
Bitcoin: The Swindle of the Century - sjcsjc
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/319192
======
PaulAJ
Lost me with the description of Satoshi Nakamoto as "possibly fake".
Pseudonymous is not the same as fake.

The rest of the article is a combination of straw-men and ad-hominems. Move
along. Nothing to see here.

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gwbas1c
I'm surprised this article is still here. A few months ago, a well-written
article by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet criticizing cryptocurrency was removed
by the moderators.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet aren't exactly the kind of authors who you
flag... You're free to disagree with them, but they do know a thing or two
about amassing large quantities of wealth!

~~~
nextweek2
I'd respectfully disagree. They knew how to get wealthy in the past, I doubt
they've actively managed their investments for the last decade.

These are people who are worth listening to, but the first rule of investment
is: past performance is no indication of future performance.

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anoncoward111
There are a lot of scams and swindles of the last few decades.

Student loans and medical billing are outright scams in the United States.

Purchasing a used car and many types of home financing are quite scammy as
well.

Bitcoin is an asset with a wildly fluctuating price as people attempt to find
a viable use case for it. It benefits from a strong network effect, not from
its particular strength in storing or transfering wealth.

~~~
jbob2000
You can do stuff with a university degree, people recognize it. And you can do
stuff with a car and money from a home finance. These might have _predatory_
aspects to how you acquire them, but they aren't scams and nobody is being
swindled.

You distinctly cannot do anything with bitcoin. There are a few dinky
companies that will accept bitcoin as payment for unimportant knick-knacks and
electronics, but that's about it. It will just sit, taking up space on a hard
disk, until society decides to fully take it up as a currency (which won't
happen in its current state).

An asset that has no use is not an asset, it's a liability.

~~~
anoncoward111
A used car has no value when the engine blows up the next day.

A university degree has questionable utility when you spend $30,000 a year to
make $30,000 a year, doing a job that previously didn't require a degree
(sales).

I sent Bitcoin to someone in Uzbekistan. Foreign currency and even gold
importe are banned there.

~~~
jbob2000
> A used car has no value when the engine blows up the next day.

Sure it does, you can sell it for scrap or repair/replace the engine.

> A university degree has questionable utility when you spend $30,000 a year
> to make $30,000 a year, doing a job that previously didn't require a degree
> (sales)

This isn't the case for everyone. Many people find utility in their degrees.
Just because a few people don't doesn't mean there is no utility to be had.

> I sent Bitcoin to someone in Uzbekistan. Foreign currency and even gold
> importe are banned there.

So is bitcoin an asset or a method for transferring money? The person you sent
those bitcoins to didn't keep them as bitcoins, they converted them to a local
currency. If it's just a method for transferring money, then there are better
ways (some don't see them as "better", though, because there are restrictions
on them that prevent criminals from transferring their ill-gotten gains).

~~~
anoncoward111
Spare me. If you've paid $3,000 for the car and sell it for $150 in scrap the
next day, that's not a win win transaction.

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jondubois
Bitcoin's extreme inefficiency (in terms of electricity consumption) is the
main reason why I didn't give cryptocurrency a second look when I learned
about it several years ago. It never made sense to me that something should
have value just because it's expensive to produce. You'd think capitalism
would reward efficiency and not punish it.

That said, I think that Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrencies will revolutionize a
lot of things including:

\- How tech companies are created and who will end up owning them (it will be
developers and early adopters instead of VCs and investors).

\- It will transform what it means for a project to be open source; the GPL
license will become increasingly important.

\- It will transform how people think about ownership.

One of the biggest innovations of blockchain technology is that for the first
time in history, it has allowed open source projects to have actual financial
value. The value so far has been restricted to cryptocurrency projects but it
will soon spread to other open source projects.

The value of a coin is not about the coin itself, it's about the community and
the network of services that exist around it.

~~~
agorabinary
Proof of stake has never been shown to work and the largest projects
attempting to move towards it, ie. Ethereum, are finding PoS's issues
insurmountable. There is still no proof of concept for PoS (Casper), something
that is becoming increasingly apparent to the ETH/BTC market these days...

~~~
jondubois
There are several delegated Proof of Stake cryptocurrencies which achieve
similar results as PoS and have been running successfully for years. E.g. Lisk
and EOS.

The reason why Ethereum is taking so long to move to PoS is not because PoS is
impossible but rather because a seamless migration between PoW to PoS is
challenging. If they implemented PoS from scratch, it would be a lot easier.

~~~
agorabinary
Lisk is a sidechain and EOS is centralized.

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Cypher
YESSSS more do more of this. This is how we get the bottom

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teilo
And yet it moves.

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agorabinary
tl;dr "You don't have to take my word for it: No less an authority than JP
Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has identified crypto as a bubble just waiting to
bust."

Is this satire?

