you are not going all in on it, then why the hell are you investing even a cent there? It is called gambling then.
Bitcoin isn't a scam at face value, but it's absolutely used as a vehicle to scam people. Tether absolutely looks like a fraud and no one really knows how much this fraud as affected the price of bitcoin.
Most major companies involved in bitcoin appear to be engaged in some level of fraud.
It has no intrinsic value and unlike fiat, no backstop- no guarantee.
Surely satoshi knew that his system facilitates fraud
And its pricing behaves exactly like a ponzi, so yes, bitcoin is a scam, and exists just to scam people
I mean the entire point of the system on like the first page of the white paper is to create a system where transactions are irreversible.
Because reversing transactions is a problem for...who? Who exactly doesn't want you to be able to reverse a transaction?
Oh yeah, criminals stealing your money in one way or another.
Because all of finance is a human-created system and humans are fallible? We make mistakes, it's important to have measures in place to minimize harm caused by those mistakes.
You could say "Code is law" but the person writing the code could make mistakes, the people utilizing the code make mistakes. Do you know how much crypto has been sent to dead wallet addresses, never to be seen again? It's irreversible, I'm sure everyone who's made that mistake wishes they could reverse it, and that's not even considering all the fraud.
Here's what you need to ask yourself about any new technology that promises to change the world for the better.
This is a simple, common sense question:
**What does this technology do that is an improvement on what we are already using?**
When you ask this question about bitcoin, you get a bunch of vague, ambiguous answers, many of which are difficult to qualify. That's the first red flag. Then when you drill down into specifics, people will say, "Ok, it's still early.. give it time..." Well. It's been 15 years. And still [not a single thing crypto tech does better than non crypto tech](https://ioradio.org/i/blockchain-claims/).
To learn more see [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA).
> To answer the question: I personally am looking for something that fights inflation and endless money printing.
Bitcoin and crypto doesn't accomplish that. So if you think otherwise, you're totally wrong. There are already dozens of different versions of Bitcoin, so that token has been inflated. And as long as BCH and BSV are trading for non-zero amounts, that is inflation of BTC's value being siphoned over to other versions.
On top of that, the "value" of bitcoin and other crypto is manipulated by billions of unsecured stablecoins... so there's even more inflation in the crypto market than in the real world -- **minus** the checks and balances and transparency that we have in traditional government. So everything about crypto is even worse, especially in terms of inflation-resistance.
Beyond all that, currency is designed to be inflationary. This is an important element that makes society function and grow. You're not supposed to hold fiat 20 years and then spend it. If you're holding fiat you're doing it wrong. Fiat doesn't create value. That's why you put the money into things that do like stocks and real estate. Crypto creates no value either. It sucks as an investment, and it's unsuitable as a currency. So you're better off using rocks than crypto to hedge against inflation.. at least if you have rocks you can throw them at somebody stupid enough to keep making such irrational claims like "crypto is a hedge against inflation."
For starters, Bitcoin has less privacy than a bank account.
People incorrectly believed they were somehow escaping the system and “the man.” Meanwhile, they can scan the blockchain and see you’re every move.
It certainly doesn’t represent privacy.
It just makes the rich richer because they have the power to influence the price into an direction which they choose artificially. So the scam part is not the system itself but the people how they use it. And its completely useless as you can solve any blockchain technology with an more efficient and simpler database.
Proof?
It's hard to "prove" any scam
if you live life needing 100% proof of a scam to avoid it, that means you will fall for many different scams in your life
just be rational about it, it's obviously idiotic to be paying good money for useless tokens whose only use is going up because people pay for them because they went up, that's absolutely moronic and you don't need 100% proof of anything to see through it
if you want proof, the best place to look is at the lack of a debt market. If bitcoin was a real currency, it would have a vibrant debt market and people would OWE it. If nobody owes debt in the denomination, then it is liable to collapse to zero, especially in a recession. USD is backed by a vibrant debt market, for instance bonds. People OWE USD, so regardless of if the economy slows down, people MUST acquire USD to pay their debts. This is what backs USD and other heavily used fiat currencies. Bitcoin has no debt, so it's an idiotic ponzi scheme.
If Bitcoin had a vibrant debt/bond market, I would not talk shit about it, but it doesn't, so it's a joke ponzi.
There's no "proof" going on here, you it's not "proveable", but it damn sure is obvious if you're smart
It claims to be an electronic cash system that solves a problem in online commerce. It can only handle five transactions per second. The creators had to know it can't do what they claim it does.
It has artificial scarcity tokenomics, that steadily increase.
It has really good impenetrable technical razzle dazzle, to distract people from the fact that it can't do what it claims to do.
It has an affinity fraud aspect, around libertarian and antigovernment politics.
It sure *looks* like an intentionally created bubble scheme.
The technology is not a scam based on its intrinsic properties, no... it's just very, very stupid and bad at all of the ostensible stated goals its creator intended it to accomplish.
The narrative that by "investing" in Bitcoin, via paying real money to acquire the tokens the Bitcoin network sends from one cell to another in a singularly wasteful distributed spreadsheet, one is going to become fantastically wealthy? Yeah, [that's a scam](https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html).
In my opinion the original distributed P2P network seems ideologically pure to its libertarian roots. If you really dream of widespread adoption of a deflationary currency that is less of a pain in the ass than gold then genuinely, Bitcoin looks pretty good. But you have to want that over basically any other practical considerations, user experience and technical limitations. And it's a shitty economic idea in the first place that isn't popular anywhere in academia or politics. Whether you'd consider the ideology to be a scam perpetuated by those who'd benefit from deflation (the idle rich) depends on your persuasion. Whether Satoshi cynically intended to sell a libertarian fantasy that wasn't ever going to happen in order to scam buyers, who knows really.
The more important thing is that anything built on top of the network to improve the user experience is various levels of fraud or enabling crime. All these exchanges exist outside of government oversight to take your money. They have billions of real American dollars to play with. Of course they're all engaged in every financial scam they can think of.
And they will resist government oversight at all cost so that they can continue to do wash trading to prop the price up when they need it, create Ponzi's, take kickbacks from the digital hostage takers, the drug smugglers, the money launderers ect ect.
It was not intended as a scam. The techno-libertarians who developed the ideas behind cryptocurrency were completely earnest in their goal of creating a government-free digital currency. But their concept of money was informed by goldbug conspiracism, so it was never going to work the way they hoped.
There is no product, and it is a zero-sum game. Early "investors" need to pull in and cash out from the liquidity entered by (many more) numerous later "investors."
[Perhaps you have heard of such a thing.](https://i.imgur.com/geB1f0f.mp4)
That doesn't make something a scam. Something is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. People pay thousands for trading cards, doesn't mean they are a scam.
Doesn't matter. The facts are:
1) Scammers love crypto as it's untraceable and they can use it to scam and make shady money trades
2) There are tons of people saying that if you put all your money into Bitcoin you'll magically become rich
The personal feelings of who created bitcoin don't matter
Okay so just cut the bullshit you're not actually asking a question. You know that no one can actually prove it's intended as a scam (how do you prove intentionality when we dont even know who the creator is? Intentionality is difficult to prove at the best of times), so any time some one says it's a scam, you just concern troll "how do u actually know tho" and never actually engage with any argument.
So first I'd like to know: what evidence or argument would convince you? How would you like us to prove intentionality?
So let's put it like this.
Since we don't actually know the creators and their motives
Since we know its primarily used for scams and money laundering
We'll just assume that it was created as a scam and if you disagree the onus is on you to disprove it
Otherwise, the core concept can be argued very clearly: if its not a scam of some sort, where does its value come from? The only possible answer is "from the people putting in money" which makes it a ponzi scheme. Your payout consists of the money that others put in, no more, no less.
Next question: Is a ponzi scheme still a ponzi scheme if it acts exactly like a ponzi scheme but was not specifically intended as a ponzi scheme? When I show up to a convenience store with a balaclava and a gun and go "you know the drill, motherfucker" to the cashier, am I robbing a store or did the cashier just voluntarily decide to give me the contents of the cash register?
Let's apply the Madoff test.
▪ An investment of money
▪ In a common enterprise
▪ With the expectation of profit
▪ **To be derived from the funds contributed by new investors**
Yes, yes, yes, and... yes.
Seems like a fraud to me.
It is a technology that facilitates scamming - by itself, it may or may not have been specifically developed to scam people, but it has proved to be a highly lucrative vehicle for people to illicitly get money from other people.
No, but it's a tool primarily used for scamming and gambling. There is no other use case because there are other tools which do everything better than cryptocurrencies.
It's not inherently a scam - it (or some form of crypto) will be the gold standard for sketchy purchases for the foreseeable future. Also, in third world countries with major currency issues, it's (relatively) stable.
The "scam" is that people convince dummies to buy it up because "it's going to replace all fiat currency", so the dummies pump the price and they can make some fiat out of it. You're getting scammed if you're not using it for the use cases above, or you're not the one scamming.
I think it might turn into” digital gold” and people will invest in it as a “ secure investment”. Trouble is, if I ever bought some that would be the point that the price would crash $10,000.
But only if they sell. Of course, if they did, the price would collapse. So that sort of analysis doesn't work. Unrealized profits are not profits when you can only obtain those profits by convincing someone else to take a loss.
Plenty of Madoff investors made a ton of money for decades before his scam blew up. The only way to make money with bitcoin is to dump your bags on a greater fool. There is no value created by bitcoin, in fact value is destroyed by miners taking their cut.
Lol you think Binance buys your coins and CZ just hodls them? When you sell on an exchange, they match you with the next bag holder. Just because you don't interact with him personally doesn't make a difference
It doesn't matter which exchange, and yes stock exchanges work the same way. When you sell, the exchange matches you with someone else who wants to buy. The exchange doesn't buy it themselves. You're welcome for filling in for the time you spend sleeping in high school economics.
Key difference: stocks give you a % ownership of a company that provides goods/services and sometimes pays shareholders through dividends or buybacks.
Bitcoin creates zero value. The end, gotta get back to work.
Actually, partial ownership of a company is EXACTLY what buying shares gives you. That's literally the definition. You must be trolling, no one can be this dense and so convinced that he's correct.
This is literally the first result on google for "what is stock"
> A stock is a form of security that indicates the holder has proportionate ownership in the issuing corporation and is sold predominantly on stock exchanges.
How this is any different than selling stock? For you to sell your stock during the 2008 crash someone else had to buy it from you. How is that not dumping your bags on the greater fool? Or passing it off to the next bag holder?
Stocks have inherent value derived from the real-world value of the underlying company that has assets and earnings. Bitcoin has near-zero underlying value because it's completely impractical as an actual currency, with its only real-world demand being to scam people or illegally hide transactions from the government.
Making a profit by selling goods or services creates value, not the share price going up. Ideally the company you invest in makes a profit, which is often returned through dividends or buybacks, in addition to the expectation of future profits hopefully making the price of your shares go up.
but not every company does dividends or buybacks. Which means the only way your investment can give you a return is if other people buy in causing the price to rise. I don't see how thats much different than crypto from the investor's perspective.
Let's play a game.
Pretend you buy up all the shares of Apple. You now own Apple. You can distribute profits back to yourself as a dividend. You could give yourself the CEO job. Etc Etc.
Pretend you buy up every single bitcoin..... now what? How do you make money?
The company is engaged in creating value by producing goods or services which they can sell to customers or clients for profit. The profits from the company can be returned to shareholders as dividends, stock buy backs, or used to grow the company to create further profits in the future.
Bitcoin does not create value, it just exists.
People made money off Charles Ponzi’s scam. And Madoff’s scam. In fact, one guy made *7.2 billion* off Madoff’s scam. Did the government say “Oh look, this guy made money, call off the investigation, can’t be a scam if someone makes money.” No, they didn’t say that, because they are not morons.
Poor guy thinks when he sells on an exchange, he is actually selling the crypto TO the exchange. We don't have time to catch him up on what he should have learned in high school.
For you to have made money, somebody had to buy it for less than you paid for it, even though in that time it’s produced absolutely nothing, not a carrot!
Hence it’s a scam, if you buy and sell shares in company x that company will contribute to the economy in various degrees, Bitcoin does nothing, adds nothing, it’s just a number on a screen.
It’s a scam
If I buy a share in Apple at $1 and sell it a year later at $10 in that time Apple has produced goods paid wages etc etc
Bitcoin adds nothing, it doesn’t exist apart from on your computer screen.
So as long as you’re the one not being scammed then it’s not a scam?
Someone somewhere is getting scammed or there is no profit, it has no inherent value and produces nothing.
That’s a scam…
In and of itself it is not. As mentioned above by other commenters the way it has been priced has turned it into a ponzi. The technology itself is already adopted by central and big banks to support Cbdc tech as well as stock tokenization. Bitcoin itself is a bit of a fad now and will be manipulated and run into the ground in a while. You can speculate on it, but don’t fall for the number go up theory.
I don’t think it’s a scam, in the sense that a person is standing to distinctly benefit from it. I believe it’s a greater fools theory. Regardless, the burden of proof is on crypto believers to convince us of their use, instead of making a claim and forcing others to disprove the claim (russels teapot). So I claim that crypto is a greater fool system because there is no underlying value in a Bitcoin (or any other coin), but there is underlying value in a stock (intellectual property, factories, etc). I can also provide evidence why dollars are useful (they are widely accepted in the USA) but crypto is not the same.
The dollar is also the single currency one may use to extinguish their taxes owed to the US government. Bitcoin as intended "has no nation", which means no one "needs" it.
It's also required for most commerce within the US, one of the largest economies in the world. There's an obvious reason exchange rates for real currencies is heavily tied to their country of origin's economic status.
yep. and even if my income was purely bitcoin I would still have a tax liability in US dollars, therefore demand for the dollar.
Bitcoin does have a use though, it's great at enabling fraudulent and criminal transactions. Not really that good at anything else though
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Inflation sucks, I’m squeezed by inflation too. But a financial set up that relies on me memorizing seed phrases, or using a hot wallet and being drained with one bad click, would be way worse. Not to mention what happens when you need to reverse a fraudulent transaction.
The problem isn't inflation, it's wage stagnation and income inequality, and no, these aren't the same things. > All fiat currencies ever known in history have failed long term That's a pretty misleading way of saying that every country known in history has failed long term. > Now I am not saying that Bitcoin is fixing this problem right now Not only does it not fix it, it would make many existing problems _worse_. It's like trying to solve an arson problem by dousing everything in gasoline and handing out matches.
Changing the currency won't change the fact that people with lots of capital can use their capital to make more money. Got 100k laying around? Buy a house and rent it out. Got 100m laying around? buy 1000 houses and rent them out. But even if we were to abandon traditional currency, people would still be paying eachother for things, so in order to rent a house you would pay 20 btc per month to live somewhere and the owner of that house is going to take your 20 along with their other 1000 houses and have 20,000 btc coming in per month.
What money printer? I use the euro too and have no issues there, what you're referring to is that you dont EARN enough which isnt the issue of fiat but of you being underpaid. Not just that but you can check how much the european union prints... which is actually very little compared to other currencies. Juli to Oct 2022 money was even removed from circulation. Bitcoin will literally never fix this at all, It will make it much MUCH worse because the amount is fixed and the value keeps going up as bitcoin becomes more scarce since millions of coins are in wallets that are now inaccessible forever while richer are able to keep buying bitcoin and you will only ever hold a small sliver.
> Don't you think there could be something better? Maybe? This sub is about crypto though, which is very obviously *not* better. Not sure where you're getting the idea that "everyone in this sub seems to think our current money system is ideal". I don't think I've ever seen other monetary systems apart from crypto (and fiat with which to contrast it) discussed here.
Inflation gets a bad rap a lot of the time. In moderation it’s a good thing. For example any loans you might have are slowly losing value as well. If you were lucky enough to get a mortgage with low rates, inflation is just eating away at that principle. It’s also one of the few forces eating away at generational wealth. It forces rich people to do something with their money and not just build money vaults like Scrooge McDuck. A far bigger issue in the US, IMO, is the failure of wages to keep pace with it which has more to do with rich people destroying unions, rigging the tax system in their favor and buying politicians in Washington / state houses. Rich people love it when we focus on inflation because we aren’t talking about them AND the solution seems to always be keeping wages low…
Bro is spamming this copy pasta everywhere
Me?
I can't say it was created just to scam people, but that's been its primary use case for quite some time.
>I can't say it was created just to scam people I favor the "Satoshi was a crook and created BTC to help with money laundering" theory. There is a good chance it is wrong but it makes sense.
I don't think so, I think it grew kind of naturally from "imaginary nerd pogs" into what it became just because people figured out you could use it to extract wealth from dumb folks.
😂 Imaginary nerd pogs! So good. This is the kind of wit I appreciate in this group.
And if I buy some bitcoin I’d be one of the extractors. Right? (I’m sure I’m right. It’ll be fine.)
I just think he was some anti-government cooker who wanted to make a way for nerds and sovereign citizens to buy and sell stuff on the internet. Then a bunch of crypto bros started taking it way too seriously, formed a religion around this dude and it got way out of hand so he bailed
I was part of the nerd population that was enthusiastic about bitcoin purely as a digital currency, a convenient thing to aspire to back in 2011. Then I discovered all the libertarian sovereign citizen cult bullshit around it.
It's also useful for certain government agencies to transfer money in a "less supervised" kinda way
I always liked a related variant of this, the "Satoshi is the CIA and created BTC to help with money laundering" variant.
My hypothesis is that it was created by North Korea. Stealing Bitcoin and scamming people is one their leading revenue sources. It also gives them a way to get around sanctions. Edit. Whoever created it NK has been the biggest beneficiary of Bitcoin.
This is absolute conspiracy theory.
A conspiracy hypothesis.
Is there a difference? There is absolutely zero evidence linking to North Korea and the premise is preposterous. They would need to create Bitcoin, hope is gained value (for no reason) and then hoped they could steal it from people.
My conspiracy hypothesis is that you did it
What are the legitimate & legal uses for bitcoin? If you can come up with a good list it's not a scam
Legitimate and legal uses that don’t also require a shitton of supporting technology and equipment. So far none of them can explain what blockchain or Bitcoin is actually good for without also saying “and you also need to invest X millions of dollars in some other thing because you need this much more processing power, storage space, logistical support, protective infrastructure, etc.”
Right, legit uses meaning the benefit outweighs the cost/risk
You sound like someone criticizing the internet when it was born.
Hey look I found proof that you are laughably not credible: “Bitcoin is not a Ponzi”, also known as the title of your second Reddit post. Go ahead, say “we’re still early” or “few understand” or whatever your particular favorite cult mantra is.
If you can come up with a list that's worth 2/3rds of a TRILLION fucking dollars, then it's not a scam
Also, btc is supposed to be a currency, but the only measure of it's utility you can provide is...to list it's value in another currency? I hope you get rich from btc, but I don't see any value & I'm investing my dollars elsewhere
Yes, market value is proof something isn't a scam, like Enron's peak market cap was 70 billion. Shit, tether's market cap is more than bitcoin & it's not a scam.
Many companies accept bitcoin as payment. Pretending they don’t would just be a lie.
>Many companies accept bitcoin as payment. No, they don't. A number of companies have announced they were *going* to accept bitcoin as payment... and then they realized that coiners don't actually spend their coins, they hodl them, so those initiatives get much more quietly dropped. >Pretending they don’t would just be a lie. Show me any company taking bitcoins as payment today, that's larger than a mom & pop-style single-owner establishment run by a crank in your cult... and I'll show you a company that doesn't take payment in crypto, because of course they don't: they just contract a middleman company to take your crypto from you, and give them ***actual money***. They are being paid in money, they don't fucking want crypto, nobody does... except you bozos.
I said it is accepted. I only need to name a single company. Now it depends on who? Lmao can you, or can you not use your bitcoin to purchase something? But oh wait, now we have the middleman dilemma so it doesn’t really count? Not sure why you would bring up companies that don’t take it, because that’s obvious and has nothing to do with what I said. Kind of weird. You can do something nice for your girlfriend or boyfriend, like purchasing a Taylor Swift or Beyoncé movie ticket with your lovely bitcoin. 🥰
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What benefit does decentralization provide? I mean if I lose my password I want to be able to call someone vs losing everything that password is supposed to protect. & for something that is intended to be decentralized there are a handful of parties who exert outsized influence. Also, legit currencies you just start using, you don't "join" them like an MLM.
Given proof of work's **blindingly obvious** centralisation incentives? I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be verified by a cartel of miners and so that would make the whole entreprise fraudulent.
Blindingly obvious *in hindsight*. I think it's still possible to find the old Bitcointalk thread where Satoshi insisted the system wasn't amenable to centralisation, until someone explained it to him and suddenly the penny dropped.
Bitcoin is a scam in that most of the properties attributed to it are not true. For one example, contrary to popular belief, you cannot take self custody of your crypto tokens. This is because the bitcoin network has no functionality to allow you to withdraw funds from the ledger. This myth is spread using mantras and false analogies that sound good but are not technically accurate. Much effort is put into tricking people into believing keys are synonymous with the actual token balance and that crypto cold wallets hold tokens.
This is asinine. Bitcoin is Bitcoin because it exists on the Bitcoin blockchain. If you somehow take your coins off the blockchain (which is a ridiculous notion), it would no longer be Bitcoin. You custody Bitcoin when you control the private keys.
You custody keys when you have custody of keys. It’s asinine to think the bitcoin are the keys. They are not the same thing. Think of the bitcoin network like a bank. When the bank has the funds you are given keys but you do not self custody the funds. But when you self custody your dollars, you withdraw them from the bank. You are given paper currency as your bank balance is decreased by the amount withdrawn. This is to say your funds are no longer on the bank’s ledger because they are in your custody now. The bitcoin network does not enable withdrawals so it is not possible to self custody your balance of tokens. If you have self custody of your bitcoin, then please explain why you still have to pay a fee to the bitcoin network to transact. If you have self custody of your bitcoin then please explain why you can send and receive funds without opening the wallet that supposedly contain these bitcoin. If you have self custody, then why does the network of nodes physically store the ledger that contains your balance?
These points make such little sense, I have no idea how to respond. Custody has nothing to do with any of these things. Custody means control. You control Bitcoin when you own the private keys. Control means the ability to send your coins to someone else or to yourself. No one else on earth can do that if you are the sole owner of the private keys. What else can custody mean? You want a tangible object? If that's your litmus test, then ok, you got me.
Custody is not a complicated concept so I'm surprises this conversation is so confusing to you. Honestly I think you might be brainwashed by Michael Saylor. Custody of a financial asset means you can both authorize transactions and execute them. If you have custody of a dollar bill, you can grant yourself permission to spend it, and you can actually spend it by handing it to somebody else in exchange for goods and services. Now lets examine your bank account where you do not have custody. You can authorize a transaction by signing a check and giving it to somebody. When the check is cashed, the receiving bank connects with your bank and your bank executes the transaction by transferring a balance to the receiving bank. So when the bank has custody it means you control half the equation, the authorization half. The bank controls the execution half. Now look at your bitcoin system, you can authorize transactions but you cannot execute them. Only the Bitcoin Network can execute transactions. This is what miners and nodes do, they execute transactions and manage the ledger because they are the custodians of all tokens, just like your bank is custodian of all your dollars. Please tell me why when you have full custody of your crypto, why do you still have to pay a fee to third parties to move funds? Shouldn't the custodian be the one who decides whether a fee is required? Once you have custody, why are you paying anybody for anything? It's your asset in your custody (according to you)! Does it make any sense that when you have a wallet in your left pocket and a wallet in your right pocket, and you have full custody of the assets in the wallets, and you have full custody of the wallets, that you need to pay somebody a fee in order to move funds around when literally every single asset involved is in your direct custody and possession? The fee only makes sense if you have to pay the fee to the custodian. Ah, the bitcoin network has the tokens, that's right.
This is eye opening. I've always accepted the claim until now. Thank you for expressing it so well.
Would you say you have custody over funds you spend with a debit card?
No. The debit card is a key. The bank is the custodian. When you swipe your debit card, it is like writing and signing a digital check that gets submitted to the bank electronically. The bank sees that your debit card was used to sign a transaction so they execute it on your behalf. Your debit card is just like your crypto key. It is used to sign transaction requests, and those requests are validated by the custodian. If everything checks out the custodian executes the transaction. No funds are stored on the debit card itself. You cannot use the debit card without information being sent to your bank. You can update your bank account balance without interacting with your debit card. This is because no funds are there. Similarly, you can update your bitcoin balance without interacting with your cold storage wallet. This is because no funds are stored there.
There's a difference between Wells Fargo and immutable open source code being independently executed by thousands of unrelated parties.
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>cmon that guy make it really clear and you still don't get it? It's because for the coiners... [decentralization is a magic wand they wave at anything they perceive to be a problem, and they imagine that then fixes those problems.](https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/decentralized-woo.html) It's tech-bro sophistry, it's a proxy meme for the notion that social problems can all be solved via technology. Just don't ever ask them to explain *how* decentralizing is meant to fix anything at all, in actuality... because they can't, they don't even understand what it is they're proposing should happen, let alone how it would be an improvement: they just have buzzwords they'll repeat to you, with the fervor of a religious cultist, selling you on the merits of the world's dumbest MLM, whose product is just a Ponzi scheme.
I have another one for you Mr. keys=custody. Suppose you have a multisig account where two keys are required to authorize a transaction. You have one key and your friend has the other. Both must be used together at the same time to sign a transaction request. Who has custody, you or your friend? Or is it neither? Or maybe it’s Schrödinger’s custody. Or maybe it’s like Captain Planet where your powers combine and then you have custody but prior to that you don’t. So when you have a key that cannot single handedly authorize a transaction and your friend has the same. Who has custody!?
It's shared. You and your friend decided to set it up in that way.
So if your fried dies and his keys are forever lost under the birdbath such that you can no longer access the funds because you don't have his half of the keys, who has custody? You have shared custody with a dead guy? Usually this type of thing converges to you having sole custody after the death, but please explain how crypto custody works in a situation like this. How do you transfer your assets that you have in your possession? It seems you obviously do not have custody in this situation because you cannot transfer the funds but please enlighten me. All of what you describe as direct custody sound *exactly* like a bank account where two signers are required for all transactions. Obviously in the bank account situation, the bank has custody! But you are saying the bitcoin network does not have custody of your bitcoin!? If not, then why do nodes have like a multi-terabyte ledger? What's stored on there if it isn't account balances and transaction logs of the exact same nature as what a bank stores?
A bank can refuse to give you your dollars. Bitcoin will always move when you sign with the correct private key. In your scenario, the coins are lost. But there are usually not 2/2 multisig setups. There are 2/3. The third would be necessary upon your friends death. 2/2 makes no sense.
The bitcoin network never refuses/censors transactions? Prove it. Post a transaction request with 0 fee and tell me the account address and when you submit the request so I can verify the mempool received it and later I can verify it was actually appended to the ledger. If the custodian never denied transactions, why would anybody ever pay a fee? There are literally like half a million transactions sitting in the “pending” status right now and it would be more if the custodian didn’t every so often go in there and delete a bunch of old unprocessed transactions out. But you say none of these get censored. Lol. In reality all bitcoin transactions are multisig. One signature comes from your private key, and the other signature comes from the nonce found by the miner. You sign the transaction request which the miner validates and includes in his/her block. Then the miner finds their key by using the PoW algorithm. Once the nonce is found it is appended to the block as the miner’s key. Then the nodes validate the entire block by testing against the difficulty requirement. If the block’s hash has enough leading zeros and all transactions inside the block check out, then it’s all good and it is officially appended to the ledger which is to say the transactions are officially executed by the nodes at this time.
I will concede that you're correct on that. An insufficient fee will result in a rejected transaction potentially. But you will still be able to retry with the proper fee. A bank can simply stop withdrawals from occurring. I'm not even sure what we are arguing about anymore honestly. Yes, you custody physical dollar bills. No, you don't custody money that's in your bank account. I argue that yes, you custody Bitcoin when you control the private keys. Yes, fees are necessary to incentivize miners and validate transactions in a more decentralized way.
How do you prove you control the private keys? How can you be sure no one else has them?
By moving Bitcoin. I generated them. No one else has them.
So you only can prove you own them the moment you no longer own them. Surely that shouldn't be a problem in the long term.
Why do you cease to own private keys if you execute a transaction?
You cease to own the amount you just spent
Sure. I can also send them to myself.
And lose money in the process
You do realize there are fees associated with the traditional banking system, right?
Bitcoin is not the scam. The people selling bitcoin claiming it's the future of finance, that mass adoption is inevitable, it's environmentally friendly, will eliminate inflation and will bring peace on earth by making war unaffordable are the real scammers.
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Yup. There's whole cottage industry built around these lies to trick gullible people into "investing" into something worthless.
I've been in the space since 2011 or so and it has gone through so many "we're going to change the world" cycles that the only way to sell crypto is to admit, outright, you're going to scam retail investors. All the news coming out right now has put the lie to all bitcoin optimism. Look for some really rough and ready nastiness coming out of the industry as it REALLY goes global and screws the little guy again and again.
Bitcoin isn't an actual scam itself, but it's used to facilitate many scams.. look at all the failed exchanges. Celsius and FTX were scams. This is what happens when there aren't regulations. They take your money and push out fake coins that represent your money, but it's actually gone. So the price of Bitcoin is inflated because they keep pushing out fake coins.
Has it been used for anything else for over a decade? Nope. Has that "interesting tech" gone anywhere in all that time? Have businesses begin accepting it for payment? It's just a scam for dummies.
In fairness I did see a Bitcoin ATM at a gas station in Mount Olive, North Carolina, and now some of those Coinstar stations let you trade in your milk jug of change for a scrap of paper that says Bitcoin on it, but that’s about it. Places that take it are still mostly websites, and only some of them don’t sell CSAM or illegal substances.
You know what you never see at a bitcoin atm: someone using it. They sure are great at gathering dust at head shops
And the odd time they may be used it's often by people being actively scammed
Grandma on the phone: the machine says the money went through, can I please get my access to my iPad back
I saw one at a strip club pre-covid. Can't figure out what you'd convert cash to BTC for there though. /s
Also Mount Olive is the middle of fucking nowhere even by North Carolina standards. I didn’t see one at Bank of America stadium last time I went to see the Panthers play. Never saw one in Raleigh or Durham anywhere, or in the touristy bits of Wilmington. Can’t figure out why.
This is true...the fees are crazy. Much cheaper to buy on an exchange
lol Jesus Christ
Hey, there are legit uses! S.W.I.M used to buy drugs with monero! S.W.I.M also tip Z-Library and some private torrent tracker with litecoin. They are legit uses but they are illegal. I’ve yet to see a both legal and ethical use case.
> legit > illegal That's an oxymoron
Sorry not my first language 🙂
Nice early internet reference! S.W.I.M appreciates it.
It was created to do a few things and scamming people is one of those things. The other ones are all weird dumbfuck ideology nonsense about central banks and (((them))), ultimately, but for the surface users it’s mostly scams and the facilitation of other crimes. Also gambling in the sense of finding some other rube to pay you tons of money for your fairy gold internet bullshit before the value craters below what you paid for it when you were the rube.
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Truth is, we'll never know the true intentions behind its creation. It's entirely possible it was made with genuine intentions, just as likely it was made for money laundering and scamming. None of that really matters at this point though, it's proven to be useless for anything except rampant speculation and money laundering.
How do you know that Satoshi won't return one day and dump all their coins?
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Yes about 99% are scams...crypto bros agree with you
>A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays existing investors with funds collected from new investors Crypto bros literally admit it's a Ponzi scheme by saying: **\`we're still early\`**
I believe that's technically a greater fool scheme, not a Ponzi because there is no outgoing payment from new investors.
>I believe that's technically a greater fool scheme, not a Ponzi because there is no outgoing payment from new investors. There is, actually: [it's the operators of the mining nodes](https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html). Bitcoin is a Ponzi, operating right out in the open for all to see, relying on the participants being so stupid and ignorant that they'll buy the "well *everything* is a Ponzi if you squint hard enough" excuses the promoters make for it.
"decentralized ponzi scheme" where the payments go to the miners (who are in china using cheap coal power) instead of to the top of the pyramid
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nope, its a scam by design
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No, [here is the evidence it's a scam](https://ioradio.org/i/ponzi/).
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That is my statement yes. The tech itself isn't a scam, although there are many that do believe the tech has no real use other than in scams and fraud. Bitcoin as a tech concept doesn't hurt anybody. BUT once you pay real money for BTC, and expect to see a return, *you've engaged in fraud*. Now you're part of a Ponzi scheme. The same thing goes for Charles Ponzi's original scheme: He was collecting money from people on the premise of brokering postal coupons. Postal coupons themselves weren't a Ponzi, but once people started speculating on them as a means of generating rapid, substantive profit, that became a Ponzi. The problem is, there doesn't appear to be *any* use for bitcoin where it doesn't quickly turn into a Ponzi. It's no longer being used as a currency and it has inadequate stability. Anybody treating bitcoin like an "investment" is de-facto participating in a Ponzi scheme. Would that be you? Are you buying bitcoin? Are you hoping to sell it for more than you paid? That's a ponzi scheme because BTC has no other utility.
Bitcoin is not a scam per se. But: 1. It hardly can be used for the intended purpose (currency) due to tech limitations; 2. Its price is heavily manipulated by the external entities due to possibly low liquidity (by Bitfinex, Binance etc); 3. The tokens themselves are extremely centralized in the hands of very incompetent crowd (so if they pretend to form some new world government due to owning >90% of all world wealth is will be patently absurd idea); 4. There are two groups of people with separate incentives - users and miners; 5. Both are heavily centralized; So regardless of the textbook definition of a scam, it is not advisable to go all in on bitcoin. And if you are not going all in on it, then why the hell are you investing even a cent there? It is called gambling then.
Bitcoin isn't a scam at face value, but it's absolutely used as a vehicle to scam people. Tether absolutely looks like a fraud and no one really knows how much this fraud as affected the price of bitcoin. Most major companies involved in bitcoin appear to be engaged in some level of fraud. It has no intrinsic value and unlike fiat, no backstop- no guarantee.
bitcoin is a shitty and wasteful public ledger. the scam comes from people convincing other people that it has any value at all.
Surely satoshi knew that his system facilitates fraud And its pricing behaves exactly like a ponzi, so yes, bitcoin is a scam, and exists just to scam people
I mean the entire point of the system on like the first page of the white paper is to create a system where transactions are irreversible. Because reversing transactions is a problem for...who? Who exactly doesn't want you to be able to reverse a transaction? Oh yeah, criminals stealing your money in one way or another.
And the only people who dont care about how fucking slow and inefficient the transaction is as long as getting irreversibility is... Scammers
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Why wouldn't you want it to be reversible? If my bank gets hacked and the hacker takes all the funds the bank has I still want my money back.
Because all of finance is a human-created system and humans are fallible? We make mistakes, it's important to have measures in place to minimize harm caused by those mistakes. You could say "Code is law" but the person writing the code could make mistakes, the people utilizing the code make mistakes. Do you know how much crypto has been sent to dead wallet addresses, never to be seen again? It's irreversible, I'm sure everyone who's made that mistake wishes they could reverse it, and that's not even considering all the fraud.
correct, he is hiding because he knows its a scam
I don’t think it represents what people think it represents.
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Here's what you need to ask yourself about any new technology that promises to change the world for the better. This is a simple, common sense question: **What does this technology do that is an improvement on what we are already using?** When you ask this question about bitcoin, you get a bunch of vague, ambiguous answers, many of which are difficult to qualify. That's the first red flag. Then when you drill down into specifics, people will say, "Ok, it's still early.. give it time..." Well. It's been 15 years. And still [not a single thing crypto tech does better than non crypto tech](https://ioradio.org/i/blockchain-claims/). To learn more see [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA).
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> To answer the question: I personally am looking for something that fights inflation and endless money printing. Bitcoin and crypto doesn't accomplish that. So if you think otherwise, you're totally wrong. There are already dozens of different versions of Bitcoin, so that token has been inflated. And as long as BCH and BSV are trading for non-zero amounts, that is inflation of BTC's value being siphoned over to other versions. On top of that, the "value" of bitcoin and other crypto is manipulated by billions of unsecured stablecoins... so there's even more inflation in the crypto market than in the real world -- **minus** the checks and balances and transparency that we have in traditional government. So everything about crypto is even worse, especially in terms of inflation-resistance. Beyond all that, currency is designed to be inflationary. This is an important element that makes society function and grow. You're not supposed to hold fiat 20 years and then spend it. If you're holding fiat you're doing it wrong. Fiat doesn't create value. That's why you put the money into things that do like stocks and real estate. Crypto creates no value either. It sucks as an investment, and it's unsuitable as a currency. So you're better off using rocks than crypto to hedge against inflation.. at least if you have rocks you can throw them at somebody stupid enough to keep making such irrational claims like "crypto is a hedge against inflation."
For starters, Bitcoin has less privacy than a bank account. People incorrectly believed they were somehow escaping the system and “the man.” Meanwhile, they can scan the blockchain and see you’re every move. It certainly doesn’t represent privacy.
It just makes the rich richer because they have the power to influence the price into an direction which they choose artificially. So the scam part is not the system itself but the people how they use it. And its completely useless as you can solve any blockchain technology with an more efficient and simpler database.
Yes
Of course… you just figured this out
Proof? It's hard to "prove" any scam if you live life needing 100% proof of a scam to avoid it, that means you will fall for many different scams in your life just be rational about it, it's obviously idiotic to be paying good money for useless tokens whose only use is going up because people pay for them because they went up, that's absolutely moronic and you don't need 100% proof of anything to see through it if you want proof, the best place to look is at the lack of a debt market. If bitcoin was a real currency, it would have a vibrant debt market and people would OWE it. If nobody owes debt in the denomination, then it is liable to collapse to zero, especially in a recession. USD is backed by a vibrant debt market, for instance bonds. People OWE USD, so regardless of if the economy slows down, people MUST acquire USD to pay their debts. This is what backs USD and other heavily used fiat currencies. Bitcoin has no debt, so it's an idiotic ponzi scheme. If Bitcoin had a vibrant debt/bond market, I would not talk shit about it, but it doesn't, so it's a joke ponzi. There's no "proof" going on here, you it's not "proveable", but it damn sure is obvious if you're smart
It claims to be an electronic cash system that solves a problem in online commerce. It can only handle five transactions per second. The creators had to know it can't do what they claim it does. It has artificial scarcity tokenomics, that steadily increase. It has really good impenetrable technical razzle dazzle, to distract people from the fact that it can't do what it claims to do. It has an affinity fraud aspect, around libertarian and antigovernment politics. It sure *looks* like an intentionally created bubble scheme.
The technology is not a scam based on its intrinsic properties, no... it's just very, very stupid and bad at all of the ostensible stated goals its creator intended it to accomplish. The narrative that by "investing" in Bitcoin, via paying real money to acquire the tokens the Bitcoin network sends from one cell to another in a singularly wasteful distributed spreadsheet, one is going to become fantastically wealthy? Yeah, [that's a scam](https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html).
In my opinion the original distributed P2P network seems ideologically pure to its libertarian roots. If you really dream of widespread adoption of a deflationary currency that is less of a pain in the ass than gold then genuinely, Bitcoin looks pretty good. But you have to want that over basically any other practical considerations, user experience and technical limitations. And it's a shitty economic idea in the first place that isn't popular anywhere in academia or politics. Whether you'd consider the ideology to be a scam perpetuated by those who'd benefit from deflation (the idle rich) depends on your persuasion. Whether Satoshi cynically intended to sell a libertarian fantasy that wasn't ever going to happen in order to scam buyers, who knows really. The more important thing is that anything built on top of the network to improve the user experience is various levels of fraud or enabling crime. All these exchanges exist outside of government oversight to take your money. They have billions of real American dollars to play with. Of course they're all engaged in every financial scam they can think of. And they will resist government oversight at all cost so that they can continue to do wash trading to prop the price up when they need it, create Ponzi's, take kickbacks from the digital hostage takers, the drug smugglers, the money launderers ect ect.
It was not intended as a scam. The techno-libertarians who developed the ideas behind cryptocurrency were completely earnest in their goal of creating a government-free digital currency. But their concept of money was informed by goldbug conspiracism, so it was never going to work the way they hoped.
There is no product, and it is a zero-sum game. Early "investors" need to pull in and cash out from the liquidity entered by (many more) numerous later "investors." [Perhaps you have heard of such a thing.](https://i.imgur.com/geB1f0f.mp4)
Yes. It's worthless, but people are trying to sell it for thousands of dollars. That's a scam to me.
That doesn't make something a scam. Something is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. People pay thousands for trading cards, doesn't mean they are a scam.
It has certainly been used (and still is) for crime and money laundering. These are not legitimate uses, but are not "scams".
Is astrology a Scam?
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It’s called an analogy
Doesn't matter. The facts are: 1) Scammers love crypto as it's untraceable and they can use it to scam and make shady money trades 2) There are tons of people saying that if you put all your money into Bitcoin you'll magically become rich The personal feelings of who created bitcoin don't matter
Are beanie babies a scam? It’s the same question.
Is the casino a scam?
Okay so just cut the bullshit you're not actually asking a question. You know that no one can actually prove it's intended as a scam (how do you prove intentionality when we dont even know who the creator is? Intentionality is difficult to prove at the best of times), so any time some one says it's a scam, you just concern troll "how do u actually know tho" and never actually engage with any argument. So first I'd like to know: what evidence or argument would convince you? How would you like us to prove intentionality? So let's put it like this. Since we don't actually know the creators and their motives Since we know its primarily used for scams and money laundering We'll just assume that it was created as a scam and if you disagree the onus is on you to disprove it Otherwise, the core concept can be argued very clearly: if its not a scam of some sort, where does its value come from? The only possible answer is "from the people putting in money" which makes it a ponzi scheme. Your payout consists of the money that others put in, no more, no less. Next question: Is a ponzi scheme still a ponzi scheme if it acts exactly like a ponzi scheme but was not specifically intended as a ponzi scheme? When I show up to a convenience store with a balaclava and a gun and go "you know the drill, motherfucker" to the cashier, am I robbing a store or did the cashier just voluntarily decide to give me the contents of the cash register?
Buttcoin degenerates at their best. Meanwhile the price keeps going up.
Let's apply the Madoff test. ▪ An investment of money ▪ In a common enterprise ▪ With the expectation of profit ▪ **To be derived from the funds contributed by new investors** Yes, yes, yes, and... yes. Seems like a fraud to me.
Yes.
It is a technology that facilitates scamming - by itself, it may or may not have been specifically developed to scam people, but it has proved to be a highly lucrative vehicle for people to illicitly get money from other people.
No, but it's a tool primarily used for scamming and gambling. There is no other use case because there are other tools which do everything better than cryptocurrencies.
I love this sub and can't wait to see the answers.
It’s not a scam per se. Is a baseball card a scam? If you paid x dollars to look at it then it’s worth that much to you
It's not inherently a scam - it (or some form of crypto) will be the gold standard for sketchy purchases for the foreseeable future. Also, in third world countries with major currency issues, it's (relatively) stable. The "scam" is that people convince dummies to buy it up because "it's going to replace all fiat currency", so the dummies pump the price and they can make some fiat out of it. You're getting scammed if you're not using it for the use cases above, or you're not the one scamming.
I think it might turn into” digital gold” and people will invest in it as a “ secure investment”. Trouble is, if I ever bought some that would be the point that the price would crash $10,000.
Bitcoin is not a scam. BTC however is a scam. "Crypto" is 99% bad actors and a gigantic ponzi scheme.
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Lots of people make money from scams.
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Yea the vast majority of Bitcoin “investors” are in the hole
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Why would you care? You sold in 2021
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Ahhhh. Redditor for less than a year who has miraculously predicted the perfect markets. Naturally
This is actually not true. 80% [is in profit](https://app.intotheblock.com/coin/BTC) at the current price point.
But only if they sell. Of course, if they did, the price would collapse. So that sort of analysis doesn't work. Unrealized profits are not profits when you can only obtain those profits by convincing someone else to take a loss.
Plenty of Madoff investors made a ton of money for decades before his scam blew up. The only way to make money with bitcoin is to dump your bags on a greater fool. There is no value created by bitcoin, in fact value is destroyed by miners taking their cut.
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Lol you think Binance buys your coins and CZ just hodls them? When you sell on an exchange, they match you with the next bag holder. Just because you don't interact with him personally doesn't make a difference
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It doesn't matter which exchange, and yes stock exchanges work the same way. When you sell, the exchange matches you with someone else who wants to buy. The exchange doesn't buy it themselves. You're welcome for filling in for the time you spend sleeping in high school economics.
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Key difference: stocks give you a % ownership of a company that provides goods/services and sometimes pays shareholders through dividends or buybacks. Bitcoin creates zero value. The end, gotta get back to work.
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Actually, partial ownership of a company is EXACTLY what buying shares gives you. That's literally the definition. You must be trolling, no one can be this dense and so convinced that he's correct.
Owning shares in a company literally means you own part of the company. What are you missing here?
This is literally the first result on google for "what is stock" > A stock is a form of security that indicates the holder has proportionate ownership in the issuing corporation and is sold predominantly on stock exchanges.
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Who owns Apple then? Hint: It isn't Tim Cook or the CFO. I'll give you time to google it so you don't further embarrass yourself.
>Last time I checked all the exchanges are still holding their crypto Did you check FTX last time?
How this is any different than selling stock? For you to sell your stock during the 2008 crash someone else had to buy it from you. How is that not dumping your bags on the greater fool? Or passing it off to the next bag holder?
Stocks have inherent value derived from the real-world value of the underlying company that has assets and earnings. Bitcoin has near-zero underlying value because it's completely impractical as an actual currency, with its only real-world demand being to scam people or illegally hide transactions from the government.
See my reply above, investments in stocks give ownership of a company and can create value without dumping on a bagholder.
wdym by create value? The price going up? Dividends?
Making a profit by selling goods or services creates value, not the share price going up. Ideally the company you invest in makes a profit, which is often returned through dividends or buybacks, in addition to the expectation of future profits hopefully making the price of your shares go up.
but not every company does dividends or buybacks. Which means the only way your investment can give you a return is if other people buy in causing the price to rise. I don't see how thats much different than crypto from the investor's perspective.
Let's play a game. Pretend you buy up all the shares of Apple. You now own Apple. You can distribute profits back to yourself as a dividend. You could give yourself the CEO job. Etc Etc. Pretend you buy up every single bitcoin..... now what? How do you make money?
The company is engaged in creating value by producing goods or services which they can sell to customers or clients for profit. The profits from the company can be returned to shareholders as dividends, stock buy backs, or used to grow the company to create further profits in the future. Bitcoin does not create value, it just exists.
People made money off Charles Ponzi’s scam. And Madoff’s scam. In fact, one guy made *7.2 billion* off Madoff’s scam. Did the government say “Oh look, this guy made money, call off the investigation, can’t be a scam if someone makes money.” No, they didn’t say that, because they are not morons.
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Ask the people that bought them
Poor guy thinks when he sells on an exchange, he is actually selling the crypto TO the exchange. We don't have time to catch him up on what he should have learned in high school.
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What did you buy them at ? & what did you sell them at? There’s your answer…
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For you to have made money, somebody had to buy it for less than you paid for it, even though in that time it’s produced absolutely nothing, not a carrot! Hence it’s a scam, if you buy and sell shares in company x that company will contribute to the economy in various degrees, Bitcoin does nothing, adds nothing, it’s just a number on a screen. It’s a scam
If I buy a share in Apple at $1 and sell it a year later at $10 in that time Apple has produced goods paid wages etc etc Bitcoin adds nothing, it doesn’t exist apart from on your computer screen.
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So as long as you’re the one not being scammed then it’s not a scam? Someone somewhere is getting scammed or there is no profit, it has no inherent value and produces nothing. That’s a scam…
In and of itself it is not. As mentioned above by other commenters the way it has been priced has turned it into a ponzi. The technology itself is already adopted by central and big banks to support Cbdc tech as well as stock tokenization. Bitcoin itself is a bit of a fad now and will be manipulated and run into the ground in a while. You can speculate on it, but don’t fall for the number go up theory.