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Comment by nullbyte | Hacker News Reader

Yes! In fact, Coinbase has a feature that lets you do just that.

This more and more looks like a Ponzi-like scheme that's simply decentralized and global, and where different investors are incrementally supporting each other and the current price just by slowly buying - and no one liquidating too quickly.

Imagine an actual Ponzi scheme, where if the stock broker was able to find and manage/facilitate millions of people around the world to slowly buy and sell ... the stock broker in this case is the Bitcoin blockchain itself.

No opinion on bitcoin per se, but how is this different from putting more and more money into a 401k automatically?

Because the value of a 401k doesn't go up based on demand/how many people are investing into it.

How does the value of, say Vanguard's Target-2055 go up/down?

How about you tell me how and why and let me know if you think the same is true for Bitcoin et al, how you'd compare them?

So you don't know. Cool.

Quite the assumption. In reality I didn't want to invest more time in the thinking at that moment, and thought allowing you to contribute to the conversation vs. just asking questions would have been nice. So the ball's in your court if you want to continue the conversation. I like your questions.

A Ponzi scheme is based on a lie that there is an underlying asset delivering some yield, when in fact it is other investor money. So you can never sell the asset to derive the capital gain. Bitcoin on the other hand has an underlying asset (rights to the blockchain) and has no yield as a dividend. In many ways it is closer to a bank in that you hope everybody doesn't want to withdraw all at once. The main difference is that the money is backed by equity rather than debt.

Money in the bank doesn't increase in value because more people demand it. Bitcoin et al are much closer to a global and decentralized Ponzi scheme than a currency system. I do understand what you're saying, however the biggest difference that makes it a completely different beast is how wealth is redistributed unreasonably weighted towards the earlier adopters. I would likely be all for blockchain crypto-assets working as a currency so long as they were fixed price.

Land wealth was also weighted to early adopters.... Gold wealth was weighted towards early adopters...

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