source: I am selling art prints via stablecoins as a payment option for interested customers, but I’m manually handling the transactions, invoicing, and accounting (Stripe crypto could be an option for a small business like me).
Did you mean greater fool theory? That's not a financial scheme that's listed under Stripe's ToS (our context).
Are you arguing in good faith that Stripe should update the Prohibited Businesses section of their ToS based on what you said?
In your own words, can you explain the difference between, say, a Ponzi and a pyramid scheme? Pyramid and a matrix? Or do you use "pyramid scheme" to just mean "scheme?"
Pump-and-dump schemes fall under the "get-rich-quick" language, but I don't see what this has to do with the details of this specific announcement.
Come on, many crypto projects don’t seem like this in any sense?
The key characteristic of a pyramid scheme is that each person gets paid by the people they recruit.
If there is a global FIFO, that's a Ponzi scheme.
A pump and dump is something else entirely. It doesn't depend on an infinite series of investors, just one wave.
The reason why every greater fools scheme fails is that there is no net revenue (or too small to sustain the scheme). No matter the scheme, you will always run out of greater fools, and so it must collapse eventually.
> No matter the scheme, you will always run out of greater fools, and so it must collapse eventually.
That depends on how you define "collapse". After a pump and dump, a stock might crash to zero, or settle back to where it was, or even settle back to a higher number than it was originally at. It doesn't require a particularly large supply of fools, and it only requires them for a small amount of time. And it doesn't have to move the stock price by a huge percentage either.
Please send them an email elucidating the finer points of what scheme is what.
I'm also aware that not all communications use exact definitions at all times! Your smugness is not called for.
If you just want to link some government pages in the google results for 'pyramid scheme', here's one following the precise definition: https://www.fbi.gov/scams-and-safety/common-scams-and-crimes...
And saying they need to remove that part of the ToS to honestly accept any crypto business is silly.
You could make an argument against allowing entirely new coins, I guess, but that's more about the other ToS terms than 'pyramid scheme'.
BitConnect was an actual Ponzi scheme. I don't see how buying my coffee with DOGE counts as a "predatory investment opportunity."
All scams.
If two people want to send some bits between each other, and they both know what they're doing, it's not a scam. It may be risky, it may be unwise, it may be speculation... but scams involve deception between the receiver and the sender. And crypto is equivalent to dollars in this sense.
It is a scam in the traditional sense of failing to deliver expected value, since we want crypto to carry value and thus people still expect to be able to use crypto to buy things. The rub is that prices of things are still typically tied to fiat currencies, even if expressed as crypto prices. E.g., buying eggs with crypto depends on the price of the eggs, which is almost always controlled by the global economic order which is essentially governed by the (petro-)dollar, because of the economies of scale that have grown around egg production and distribution.
The only reason any plausible deniability still exists about this basic feature of the crypto space is that crypto does not concern itself with participation in economies of scale, and the prices set in crypto-space are essentially just in crypto-space (even if all the reporting equates buys of NFTs, etc. to equivalent fiat amounts).
One could say this is the ideal, but when the source of that value-as-expressed-in-crypto is value-as-expressed-in-dollars, you are siphoning realizable value from naive folks in a way that is functionally indistinguishable from a scam.
> All scams.
"All" meaning those 2?