Nicholas Weaver being interviewed at Current Affairs:
So the stock market and the bond market are a positive-sum game. There are more winners than losers. Cryptocurrency starts with zero-sum. So it starts with a world where there can be no more winning than losing. We have systems like this. It’s called the horse track. It’s called the casino. Cryptocurrency investing is really provably gambling in an economic sense. And then there’s designs where those power bills have to get paid somewhere. So instead of zero-sum, it becomes deeply negative-sum.
Effectively, then, the economic analogies are gambling and a Ponzi scheme. Because the profits that are given to the early investors are literally taken from the later investors. This is why I call the space overall, a “self-assembled” Ponzi scheme. There’s been no intent to make a Ponzi scheme. But due to its nature, that is the only thing it can be.
If you’ve been watching the Crypto currency space for any amount of time, you’ve likely already discovered that the whole thing is a scam.
The full article is a great breakdown of just how broken and corrupt the crypto space is and why you, your family, and friends should stay away.
Here are a few more gems.
Because it’s a self-created pyramid scheme, you have to keep getting new suckers in. As soon as the number of suckers dries up, it collapses. And because it’s not zero-sum, but deeply negative-sum, there are actually a lot of mechanisms that can cause it to collapse suddenly to zero. We saw this just the other day with the Terra stablecoin and the Luna side token. This was basically another Ponzi scheme implemented in the larger space of Ponzi schemes.
…we had the bubble at 100, powered by fraud at Mt. Gox. And that imploded down to 10. We had a bubble a 1000 powered by fraud, it imploded and went back down to 100. We had a bubble at 10,000 powered by Tether, it blew up and went back down to 1,000. And now we’re at a bubble where Bitcoin blew up to 60,000, fueled by Tether and falling. But I don’t think there’ll be a fifth bubble. Because basically, they will have broken all the suckers left to break. There’s only so many more suckers that can be brought into that space. Once you burn out a sucker, they don’t come back. They’re a non-renewable resource.
Crypto currency, at its core, is just a Ponzi scheme. You’re either running it, or you’re the sucker. There is no other option.
Read the full interview here.
