RE: I'm tired of the "Ponzi" meme
Fiat uses plenty of power on it's own. All the ATM's and banks. Much of our money is actually just numbers in a bank and it's been that way for a while. Fiat needs banks and ATM's and card machines everywhere. What does crypto need? A wallet and some computers to verify the transactions. Those computers can be placed anywhere, including next to power plants and in ice caves.
As for the ponzi aspect...there are a lot of things that have similarity to ponzis, in that the new money pays the old. Affiliate programs sprang to mind. Of course, some are more ponzi than others. With affiliate programs, the older members invite newer members, giving a percentage of what they spend to those that invited them. Technically there are a limit to the number of members that you can invite. Eventually, you'll run out of people. Of course, that rarely happens. Nothing gets 100% adoption. In reality, you can invite people, some of which won't even try to bring in others, make plenty of money, and they'll use whatever the service is and likely be happy with it.
There are also stocks. The new money raises the price and eventually, the old money sells their stocks, earning a ton for being one of the first.
You seem insistent that the early adopters deserve this reward. In some cases they do. The early miners certainly deserved what they got, because they allowed Bitcoin to become what it is today. Of course, Steem proves that just because you were here early and have gotten a lot of SP doesn't necessarily mean that you deserve to be in a position of high SP. The reward for early adoption is often greater than it necessarily should be, but it rewards people for being there when others weren't.
Whatever the case, crypto does serve a purpose. You ever tried using Paypal? They charge you a substantial fee, don't care about your privacy, have shitty customer service, and occasionally seize people's money with little or no evidence.
Yeah. If wealth redistribution to early investors makes something a Ponzi, virtually every public company is a Ponzi.
Well, being one of them I suppose I am biased. But you're an early adopter too... :)
I don't really like getting into these subjective concepts of "deserve" and what is "fair." The fact is, if you were in the right place at the right time with Bitcoin, it wasn't enough. You had to also take a fair amount of personal financial and other risks. The legality of such things was not clear at the time, and back then the ratio of illegal activity was much higher (BTC would not be where it is today without the Silk Road giving it value as a means of exchange). It was always possible for early adopters to be prosecuted... and people have been prosecuted for selling bitcoins without a money services licence.
Thanks! I received some alpaca socks, two large pizzas, a few hundred dollars
' worth of crack cocaine, and an eternity of retrospective dread. Your support is encouraging. ^_^Some of them are...because they don't actually have any value and have just been growing in value because hey, they've been existing and getting people to buy shit for a while now. Then one day they just tank and you realize that they weren't worth anything. But some other ones are actually worth something. But you can't know if the value of a stock doesn't necessarily show if something is just a worthless product that's appreciating in value just based on lies.
I think crypto does offer an option to have custom coins that can replace stocks with something more unique. You can create debt instruments with them or an alternative to stock that has an actual value in addition to what the crazies on some floor somewhere say something's worth.
Stocks and other things these days aren't literally ponzis...but sometimes I kinda feel like they aren't quite as far off from them as we'd like to think.
Tell me about it. I was paying attention the whole time. I wanted to buy Bitcoin...but unfortunately, I listened to the idiots with FUD saying that it was too risky. There were some that got prosecuted, the the risk to reward was probably a lot better than many of us feared. If only I had decided "WTH, I''m gonna buy some Bitcoin! The first time I heard about it." Of course, I also was wanting to do crypto forex trading back a number of years ago and now that's exactly what I'm doing!