LOL. Not at all...
Scratcher tickets aren't useful innovation. They don't make industry processes more efficient. They don't reduce costs or friction in archaic technologies. They don't enable new, useful applications that previously weren't possible. They are clearly -EV, since there is no real value being created and Uncle Sam takes a healthy slice.
Crypto-currencies are a useful innovation. As a crypto-currency, Bitcoin offers unique utility in the real-world that, at least today, is not matched by any alternative crypto-currency. It exhibits an incredibly strong network effect. It has the greatest hashing power (by far). It has the infrastructure and distributed ecosystem. It has international brand recognition, and a growing "trust" due to it's age and familiarity, and these things only strengthen with time.
Anything that is both useful and scarce will have value. A new technology that provides real utility in the world is not a Ponzi scheme. To ask why speculators have gotten wealthy, some quite quickly, is to strike the bedrock of what constitutes real value (in society) with the shovel of a stupid question. The value of the "thing" is not a function of the fact that there's an internal unit of account ("bitcoins") and that this unit of account is traded between peers. Else you'd have to apply this fallacious logic to any tradable instrument. Is Tesla a Ponzi scheme because some investors might want to "get rich quick"? What about gold?
>Scratcher tickets aren't useful innovation. They don't make industry processes more efficient.
What industrial processes are you talking about? Turning electricity into waste heat? That could be done more efficiently via legacy methods, like electric space heaters.
If you're thinking payment processing, 3 tps @ $8 per transaction (at current BTC rate of $580) is, like, the worst possible way to do commerce.
>They don't reduce costs or friction in archaic technologies.
Other than the ransomware, name one.
>It has the greatest hashing power (by far)
Hash power is useless, an overly complicated way of turning electricity into heat. If you build a machine that has the greatest rate of flushing money down the toilet? Trust me, they won't come.
>It exhibits an incredibly strong network effect.
So did crack.
>It has international brand recognition
Yeah, so do AIDS and cancer. Everyone has heard about bitcoin, the defacto currency of cybercriminals.
>Anything that is both useful and scarce will have value
Bitcoin blows it in both respects. It can't scale, and, for all but criminals, it ain't useful.
>A new technology that provides real utility in the world is not a Ponzi scheme.
Huh? Saying that it's not a ponzi often & emphatically enough doesn't make it so.
>To ask why speculators have gotten wealthy, some quite quickly, is to strike the bedrock of what constitutes real value (in society) with the shovel of a stupid question.
You drop a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days?
>Is Tesla a Ponzi scheme because some investors might want to "get rich quick"?
Tesla makes cars.
Bitcoin takes the marks' money and turns it into heat, tears, and failure.