Is it a Ponzi? A framework for evaluating crypto projects
every.to
every.to
Absolutely not. Gold has a variety of functional uses in electronics. It's used for its physical properties in a lot of spacecraft. And until dentistry had modern options gold fillings were common (not even that long ago- my own mother has a couple gold fillings).
He also skips over why it's called a Tulip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
We don’t just use gold for jewellery because it’s valuable, we also use it for that because it looks good. Better than many other materials we could use.
Now you could argue that we only think it looks good because it’s valuable, and maybe that is how it came about, but I think it’s been embedded into the culture deeply enough that gold as a material looks great to us on it’s own merit at this point.
Aesthetic value is real value, as we can tell due to peoples willingness to pay for artistic objects even if made from cheap materials.
The value of gold being embedded in society is similar to the value a dollar bill derives from being embedded in society. It's valued because it's valuable, which really means it's a reflection of values coming from other sources, and not something on its own.
I am allergic to most metals, and only highest purity surgical stainless steel, surgical titanum, and noble metals can come in constant contact with my skin without generating rashes. I can only wear piercings made of surgical titanum, gold and platinum.
Gold is extremely ductile, malleable, and is very easy to amalgamate, alloy, and mix with other metals.
This and other minor properties, plus the aesthetic factor, is what makes it the best material for jewelry; it's extremely easy to work with, it's safe to use, it won't react under normal circumstances, degrade or get ruined by time.
I don't know any alloy that has similar properties that isn't either super expensive, has a different color, or io hard to worx with.
Furthermore, it's non-industrial value doesn't derive from its industrial use: if industry could switch to something else overnight (like fillings did), gold would still be a value store.
People without access to banks wear their wealth on them. That seems super risky but you see it every day on the street. I suppose they have no alternative.
I have seen in photos that when my parents married my mother was draped in gold, which she never wore again. As a kid I once was with her when she visited her safety deposit box and I picked up one of the bangles which immediately bent out of circularity. It wasn't designed to be worn, or at least to be worn once, very carefully.
Jewelry stores in the US don't seem to sell by weight. I remember jewelry stores always pulling out the scale and calculator to tell you the price -- it must have changed every day.
Gold as an asset reminds me of those NASDAQ-listed companies that assert they will never declare a dividend. Any intrinsic value their stock might have is simply the belief that someday, somebody else will buy it.
Consider: Any value my money has is simply the belief that someday, someone else will accept it in exchange for something else.
Yes of course but cash is quite liquid while a share is not. In other words, that dollar will be accepted by the butcher, baker, or cabinet maker while demand for that share of coinbase fluctuates wildly.
An item can last longer than a lifetime, be passed down generations, melted and reformed into something new whilst being the "same" material. These are astonishing properties. Tulips and currency both rot, but at different rates.
The value of it is relative. In happy times, sure, not worth so much. Bartering to get yourself out of trouble...a Rolex tells the time and opens cell doors.
Gold is most certainly not a Tulip.
The industrial uses made up 81.7 of the 474 tons in Q1 2022 (or 17.2%). That is not a lot.
https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/gold-demand-trends/gol...
81 tons out of 205,238 tonnes used per year...
rounding error.
financial utility IS utility.
nothing is detached from anything.
gold inlays/crowns are still BY FAR the best dental material. People just don't like the looks of it, but it's still medically the absolute best.
Gold crowns typically outlive the owners.
I'm convinced the great filter has something to do with the availability of gold to a species. There are all manner of gold based alloys that we haven't researched and There are all sorts of technological innovations locked away from us simply because gold is too expensive.
case in point, a boat hull coated in a gold alloy could be non reactive. no more need for antifouling paint or sacrificial anodes.
For a boat the gold coating would need to include all metal parts in contact with the water (rudder pins, prop shaft, etc) and it would be an interesting experiment to learn whether it really prevents fouling (I can imagine that wear and damage to the coating might provide cervices for growth to anchor)
I got it intentionally when I needed a crown on a back molar, to remind myself of where I came from: my grandparent's generation had to sell their gold fillings for safe passage from harm.
That's where but for the grace of an uncaring universe go I.
Gold is malleable, and non-degrading.
It can be readily converted between blocks for storage, and other forms required for function purposes.
It does not degrade - it will not react with water or air (or the water there-in); it is an effective indefinite store (until, that is, it gets stolen).
Are these people enjoying the game? Doubtful. They found a way to make a living. Is this a "productive" way to earn a living? Also doubtful. But is it any different from professional poker players (other than poker is probably a better game than Axie Infinity)?
I know it rubs me the wrong way. I don't know what to call it though -- tulip, scam, ponzi, or just a wasteful use of human time that could be better spent in more pleasurable activities, if money wasn't an issue.
In Play 2 Earn my understanding is that it's not gambling, instead money "magically" appears from merely playing the game.
The only way for this to be sustainable is if the output from playing the game is something that someone else finds valuable and can't be automated (otherwise why not automate it?) like Mechanical Turk or the various captcha-solving services.
I don't believe this is the case, so the only other answer is that the buy-ins from newer players are used to reward existing ones - aka a Ponzi. Alternatively, it could be that the system isn't even a Ponzi and is instead bankrolled by the parent company which itself is bankrolled by clueless investors not realizing the above (Play 2 Earn will only work if the entire system produces an output that someone else values enough to pay for and can't get said output elsewhere for cheaper).
There is common wisdom that the rake can kill a local poker ecosystem. There can be a lot if good games for weeks or months, then all the weak players can’t sustain any longer, and all the medium players start losing and lose interest, and there’s no one left to win money from and games get harder to form.
You need to ask where the money to pay those players comes from, and the answer is a mix of speculators and new players buying in to the game. So it's just another tulip/ponzi mix.
You will notice the certificate transparency website makes zero mentions of blockchain anywhere: https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/
What a blockchain normally means is something that has added some sort of attempt at solving the two generals problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem), as the original bitcoin whitepaper outlined.
That is to say, blockchains have a consensus mechanism to resolve multiple writers, with some of those being potentially untrusted.
If Certificate Transparency is a blockchain, than so are the zfs filesystem (which also uses a merkle tree internally), git, and dynamodb.
I hadn't seen any of these blockchain projects that try to provide a similar audit log for issued certificates that you reference... mind naming them? Particularly any that can actually be used?
Even so, finding examples of scams or fraud or risky investments that aren’t crypto doesn’t validate crypto. People are capable of all kinds of scams and frauds. Crypto is just a near-perfect vehicle for scammers.
[Is it a crypto thingy?] -----> Yes ----> Definitely a Ponzi or other scam.
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|----> No ----> Perhaps a Ponzi, perhaps not.yes -> it's a Ponzi scheme.
no -> it's not a crypto project.
Even if you use a different word, the category doesn't work. The fact is, bitcoin and ethereum are each sui generis.
Bitcoin, for example, differs from gold in *important* ways. There are various theories people have for why it might be able to hold value in the long run, and none of them are reducible to something that has existed before. It's a new experiment. People can argue that bitcoin won't hold value, but not by a 1:1 reduction to something that has existed before. On that note, the author is very right to point out that bitcoin is not, technically, a Ponzi scheme, and that point is much appreciated.
But in some ways, until autonomous vehicles can go everywhere, they need a blend of autonomous cars and human-driven cars to be the first stop app for rides. Then they can route an autonomous car or human driven car depending on the ride needed.
Otherwise riders will hit a wall if they request a ride outside the autonomous service zone.
Cities where they've allowed their infrastructure to stagnate due to reliance on those private companies are going to be in for a rough time when they inevitably fail or drastically raise their pricing.
What comes next when private enterprises extinguish municipal services with unsustainable business practices? Can the municipalities recover? or are we watching hostile privatization?
https://finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/ubers-nyse-uber-profi...
Although it is telling that the best cryptos are compared with failing and unprofitable companies
If every single gold miner would stop doing work, gold would still have "value". If every bitcoin miner stopped doing work, bitcoin would have zero value (as impossible to use as need miners to create new blocks on the chain).
That is why I dislike any comparison to gold and why crypto feels like a ponzi to me, even if its not technically a ponzi. To me a ponzi is a scheme that requires a continuous inflow of new money to prop up the old invested money. Crypto seems that way, we have to constantly spend money on it (via mining) to prop it up. If we stopped spending that money, it would by definition collapse to zero.
Just because there are incentives to keep on spending the money, doesn't take away from the fact that it requires it as well.
Sometimes even cans of beans do the trick.
A tulip might not make it to next year per se. I meant a "tulip" as in a value token with little value other than scarcity and speculation.
The USD's purchasing power is bound to go down; there was an 8% increase in M2 supply in the past year, and velocity is constant.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V
As such, if a token has relatively constant supply and demand, its price should go up with the money supply.
The problem is, I agree, that the demand is far from constant. But if you hold them so that their price is not correlated among each other, it might get smoother.
Ray Dalio uses gold and a commodities index in his All-Weather portfolio, in case of inflation.
http://www.lazyportfolioetf.com/allocation/ray-dalio-all-wea...
Layer 2 solutions/protocols are built on top of layer 1 protocols like Ethereum and Cardano.
When you can summarize the same result for 99.99% of the cases with a tweet: https://xkcd.com/1723/
Also the shade thrown at Cardano is ridiculous. They write "Their focus on convincing YouTube influencers to promote Cardano.." But the truth is the opposite. Cardano relies on thousands of validators to secure the network, who in turn are incentivized to market themselves. So it's not that YouTube influencers were convinced to do anything- it's highly technical people that were convinced to market the network. Big difference, and actually quite smart.
Yes, you're just not clever enough to understand all of the jargon I just invented and refuse to explain, audit every line of code, audit the organization that actually controls the project, spend a month brainstorming all of the possible failure modes and get a PhD in multiple disciplines to discover if any of my claims are deceptive.
No one reads them though, I've been surprised by the things I've found in some.
Blockchain analytics are also big business.
My point stands- it's hard to hide things on an open source, decentralized blockchain.
And yet, why do ransomware attackers only accept crypto?
The """transparency""" is just marketing. It is very easy to hide stuff with crypto