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> ...vested interest in it succeeding. That has led to a lot of people who have annoyingly strong opinions about it.

Cryptobro-splainer here. Having been involved from the beginning, I can tell you that detractors (especially vocal ones) are far more invested than proponents. Imagine declaring bitcoin dead in 2014, and then again the next year, and then the next... and while this is going on you can't help but calculate how much potential profit your mistake has cost you. You are also going to be struggling with envy, and your offended sense of justice. What would such an experience do to a person? Well, it makes them very upset - and desperate for something that would shield their ego. The whole environmental impact cover is a perfect example: the papers people point to are always poorly executed, using outdated data and poorly justified guestimation... always without acknowledging the most important part - "relative to what?" But that isn't really the point, the point is to provide a moral justification for the costly shortsighted position.




I don't see any detractors claiming that cryptocurrencies will be dead in any timeframe. They are arguing that they are useless and ponzi schemes, but it's very well known that market and people can stay irrational way longer than any bet.


You must not be paying attention then, because many detractors have made the claim repeatedly. It would be funny if it wasn't clearly the result of a predictable feedback loop. I'm really not interested in skylining one particular individual, but if you are genuinely interested in understanding what is happening: pick any one of the many tech writers appearing in the multitude of obituary compilations, then pull up their twitter timeline and observe their increasingly venomous attacks on cryptocurrency over the years.

With regard to them being useless: that argument falls apart very quickly when challenged. Unless you actually believe that software agents won't cause a massive economic shift, and that a weaponized financial system is really a good thing that brings stability. As far as it being a "ponzi scheme", a pump and dump, a tulip mania, a beanie-baby fad, etc... Just look at the time scale for a big clue as to why such an argument is laughable.


> As far as it being a "ponzi scheme", a pump and dump, a tulip mania, a beanie-baby fad, etc... Just look at the time scale for a big clue as to why such an argument is laughable.

To look at why this counter argument is laughable you simply have to do a bit of research into actual ponzi schemes:

* Bernie Madoff ran a ponzi scheme for ~18-28 years

* Reed Slatkin, 15 years

* Dona Branca, 14 years

* Tenka Ikka no Kai, 14 years

It's difficult to actually classify crypto, but it certainly falls into greater fool theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory).


I know enough about the Madoff point to know that it can't be argued in good faith. Not unless you are willing to describe everyone who ever got looked into by the SEC, and then not prosecuted, as a scammer engaged in a scheme. Because that time scale requires the inclusion of investigations that found no fraud. Now if you are willing to expand your definition of fraud to include the whole of Wall St activity - then I definitely won't argue otherwise, sure - bitcoin is just like that except less concentrated and more transparent.

The larger point being that any plausible definition for fraud applied to crypto actually undermines the legitimacy of the modern financial system to a much greater degree.


None of those have any claims about short-term BTC value.

>https://99bitcoins.com/category/bitcoin-obituaries/2022/


lol, yeah - Newsweek's claims about the Internet in the 90s had nothing to do with the short-term value... they'll likely be proven right in a thousand years! Take that, peanut-gallery - it was a fad after all.



Yawn. A ton of those do not claim any predictions related to value, just state some facts and opinions about it. For example: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-is-just-a-crappy-tech-stock/


Google "crypto bubble".




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