Is Bitcoin a Pyramid or Ponzi scheme & what are the ramifications?

[pjviitas]

Since when do gold, silver jewels etc have any intrinsic value?

The only thing that has any intrinsic value to me is drinking water, shelter, food and bullets.

[1714161320]

1714161320

[AnonyMint]

Since when do gold, silver jewels etc have any intrinsic value?

The only thing that has any intrinsic value to me is drinking water, shelter, food and bullets.

That is the case when the world sinks into a Madmax dark age. But that is not the norm. Indeed only rice was money in Japan for 600 years, but God help us if we end up in that Madmax outcome.

[pjviitas]

Since when do gold, silver jewels etc have any intrinsic value?

The only thing that has any intrinsic value to me is drinking water, shelter, food and bullets.

That is the case when the world sinks into a Madmax dark age. But that is not the norm. Indeed only rice was money in Japan for 600 years, but God help us if we end up in that Madmax outcome.

Well put.

In the meantime however I don't see any need to put my resources into something that has no value to me personally.

[Zarathustra]

Since when do gold, silver jewels etc have any intrinsic value?

The only thing that has any intrinsic value to me is drinking water, shelter, food and bullets.

That is the case when the world sinks into a Madmax dark age. But that is not the norm.

The historic norm is a non-collectivist, self-sufficient life where the only thing that has any intrinsic value was drinking water, shelter, food and hunting tools. That's still the situation in territories, where the state is absent.

All other things later got their value by collectivism (labor division) beyond Dunbars Numbers. Your arguments are the arguments of a collectivist.

[AnonyMint]

Since when do gold, silver jewels etc have any intrinsic value?

The only thing that has any intrinsic value to me is drinking water, shelter, food and bullets.

That is the case when the world sinks into a Madmax dark age. But that is not the norm.

The historic norm is a non-collectivist, self-sufficient life where the only thing that has any intrinsic value was drinking water, shelter, food and hunting tools. That's still the situation in territories, where the state is absent.

All other things later got their value by collectivism (labor division) beyond Dunbars Numbers. Your arguments are the arguments of a collectivist.

The minimization of division-of-labor is economic retardation.

[AnonyMint]

  Maximum division-of-labor is the optimum, because each person can maximize the focus and effectiveness of their learning and skills. That is the antithesis of multi-talented.

[akipfer]

Is not, its money over web, hence BITCOIN, bit for bits, coin for money...
if u read how it works, u will know how good is it, and why is not pyramid or ponzi scheme, + there is tons of uses, the best of all is the easyest way to send money over web, and secure too!

[Zarathustra]

Since when do gold, silver jewels etc have any intrinsic value?

The only thing that has any intrinsic value to me is drinking water, shelter, food and bullets.

That is the case when the world sinks into a Madmax dark age. But that is not the norm.

The historic norm is a non-collectivist, self-sufficient life where the only thing that has any intrinsic value was drinking water, shelter, food and hunting tools. That's still the situation in territories, where the state is absent.

All other things later got their value by collectivism (labor division) beyond Dunbars Numbers. Your arguments are the arguments of a collectivist.

The minimization of division-of-labor is economic retardation.

The end of division-of-labor is the end of the economy, which is a collectivist event. The end of the economy (collectivism) is the beginning of self-sufficiency, et vice versa.

[Impaler]

The historic norm is a non-collectivist, self-sufficient life where the only thing that has any intrinsic value was drinking water, shelter, food and hunting tools. That's still the situation in territories, where the state is absent.

All other things later got their value by collectivism (labor division) beyond Dunbars Numbers. Your arguments are the arguments of a collectivist.

Your statement on historical norms is incontrovertibly FALSE, an archaic hunter-gathering society is explicitly collectivist.  The collective is VERY SMALL, literately a band of 20-30 individuals but the reciprocal sharing of all the resources is the norm, usually with a close-kin social obligations over the whole thing which significantly constrain the individuals behavior.  And we can know this by anthropological study of the few remaining indigenous groups still at this level.  They do not conform to a libertarian 'self-sufficient' 'rugged individualist' John Galt fantasy, rather then as wrapped in family and cultural obligations as any modern individual would find himself wrapped by law.  The existence of organized governments and written laws largely replace the amorphous constraints of custom of earlier times, they do not rob man of some kind of 'original innocence', in fact we allow everyone to challenge, change and often flout the laws far more then any ancient society would have allowed it's culture and customs to be challenged or broken.

Your appeal to some kind of 'original innocence' marks you as a right-libertarian to me a person who defines freedom exclusively as freedom from law.  A left-libertarian knows that mans original state is not one of freedom and they share with liberals the belief that a regression of society to more ancient forms would reduce freedom.

[AnonyMint]

The historic norm is a non-collectivist, self-sufficient life where the only thing that has any intrinsic value was drinking water, shelter, food and hunting tools. That's still the situation in territories, where the state is absent.

All other things later got their value by collectivism (labor division) beyond Dunbars Numbers. Your arguments are the arguments of a collectivist.

Your statement on historical norms is incontrovertibly FALSE, an archaic hunter-gathering society is explicitly collectivist.  The collective is VERY SMALL, literately a band of 20-30 individuals but the reciprocal sharing of all the resources is the norm, usually with a close-kin social obligations over the whole thing which significantly constrain the individuals behavior....

And the Dunbar limit meant that such tribes only functioned well in small sizes. Where everyone could watch the reputation of everyone. This is why humans still follow the herd and base their logic on reputation instead of analysis.

But as the collective grows large, then it is subject to takeover by vested interests which can hide behind propaganda, because of the former trait that humans rely on reputation not analysis.

The move to greater scale interaction and maximum division-of-labor is more efficient, so the trend can't be denied.

Society has only two choices to avoid the monetary gridlock where all wealth concentrates to the 3% via usury, which I have outlined in great detail in my November posts:

1. Government redistributes from the 3% to the 97%. The vested interests control it. Keynesian.

2. A decentralized, algorithmic debasement, that Bitcoin is not.

Outlawing debt and usury can't work.

[Impaler]

Outlawing debt and usury can't work.

I'd agree with this statement only because you have the word debt in it, as debt is fundamental to any reciprocity and division of labor which results in temporal displacement of an individuals production and consumption (like farming), individual must be able give and receive debt from the rest of society to make that work.

But Usury is separate from Debt, it is a parasitic layer placed on top of debt.  It is to Debt what co-dependency is to marriage.  I argue that Usury can be eliminated from Debt with Demurrage and this is the best strategy to adopt.

[AnonyMint]

Outlawing debt and usury can't work.

I'd agree with this statement only because you have the word debt in it, as debt is fundamental to any reciprocity and division of labor which results in temporal displacement of an individuals production and consumption (like farming), individual must be able give and receive debt from the rest of society to make that work.

But Usury is separate from Debt, it is a parasitic layer placed on top of debt.  It is to Debt what co-dependency is to marriage.  I argue that Usury can be eliminated from Debt with Demurrage and this is the best strategy to adopt.

There has to be an illusion of usury, else the 3% will buy feudal (middle ages) armies instead of loans (because they are selfish and ignorant/denial of the fact that capital can't grow exponentially forever). So we need to be clever about how we do it, so that only those who are large enough (the 0.01%) to control the nation-state (soon to be NWO) armies are thwarted, so we retain those 3% who want to buy bonds. Demurrage might be one way perhaps.

If we can remove the public-backstop from loans and remove insurance (that ends up as public-backstop), then they can loan at higher interest than the debasement/demurrage and still they will not grow exponentially forever, because they will pay for their failures in lending to those who can't repay.

Thus in my opinion, the key is removing the ability for the collective to tax and confiscate. That is the only way to end the public backstop and force the selfish hoarders to be subject to the free market.

This is why anonymity is the most important feature in my opinion. But this will only be realistic for the new virtual economy. Yet I expect that to be the main economy now or for sure by 2033 when a recent Oxford study predicts 45% of all current jobs will have been replaced by automation.

This is why I make a point about prosperity has always been facilitated by small government, not by lack of debasement.

Sort the following global data on Govt Spending and you can see why the future of the world is transferring from the developed countries to the emerging markets (although emerging markets will crash hard first in 2016 - 2020 period):

http://www.heritage.org/index/explore

[Impaler]

Mint:  Your rambling about government when my argument is about money.  But it's all moot because Usury dose not require a State

Gesell proved that Usury is the result of the liquidity value of the medium of exchange.  The medium of exchange is by definition the most liquid item in an economy, that liquidity has time-value and if the money is hard then the holder of money accrues an unearned value stream from the rest of society WITHOUT EVEN LENDING THE MONEY.  This is probably the part that confuses people so much, that the usury is really latent in the money before lending actually happens.

Because the drive for usury is in the basic nature of hard money, states and governments do not even need to exist for usury to occur as I've described.  Usury is simple the Nash-Equilibrium end state that will result from a Hard (non decaying) form of money.  Neither dose usury require any manipulation in the supply of money, that a different swindle I admit is a problem but one swindle at a time please.

Your still 6 layers too shallow in your thinking, I'm not denying a Incestuous cabal between elites, banks, manipulation of the masses and subversion of the state.  No rational person would deny these things, the only question is one of degree, but all the minutia of how that corruption is being manifested and the exact layering of all the various swindles don't interest me, I'm looking for the ROOT.

But if we ignore that (which is hard money) then we are doomed to repeat the whole sorry history.

[Random8]

The really, really ironic thing is AnonyMint accusing others of being irrational. Fruit Loop city.

-R8

[AnonyMint]

Impaler is one of the smarter guys on the board, so I read his posts carefully and with great interest.

Mint:  Your rambling about government when my argument is about money.  But it's all moot because Usury dose not require a State

Will rebut below.

Gesell proved that Usury is the result of the liquidity value of the medium of exchange.  The medium of exchange is by definition the most liquid item in an economy, that liquidity has time-value and if the money is hard then the holder of money accrues an unearned value stream from the rest of society WITHOUT EVEN LENDING THE MONEY.  This is probably the part that confuses people so much, that the usury is really latent in the money before lending actually happens.

Agreed.

Because the drive for usury is in the basic nature of hard money, states and governments do not even need to exist for usury to occur as I've described.

Disagree.

Society will not tolerate that form of usury for very long, as is evident by history. When that form of usury exists for a long time it is a Dark Age (we are still digging up hard money hoards from the middle ages).

So how does society confiscate and redistribute hard money? Government!

And of course this only works marginally (just enough to appease the masses), because the power vacuum of (democracy or any form) government is captured by the vested interests. See Mancur Olsen's The Logic of Collective Action (the linked writer is Eric S Raymond 150+IQ creator of "open source").

And if the usury is done through lending then refer to the points in my prior post. The hard money folks capture the collective (i.e. insurance and government) to backstop their loans.

Now we have the possibility to decentralize that redistribution so it isn't captured by vested interests. Unfortunately Bitcoin doesn't do that, because coin rewards diminish. And that design choice opens the door to attacks on Bitcoin that destroy it as I have detailed in the November archive of my posts.

Usury is simple the Nash-Equilibrium end state that will result from a Hard (non decaying) form of money.  Neither dose usury require any manipulation in the supply of money, that a different swindle I admit is a problem but one swindle at a time please.

Disagree. We must eliminate the power over money printing and taxation (of the new virtual economy, the brick&mortar economy can always be taxed) else the redistribution from usury (in either form) back to the masses, will always be socialism and gamed by vested interests.

Your still 6 layers too shallow in your thinking,

As far as I can see on this issue I am ahead of you, even I do respect your intellect. I hope you are not the type of person who is unable to question your own views. Please rebut what I have written sincerely or open your mind to it. I have confidence you will not play the silly games that others do on this board.

The really, really ironic thing is AnonyMint accusing others of being irrational. Fruit Loop city.

You will eat humble pie. Soon.

[pjviitas]

Have another Ritalin AnonyMint

[johnyj]

The key characteristics of anything that resembles a ponzi or pyramid scheme are:

1. No intrinsic value, it is all a willful delusion of the participants.

2. Viral adoption as deluded participants scurry to induce greater fools by word-of-mouth.

These 2 characters apply perfectly to fiat money, and the second one is more funny, since everyone is induced by their parents when they were still children

[Buffer Overflow]

I thought this thread would of finished now. Didn't the majority (excluding AnonyMint obviously) draw the conclusion Bitcoin isn't a ponzi/pyramid?

[AnonyMint]

Fiat ponzi fails horrifically often with megadeath, e.g. Wiemar (communist) Germany then Hitler, Zimbabwe, Argentina, etc. It is not a comparison you want to be associated with.

[AnonyMint]

A reply of yours, quoted below, was deleted by the starter of a self-moderated topic. There are no rules of self-moderation, so this deletion cannot be appealed. Do not continue posting in this topic if the topic-starter has requested that you leave.

You can create a new topic if you are unsatisfied with this one. If the topic-starter is scamming, post about it in Scam Accusations.

In my opinion it is a great testimony that we just crossed 100,000,000% value appreciation 

It is truly amazing. What historic assets or companies have risen that much? Are there others?

I would say, no. It is "easy" to have a 1000x value appreciation with startups, perhaps 10,000x is possible. 100,000x hardly.

A MILLION TIMES INCREASE IN 4 YEARS 10 MONTHS IS A NEVER BEFORE IN WRITTEN HISTORY EVENT.

You pick an arbitrary transaction between private parties to create some irrational hyperbole.

Heck if I note that Dori in a Thirld World country internet cafe gave me free internet access ($0.25 per hour normally) in exchange for my promise to share some of the ownership of Art-O-matic, then does that mean I count the gain after 3 years of the $1.2 million IPO valuation that I was offered in 2001 as a counter-example to your claim.

Have you priced the Tulip mania in comparison? Are you sure you really want to show the "investment" only matches manias and not real investments throughout history?

The gloating is what people who deserve to lose their talents do, because they aren't productive any more, because they've been made too rich to do any real work.

I guess you will delete this post too.