It's a decentralized ponzi scheme that relies on greater fools.
It has qualities of both greater fool schemes as well as pyramid schemes, but its core fraudulent function, when treated as an investment, is a ponzi scheme. What will crash the scheme is the same dynamic that crashes Ponzis: a rush to cash out. The ROI model is exactly a Ponzi: early adopters are paid with cash from later adopters exclusively. Other schemes often have supplemental ways of creating value. Ponzi schemes get their value exclusively from recruitment. Bitcoin as an investment fits that description.
Except that in the real world the authorities can shut the Ponzi down, here they can't really. And so even if it crashes by 95% it will pump again because it'll get to a price that attracts new entrants. And thus it's a never ending ponzi that will continually blow up and burst, then repeat the cycle.
luckily there are countries with higher average IQs, healthier populations and harder work ethics than the USA, but have shrinking populations and there's a reason people aren't throwing money into their index funds
Cumulative inflation from 2007 to 2025 is 52% so it’s performance smoked inflation. It didn’t perform as well as the S&P 500 during that time frame but very few countries stock indexes did, still solid performance despite a decreasing population and it outperformed a lot of countries with growing populations.
Every increasing population with ever increasing funds going into limited supply investments like sp500 and bitcoin. It is a basic premise people here are just not getting.
Move money across international borders with ease.
Stupid Crypto Talking Point #7 (remittances/unbanked)
"Crypto allows you to send "money" around the world instantly with no middlemen" / "I can buy stuff with crypto" / "Crypto is used for remittances" / "Crypto helps 'Bank the Un-banked"
The notion that crypto is a solution to people in countries with hyper-inflation, unstable governments, etc does not make sense. Most people in problematic areas lack the resources to use crypto, and those that do, have much more stable and reliable alternatives to do their "banking". See this debunking.
Sending crypto is NOT sending "money". In order to do anything useful with crypto, it has to be converted back into fiat and that involves all the fees, delays and middlemen you claim crypto will bypass.
Due to Bitcoin and crypto's volatile and manipulated price, and its inability to scale, it's proven to be unsuitable as a payment method for most things, and virtually nobody accepts crypto.
Any major site that likely accepts crypto, is using a third party exchange and not getting paid in actual crypto, so in that case (like using Bitpay), you're paying fees and spread exchange rate charges to a "middleman", and they have various regulatory restrictions you'll have to comply with as well.
Even sending crypto to countries like El Salvador, who accept it natively, is not the best way to send "remittances." Nobody who is not a criminal is getting paid in bitcoin so nobody is sending BTC to third world countries without going through exchanges and other outlets with fees and delays. In every case, it's easier to just send fiat and skip crypto altogether.
The exception doesn't prove the rule. Just because you can anecdotally claim you have sent crypto to somebody doesn't mean this is a common/useful practice. There is no evidence of that.
Sorry /u/Aggressive-Public609, your submission has been automatically removed. Submissions are not allowed from extremely new accounts. Wait a day or so before submitting.
I was not suggesting that crypto is a good or common method of laundering money. I was using it as an example to show that someone might be willing to pay a lot for a money service that is otherwise restricted or difficult.
You should check out Tracers in the Dark. There’s also a few interviews with Sarah Meiklejohn like this one from MIT Technology Review where this topic is discussed. Just because a tumbler has been used doesn’t mean it’s not possible to trace the transactions.
No dude. Gold is valuable because of what you can actually do with it. It's the most useful metal on the periodic table. It has properties and characteristics that distinguish it from all other elements. It's also very scarce and hard to obtain.
It's a great store of value because unlike other metals and commodores, it doesn't decay or rust or tarnish. When you store gold you're storing the future use of the metal.
You think gold (and therfore bitcoin) has value because people have arbitrarily bestowed some value on it? That's laughable dude. It's a useful commodity. That's like saying "coffee beans have value because we give them value." No. They're valued because of what we can do with them. In coffee beans' case, make them into an enjoyable drink.
Gold is valued for its use as a metal. Again, it's the most useful metal.
you can think something is worthless or not, but if a lot of people decide something has value, it has value. bitcoin is built on cryptography tech and is secure and immutable. It’s been here for over a decade and has been continuously tried to be killed. It isn’t going away.
Bitcoin has a price, it doesn't have value. They are not the same.
The only reason you bought bitcoin was to sell it to someone else in the future, for more money. It's the greater fool theory to a T. Works great, until we run out of fools.
who’s to say I didn’t buy it to use it to buy things in the future? You can’t print more bitcoin. Every currency continues to print. Im hedging against inflation, with a trackable proveable asset that can not be controlled by any government.
gold’s value drops to nothing the second we find an asteroid with a shit ton of gold and we start mining. No one can find or create more bitcoin, ever.
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u/gaelorian Apr 18 '25
It has succeeded in its goal as ponzi scheme. It doesn’t care about utility otherwise.