It was well stated, and I'm glad to see Vanguard explicitly stating the lack of inherent economic value as part of their reasoning. It's actually worse than that, since creating cryptocurrency requires investment of things of real inherent value (capital investment, energy, etc) but only provides a purely speculative asset as an output. Cryptocurrency is basically an economic sink.
Exactly. Capital investment is a positive sum game. E.g. you build a factory and over its lifetime it produces more than what was the cost to build it. That's the root of economic growth. Bitcoin is a negative sum game. All money that has even been invested into Bitcoin - total cost of mining = all money that investors will ever get back.
This identity (with the minus) would be true if the only things you could do with Bitcoins were create them (at some cost) and then later destroy them for some kind of reward.
Since they can be transferred, it's analogous to saying that the amount of value produced by Visa is equal to negative one times Visa's revenue.
You just wrote an excellent description of the Greater Fool Theory. [0,1]
The greater fool theory argues that prices go up because people are able to sell overpriced securities to a "greater fool," whether or not they are overvalued. That is, of course, until there are no greater fools left. [0]
Crypto technology had potential, but those involved never resolved the critical usability and security issues, and just went straight for killing the golden goose — get the money now and nevermind whether it ever becomes anything. Those now pushing for a "US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve" are attempting to cash out making the rest of the US taxpayers the last Greater Fools, and leave them holding the steaming bag...
Ponzi schemes usually involve promises to get back X times the money after N time. And in terms of actual cash. So whoever runs the Ponzi scheme needs to keep it growing exponentially in order to create exponential payouts. Eventually, it will grow so large that it collapses.
With Blockchains, they are more stable, as there is no such guarantee. Many people choose to HODL instead, and this gives the coin some stability. As long as there is less interest in cashing out than people trying to cash in, the value is growing. And as long as the value is growing, people cash out.
For a Ponzi scheme with guarantees in terms of currencies not minted by the scheme creator, they are bound to collapse sooner or later. Blockchains could go on forever in theory. However, latter still requires more people to cash in than people to cash out. If there is enough people trying to cash out, maybe larger number of people will panic and cash out as well, leading to an avalanche like race to zero.
Both are united by the requirement for a "greater fool", just with Ponzi schemes, this greater fool is exponentially growing while with Blockchains it can grow linearly.
Bitcoin could be more compared to a national currency like Argentinian pesos. The value can go to zero as it is no longer accepted (people do not want it), but there is no inherited promise in the first place it goes up forever.
All it matters that it will stay more stable than other assets. And we know from economic history that assets tied to nations may disappear overnight, e.g. Cyprus.
Trump wants to make the Fed, which is supported and defended by the biggest military on this planet, hoard bitcoin. It turns out you can buy politicians with money, and Bitcoin supporters have done just that.
Strictly speaking a Ponzi scheme involves a single person or entity doing that, consciously. Bitcoin is… an anarchist self-organising Ponzi scheme? :) It has many of the features of a Ponzi scheme, but largely by accident; there is no _intent_.
Depends on how many coins the creator owns and when he sells. The creater starts with a few bits in a chain that suddenly are worth billions. When he sells be gets a big chunk of that in Dollars and the value of the rest collapses to zero for everyone trying to sell later.
Yeah, granted, the creator of bitcoin _might_ be, effectively, operating a very complex Ponzi scheme, but it seems unlikely. Occam’s razor says that they were a sincere person or group with unconventional economic theories.
The creators of small memecoins often are doing this, deliberately, of course. Some of them are amazingly open about this, often marketing their memecoins as, essentially, “it’s still early” (ie you, the buyer, get to get in before the scheme collapses; like early Madoff customers, you can be one of the lucky ones!).
Eh, crypto is weirder and worse than a Ponzi scheme in a way that deserves its own moniker.
A Ponzi scheme typically involves a small inner circle perpetuating a fraud; even if "everyone knows" it's hinkey, it is ostensibly returning fabulous returns through actual investment/economic activity. Eventually, the insiders stop being able to keep the game going, and go bankrupt, get arrested, flee the country, or some other ignoble end.
Crypto has lost its layer of fraud; it used to be "this thing will be the future of money and therefore have value", but for the last five+ years it's all just been "this will be worth more in the future because people will buy it so you should buy it," a naked Ponzi.
Meanwhile, it is distributed, even if it is highly centralized at every point from mining pools to exchanges. There's no single person who has to go to jail or disappear with his money to collapse the whole system. It's happened dozens of times, and every time it does a new set of criminals steps up to keep the fraud going.
In summary, even if individual enterprises (eg, FTX) are classic Ponzi schemes, crypto as a whole deserves to be the name of its own type of scam.
Just thinking out loud, but the problem I see is that even if you define Bitcoin as a scam, it could very well have been created by Satoshi Nakamoto (or the group behind the name) in good faith. The real issue now lies with the responsibility of companies like BlackRock to clearly and transparently identify what they are selling to the public.
It is also different than a casino: "Even if crypto investing is considered gambling, there is a factor not present in traditional casino games: the time variable of holding. Holding roulette chips has no effect on their value, while in crypto markets, prices change in time. By holding crypto assets for a longer duration, investors can potentially benefit from market fluctuations and price appreciation, making it a unique aspect compared to classic gambling games." [1].
What you say is complete nonsense of the reactionary kind that pervades on this site against crypto, by which at all costs it has to be defined as a scam, against all normal, rational definitions of the word.
If for whatever reason, something my go up in price because there's demand for it despite widely available and mostly correct information about its utility or lack of it, that's not a scam. This is the case with bitcoin. It's growth has fueled interest in a bit of gambling by members of the public about possible future growth. There's no central party running it as something it isn't or perpetuating a core lie by hiding some key information about what bitcoin really is.
People insisting on buying something despite it having an unstable market value and debatable concrete utility doesn't make that thing fraudulent. A scam requires intent and misdirection, regardless of how you and others who share your view try to redefine the word scam arbitrarily. You might as well also call all forms of speculation a scam by the same ridículous logic.
Thought experiment: what would happen to the price of gold by 2125 AD if nobody born after the year 2025 believed it had value outside of its industrial applications?
See my below comment about 16 Psyche, a 140-miles asteroid made of gold floating out there in the sky. By 2125 AD we'll sure find a way to tow it to our shores.
16 psyche is not made of gold and this reply has nothing to do with my question, in fact, my point would still stand if confidence in gold as a scarce store of value disappeared without any change in supply and it went to ~0 (industrial value)
Or shares: they have a value as long as someone else is willing to buy them. Or just like any other type of transferrable representation of value, including precious metals.
Shares have a value beyond that, though; they are a share in an actual company, which has assets and generates revenue (hopefully; granted if you’re buying shares in some SPAC merger that might one day produce a flying car or something, that’s not a million miles away from bitcoin). There is a price floor. One might reasonably argue that nvidia is not worth $3.4 trillion (its current market cap), say, but it is clearly worth _something_, even valued purely on assets and yield. Bitcoin has no floor; you are entirely dependent on other people buying it from you for more than you bought it for, because they believe that someone will one day buy it from _them_ for more than _they_ bought it for.
As long as you have a real share, and are not holding an "entitlement" (e.g. a brokerage firm holding your shares in their street name. In that case, you have the right to the economic benefits of the stock, but not the underlying. To do that your name needs to be on the company's ledger. Anyone can request to directly register their shares and hold them directly with the company's transfer agent.
I mean, unless the broker is fraudulent there’s very little practical difference; most people will go with the broker, as it tends to be cheaper. For that matter, most people aren’t investing in individual shares, they’re investing in some sort of mutual fund, so there’s another party that you have to _somewhat_ trust there.
If Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme because of this, then literally every asset which has resale value is a ponzi scheme.
When people buy bonds, stocks, commodities, or purchase a car, a house, or even an Xbox, they are taking into account the resale value of that asset. If you supposed that when you're done with your house, it would be worth $0, you would be willing to pay a lot less for it. There's nothing fundamentally different here wrt Bitcoin.
A house produces value; you can either rent it out, or live in it (thus avoiding paying rent to someone else). Stocks produce value; the companies make money (and generally either pay dividends, buy back stock, which is just a tax dodge approach to paying dividends, or invest in growth, and will thus eventually be in a position to pay more dividends). Bonds produce value; they are literally loans which (hopefully) get paid back. All of this allows a value to be assigned to them; that value may be greater or less depending on market conditions, demand, future value of money, etc (for instance, if your house is in the middle of nowhere and, by the time you’re done with it, needs a new roof and windows and so on, then its market value may actually approach zero). Things like bitcoin are different in that they do not produce value. You can’t value bitcoin based on X years of expected dividends/quasi-dividends or anything; any value is purely speculative.
To be clear, there’s speculation involved in buying stocks, too, to an extent (particularly buying _individual_ stocks), but ultimately you have a share of some real thing. That is not the case with bitcoin.
Sure, there's some value there, you can use it to make gold-plated contacts or shiny things, but if that was the only use case, it wouldn't be nearly as valuable as it is now.
Gold is valuable because people think it is valuable, and the same hodls true for Bitcoin.
Gold is probably the closest conventional thing to bitcoin, yes, though it does have _some_ intrinsic value as an industrial material, which sets a floor. But yes, gold’s value is basically speculative, and you’re largely relying on a greater fool.
You also shouldn’t buy gold; over any long period it is almost guaranteed to massively underperform the markets. If you had bought gold at its 1980s peak, you would have been down in real terms ever since; adjusted for inflation it has never reached that value since, and may never do. While you can say that about some individual _companies_, of course, you would be hard pressed to find a major index for which that is the case.
> If you had bought gold at its 1980s peak, you would have been down in real terms ever since; adjusted for inflation it has never reached that value since, and may never do. While you can say that about some individual _companies_, of course, you would be hard pressed to find a major index for which that is the case.
The Nikkei 225 comes to mind. It only broke its 1989 peak last year.
You really don't want a financial crisis in banking. All those regulations that crypto folks want to get rid of keep things like what happened to Japan in 1990 from happening with more regularity. Even 2008 in the US was painful and very long recovery, and mortgages were a smallish part of the overall economy.
The claim that we are disagreeing with is that Bitcoin is meaningfully different from any other investment in a way that makes it a Ponzi Scheme. I'm not trying to persuade anyone that it's a good investment, just that it isn't a ponzi scheme any more than gold, oil, real estate etc is.
I don’t think bitcoin is a deliberate Ponzi scheme, but it does have Ponzi scheme-like elements, in particular the absolute dependence on a greater fool to take it off your hands, with value _purely_ being based on what other people imagine it to be worth (ie not backed by any intrinsic value). Gold, yeah, isn’t a million miles away from this, either (as I mentioned previously, historically it is a _bad_ investment) though it does have the benefit of a few millennia of cultural cachet, increasing the chances that there’ll be a greater fool along soon.
Oil and real estate are totally different, though investment in oil in particular _is_ rather speculative; you’re betting on future real demand, but that demand is at least, like, _real_; there are obligate buyers of oil, almost no matter how high the price goes. Real estate, as I previously mentioned, produces value in terms of either rent or not having to pay rent.
The difference is that Bitcoin only has resale value.
The other examples you mentioned generally have some significant additionally value beyond just resale value -- e.g. stocks pay dividends or are expected to at some point, a house is something you can live in or get an income from by renting it out, and so on.
Bitcoin's use is as a store-of-value. That's it's utility. It has the traits of an ideal store of value. Eventually we may use it as money, but that won't happened until it is much closer to it's ultimate value and the value as stabilised enough to use it as a unit of account.
What happens to a store-of-value asset like gold or cash if you can't convince the next generation to trade another store-of-value-asset, hard asset, or labor for it?
This is precisely why financially literate people hold on to the amount of cash necessary to buy and sell goods, keep some excess in an account that bears interest, and the bulk of the rest goes into productive assets.
Since we are hypothesizing, here is another hypothesis. Crypto, being non-government controlled, maybe be better than the hypothetic alternative: a government ledger, where the central planners decide which economic activity is "good" and which leads to de-banking, and where decisions are made by government-controlled AI. Then this p2p economic liberty is worth the investment.
Crypto is a commodity that is a fraud machine by nature of its trivial transferability. The lack of transfer controls makes it great for a variety of grifts, as demonstrated time and again.
Even without my cynical opinion, Vanguard doesn’t have a heavy commodity focus, and it’s hard to diversify crypto.
I genuinely believe this is a valuable use of cryptocurrencies.
That said, I would wager enormous sums of money that on net, they have been dramatically negative. Once you factor in the vast quantities of energy wasted (even using up energy that would have otherwise gone to waste simply decreases the demand for batteries or competitiveness of other marginal-value uses) and all the funding of crime such as theft, fraud, hitmen, blackmail, money laundering, scams, and so on it’s very hard to see “I was able to get LSD” as compelling.
As an example it's much easier and cheaper to send money from a bank account in US into a bank account in another country when you use bitcoin as the rails for this. All of this can be done fully legally, using companies like Strike, Revolut, Relai or similar.
If you ever tried doing international wire or even using Wise, you will definitely appreciate bitcoin.
You're missing the value the Bitcoin network provides in facilitating trade that's illegal or shady.
I don't want to make any moral statement here. I'm just saying that Bitcoin can be positive sum or negative sum. I don't know which is true and I don't know whether it's better or worse for humanity to have a global mechanism for unregulated money transfers. But that's what we have.
I really hate to be defending cryptocurrency, but doesn't this same argument apply to banks? They don't produce anything either, they just shift made up numbers around.
Banks produce economic services: they provide the structure and liquidity needed to convey value through the rest of the economy.
(A typical form of blockchain apologia is that blockchains also do this. This is true only if you ignore the social and regulatory structure that allows companies and individuals to treat banks as mostly interchangeable assets.)
Banks are service providers. They are the middlemen between entities that have money and entities that need money. They make the deal (a loan/mortgage) and then skim some off the top. There is real economic benefits derived from banks.
There are some real economic benefits to Bitcoin as well, but I don't believe they justify the valuation though that's neither here nor there.
> They make the deal (a loan/mortgage) and then skim some off the top.
Thanks to fractional reserve banking (i.e. institutionalized fraud), they also create new money along the way (i.e. debase the existing currency).
Thus, the amount they're skimming off is even more than one would originally think, since they're charging interest on something they didn't entirely have in the first place (second-order fraud).
That is quite the service being provided. How fortunate we all are!
As someone who makes things, they solve a really important chicken-and-egg problem for me.
i.e. Where does the money needed to make a thing come from before you make it so that you can sell it and make money from selling the thing?
I suppose technically I could risk my money, assuming I have some. But I'd much rather risk the bank's, and I understand that they will charge me for that.
Creating new money helped propel economies since a long time ago. It has downsides but almost universally countries have agreed that the positives are worth the downsides.
You can say that banks manage risk of lending and charge for that.
Imagine that instead everyone can take a loan from a government without any checks. Soon financial system would collapse as a lot of irresponsible or too optimistic people would take loans for various purposes and those loans wouldn't be paid back. You need an institution that manages it and take the hit of unpaid loans for the system to be stable.
A loan, say, _is something_. You loan money to a company, they use it to build a factory, which produces, in the long run, more economic value than the cost of building it (hopefully). They pay you back, with interest. It’s a somewhat abstract something, but it is still something-by-proxy. This is generally not the case for a cryptocurrency (it might be for a lender dealing _in_ cryptocurrency, though, well, historically those usually turn out to be scams of some sort).
As a very specific example, I can go to a bank with my W-2s and credit history and get a mortgage. That’s a complex and valuable decades-long relationship they’re facilitating.
It's not hard to imagine your tokenized income stream and tokenized assets, algorithmically qualifying you for a defi loan with out need for some guy at a physical desk in a physical building.
Hence it's also not hard to imagine the economic value you attribute to banks, as value eventually accruing to crypto.
Banks provide a service to the economy of connecting people with more money than needed right now (savings) to people with less money than needed right now (loans). They make money in between when this goes well. So I would contend the shifting of numbers around actually does provide a good to the economy
It's unpopular but, crypto as it exists looks a lot like sports betting with "prop bets" "Futures bets" and "lines." They basically. found a way to sell sports betting to STEM people.
I'm sure there are a new wave of stealth startups furiously working on schemes to turn real estate investing into something closer to casino gambling. I mean there's already speculation in that asset class but the slow rate of actual transactions makes it less like gambling than stocks / options / currency / commodities. (I'm not saying this will be a good thing, just that it seems like the next logical step in enabling gambling on everything.)
I mean, see the last financial crisis. A lot of that was more or less precisely this; activities relating to real estate lending were made more profitable, but riskier (in a way which was poorly understood at the time, though obvious in hindsight).
As a result of that financial crisis, real estate is somewhat heavily regulated in most countries, and exotic financial instruments based on real estate (which you’d need to make this work) are treated with suspicion. Probably not the most fertile ground for the aspiring scammer.
That was something a little different. Degenerate gamblers don't want to wait months or years to see if their bets hit. If someone is going to turn real estate into outright gambling then they'll have to find a way to accelerate the cycle time.
If a few stories I read were true. The part of the thing was absolutely certainly going to blow up sooner than later. Certain loans were economically impossible.
If you think crypto is only with STEM you're woefully out of touch. I'd wager the adoption and continued interest in crypto is actually lower among STEM than many other professional circles.
Gold is an economic sink, too. It is primarily used to preserve capital, even though it has unique atomic properties. Mining gold also takes real inherent value.
Gold as a store of capital isn’t accessible to a lot of people, though, because it is easy to steal and thus hard to store. So instead, I can buy a gold ETF.
It does make sense that Vanguard doesn’t have a Bitcoin ETF, though: they don’t have a gold ETF either, for the same reason
Right, so gold has a financial use and a material use.
So, if I were to print bitcoin keys on firewood and sell that, would it become a “good investment” in your mind?
That’s basically what gold is. A commodity with some limited material value, whose price has become completely detached from that value due to its use as a financial instrument.
Every civilization reaches a point where they invent cryptocurrencies, burn through all their resources mining imaginary coins, and that's why the universe is so quiet.
Proof of stake doesn't require that kind of investment. Ethereum for example has a large decentralized set of validators like Bitcoin, but runs on regular computers with the energy usage of a few hundred average American households. It's similar to any other internet protocol.
Economic value is whatever people are willing to pay for, and I do mean "pay for," not "invest in." If you want to use applications on the Ethereum network, you have to pay ETH to do it and the ETH gets burned. As long as people keep doing that, the economic value is demonstrably there. Whether that equates to any other kind of value at this point, I won't try to argue, but for significant periods after proof-of-stake rolled out, ETH has had a P/E comparable to some high-growth stocks. This does not apply to Bitcoin, which doesn't have the burn mechanism or much in the way of applications.
ETH and BTC are the two cryptocurrencies with ETFs available. It's unfortunate that even now, so many investment professionals don't understand their differences.
What I don’t like about eth is when you think extremes and I mean 10000x supply growth of eth or 99.9999% burn all of these are possible scenarios which is not a good idea. Remember how eth forked to save someone’s crypto? Basically defeating the whole idea of crypto currency.
Bitcoin on the other hand - hardcoded, meaning supply can’t change.
ETH's supply growth without the burn maxes out at about 2% annually, in the case of almost the entire supply being staked. That's still less than major fiat currencies. Its current growth rate is less than Bitcoin's.
For the burn to be so extreme, the demand for transaction space would have to be much greater than the space available. Since they're also making large improvements to scaling, with the roadmap going to millions of transactions per second and the hardest parts already done, that also seems unlikely.
As for the infamous fork, that happened in Ethereum's first year and it didn't change the ETH supply. Nothing like it has happened in the nine years since. Bitcoin forked when it was eighteen months old, and that actually did change the Bitcoin supply.
>but only provides a purely speculative asset as an output
i would expect this kind of technical ignorance from the news or my mom but not "hackernews". there is real value in exchanging value/currency P2P globally relatively quickly and cheap. you know "internet money" people dreamed about decades ago...
Next to nobody is actually using it as a means of exchange because it is poorly suited for that purpose in practice. The only type of commerce for which it’s viable in practice are typically crime or crime-adjacent. There is of course a small market of users for “legitimate” and ethically reasonable purposes, but they are by far in the minority.
The overwhelming majority of users are holding it as an asset. Which it’s also poorly suited for in the long run: it generates nothing in and of itself and requires constant feeding of money and energy to keep it going. The only way to see a return is to trade it to a greater fool.
> Next to nobody is actually using it as a means of exchange because it is poorly suited for that purpose in practice. The only type of commerce for which it’s viable in practice are typically crime or crime-adjacent.
Yes. The size of the money-laundering, exchange control evasion, and tax evasion industry was way underestimated.
What surprised me is that after China banned cryptocurrencies in 2021 [1], the price didn't drop.
Outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum, almost everything in crypto eventually tanks.
The entire NFT market has tanked. Even the big names, such as BAYC, are down. BAYC is down 80% since launch. In memecoin land, "eventually" can be measured in days. Check out TRUMP.
Even Ethereum peaked back in 2021. Bitcoin has had 75% drops. If you bought and held anything other than BTC, you're probably under water now.
Then there are the constant collapses and "rug pulls".[2] US$76 billion total so far.
You and everybody else in the replies talk about BTC specificly while I and OP are about cryptocurrency in general. BTC does indeed suck as a currency.
For Vanguard's customer base, this is quite true though. They have access to easy avenues for exchange in the form of USD and other assets.
There is some value for those without access to stable currencies in their home country, but that use case is absolutely dwarfed by the other use cases out there at the moment. Perhaps this will change if the US goes through an economic collapse due to bad tariffs or something.
And yet that's not what we have. Bitcoin, the most popular cryptcoin in the world, is far from quick and cheap to exchange...especially during times of volatility. That dream of "internet money" is just a fantasy to lure potential bag holders.
> Bitcoin, the most popular cryptcoin in the world, is far from quick and cheap to exchange
Compared to what?
Let’s say your goal is to get some wealth out of Tibet into India.
Is it “quick and easy” to do that with dollars? Or Yuan? How about gold bricks? Maybe goats?
I’m not sure what the Chinese authorities at the border would have to say about those things.
With Bitcoin you can memorize a phrase like “witch collapse practice feed shame open despair creek road again ice least” and with that information in your brain you can move any amount of money anywhere your brain can go.
That is one _utility_ of Bitcoin. Just like one _utility_ of a dollar bill is I can put it in a Coke machine.
A crime can be just about anything that the current government doesn't like, for any reason.
The first thing that many governments will do when a protest of any kind starts becoming too effective is to make it a crime to participate or support the protest. I think we should all keep this scenario in mind when discussing what the future of our financial system should look like.
It's foolish to gloss over the word "crime" like it only describes human trafficking and international drug trade, especially with everything going on in the US. What was "going to the doctor" yesterday could be "committing a crime" tomorrow.
Insofar as cryptocurrency is valuable for this at all, it’s really more stablecoins than bitcoin. And even then the concept predates crypto; notably, there’s the Eurodollar (not to be confused with euros or dollars) which is a stablecoin-like thing which has many of the same applications (though a more limited scope).
Hacker News ceased to be a news site for hackers and founders years ago and is now a generic discussion forum with all sorts of people with all skill levels and from all political spectrums. Hating cryptocurrency is especially popular here.
