Jorge Stolfi

> https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html

> https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html

(The following comment is a copy of what I've already said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951404 )

Points 3, 4, & 5 apply similarly to any investments made in commodities (gold, silver, copper). A direct source of revenue for those commodities themselves is not provided: There are no dividends being paid out just because I hold 1 kg of gold in a safe. Instead, the people that want to use that gold for other purposes is what provides revenue.

Point 1 & 2 can similarly be demanded from commodities as well. The only difference being is that the public market is where I can cash out my 1kg of gold to.

> By that definition, gold too is a ponzi. No, gold clearly fails to satisfy that definition on two counts.

> First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour.

There is no difference between the expectation of profits & stores of value: They're facets of the same diamond - Value. The pursuit of one is a masked notion of the other & vice versa - Expectations of profit are a consequence of wanting to retain & accumulate resources against the eroding forces of inflation & entropy in general, & a desire for stores of value is of similar expectation that the overall value grows faster than…

Hacker News (HN) is actively hostile to the idea of cryptocurrency. I doubt you'll get a measured opinion, one way or the other.

Stacker News (SN) is a place that is at least attempting to have these conversations, though they swing the other way and are actively pro-cryptocurrency, even if the main focus is on Bitcoin and Lightning [0].

---

Let me try to actually answer your question.

* Cryptocurrency is creating value

Cryptocurrency offers the possibility of digital money outside of government control. This allows for a variety of transactions that are difficult otherwise.

For countries that have locked out other currencies or whose banking system is crumbling, remittances through Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies offer the possibility of sending cash, even considering the high barrier to entry, the high friction etc. etc. (take it with a grain of salt, but here's an article [1]).

There was been at least one instance where a news organization drew the ire of a government, had their funds frozen and were able to function through the use of Bitcoin [2].

Sex workers now have an option to accept currency with less fear of backlash.

Substances criminalized by local governments are available for purchase with Bitcoin.

To all those that will respond "cryptocurrency is only good for illegal activity", my response is that's precisely why cryptocurrency is needed. For countries with a developed banking system, the need is not so pressing. For places where it's effectively…

This particular article is exceptionally weak and fails to address substantially all of the criticisms levied by Stolfi (which is what this is really in response to). [1]

It spends a lot of the time discussing the SEC's "warning signs" / red flags that something may be a Ponzi scheme which are symptoms and not causes. Just how a traditional Ponzi scheme may manifest within the context of traditional markets like 'issues with paperwork.' Nobody is going to claim that you need to have 'issues with paperwork' to be a Ponzi scheme.

Bitcoin is best thought of an a distributed or unbundled take on a Ponzi scheme where instead of having a single centralized authority run the whole show, various parties all collude directly or via incentive structure to achieve the same fundamental results.

> Investment Returns: Not Promised

They 100% are - by every single shillfluencer account on Twitter, on Reddit, on TikTok and yeah, even here from time to time. I've been NGMI'd here at least several hundred times.

> Open Source: The Opposite of Secrecy

Everyone agrees the chain is transparent. However, that's the kind of transparency that doesn't matter at all in this context.

What makes it a Ponzi scheme isn't that 1BTC=1BTC, it's that you have shady Inspector Gadget themed Bahamian shadow banks printing un-backed ersatz dollars and pushing the price up to create the illusion of gains. You have exchange "outages" as soon as the price starts dropping - but only when it starts dropping.…

I studied that manuscript a bit at university, and the questioner in the audience was definitely on the right track wrt the Bible being valuable as a source of training data. We trained on the pre-15th century translations of the Bible in a number of languages. Off the top of my head, there was Old Church Slavonic, Vulgate Latin, Bibilical Hebrew plus a number of other languages people had proposed over the years, but the statistics from Voynich Herbal A and Herbal B were never very similar to any of the languages. The closest fit we found was for Manchu, trained using a Manchu translation of the 'Dao de Jing' which made us hopeful for Basanik's Manchu Hypothesis or a modified Proto-Manchu hypothesis (http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/04-05-20-manchu-theo/) but as we dug deeper, the n-gram frequencies ended up being wildly off.

Over the years, I have been more and more doubtful that the Voynich Manuscript is natural language at all. Hopefully someone will come along and prove me wrong, but I have stopped hoping that any of these headlines is the answer for quite a while.

We just discussed this on the occasion of SBF being convicted as a fraudster: all crypto is a scam. Them being negative sum games makes them so. Whether the scam is a ponzi, a pyramid scheme or something novel is a matter of debate. That it's a scam is not in debate, that's a plain mathematical fact.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitcoin-isnt-the-future-of-money-its-either-a-ponzi-scheme-or-a-pyramid-scheme/

https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/

https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html

https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html