Quote from: bitcola on June 20, 2011, 11:24:46 AM

Quote from: relative on June 20, 2011, 11:13:20 AM

Quote from: bitanarchy on June 06, 2011, 07:00:45 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgYamdGLuA4

Quite sad that he is also going for the Ponzi scheme thing... actually it is an insult to all the early adopters, who are entrepreneurs!

I didnt watch the video, but bitcoin has party of a ponzi scheme, namely the graph of money creation.

why the rate of money creation would be the biggest at the beginning, when it was obvious there would be no demand, is beyond me. money creation should have started slowly, then picked up when wider adoption was expected for a couple of years and then decline.
when other monetary systems were started they didnt distribute 10 mil each to 100 people.
the money supply was increased when the currency got more widely used (for example: more countries were added to the eurozone).

now I understand you can't manage this in the same way with bitcoin because there is no central authority, but the graph should have been shaped differently.

The Euro works because the legacy currencies were tradable for it.

There is hardly any real wealth transferred into bitcoins, mainly because you can just create bitcoins with mining.

Bitcoins is like a new country inventing their own currency but without giving up their old one. They decide to trade this currency among themselves and then they try to sell it to others (for USD, for example). Wow, they can't believe it - people will actually pay them for their "invented out of thin air" currency, they're all going to be rich.

This picture is not sustainable. Eventually, people refuse to pay anything for bitcoins.

It has all the hallmarks of a ponzi because the only people who believe in swapping real wealth for bitcoins are those who have convinced themselves that they will get a long term return. They can get a short term return if they are quickly in and quickly out but in the long term they will lose all their money.

Out of thin air? No, out of (currently) 10.574 Thash/s. You think that kind of computing power is made of faery dust and unicorn-horn? Think again.

Real wealth is not bitcoin, or dollars, or euros, or even gold. All that stuff is just information, written with atoms, bits or ledgers at central banks. Real wealth is the work people will exchange using these different media. They are all claims on wealth, you can't eat gold. Money is information.