“Get Rich Quick” with “the Bitcoin Ponzi scheme!”


The strawman that you dismiss is actually correct.  For example, in 2011, theymos, this forum’s administrator, was overtly advertising a Ponzi in his signature:


I have archives of the old fxnet thread.  It is quite a read.  I’ll keep this brief for now.  I don’t blame theymos too much, because he was literally a teenager—not revealing dox here; he chose to reveal his own age on his forum profile page, as seen in the above-linked archive.  Youthful foolishness, no doubt.  I also did some very foolish things when I was a teenager; I am lucky that they are not available in the Internet’s permanent memory.

But it is significant:  The adventuresome kids and the greedy retards in early Bitcoin were openly doing a Ponzi, which they openly called a “Bitcoin Ponzi scheme”.  Quote-unquote.

That same year, in that same cultural atmosphere, amidst numerous giant scams much worse than that kids’-game toy-money Ponzi, pirateat40 got started with the single most enormous scam that Bitcoinland has ever seen within its notional borders.


In Bitcoin, the adults in the room stepped up and built companies like Blockstream.  This is yet another reason for my respect for Blockstream.  If mature, serious-minded people had not been building legitimate, respectable businesses, then Bitcoin would have remained a garbage heap of Ponzis and HYIP scams.  The garbage heap that it was—worse than defi today!  Blockstream was founded by OG cypherpunks who also understand legitimate business—an important combination.  There were many others good ones, of course; but I think that Blockstream is symbolic of “how grown-ups do Bitcoin”.

According to your 2011 account registration date, cAPSLOCK, you should know all of this from your own memory.  Why do you try to cover up the past?  So that you can take a holier-than-thou attitude towards concepts that are now in their practical infancy, just as Bitcoin was still in its infancy in 2011?  To try to protect your own investments by hurling broad-brush insults at anything you may perceive as competition?  Why do that, instead of letting Bitcoin stand on its merits?

You should know better, personally.  By the time that JayJuanGee (sorry, Jay, you have said when you got in)—or for that matter, by the time that conceited, Coinbase-defending n00b Torque discovered Bitcoin, most of the worst Ponzis and other high-yield investment scams had either condignly imploded into bankruptcy, or been forcibly cleaned up, or been relegated to the criminal underworld where they properly belong.  Though they both suffered at least the immediate fallout of Gox stupidity to all Bitcoinland, regardless of whether any particular individual got Goxed.

Of course, by then, the price of BTC had risen by 10x–100x–1000x or more, depending on where you draw your points of comparison.  BTC was dirt cheap, when when it was toy money being treated like toy money and/or an instrument for open, overt, brazen scams.  If you invested then, you took the extremely high risk that that may never change.


Your snark shows your doublethink and selective memory about even such an infamous meltdown as pirateat40.  Never mind the obscure chicanery that I quoted above.  Bitcoin was still riddled with Ponzis and High Yield Investment scams in 2012.  Only a visionary with extreme risk tolerance would have taken any significant financial risk on it then.


I see some great concepts in defi.  Permissionless no-KYC exchanges!  Decentralized quasi-banking!  Decentralized, trustless derivatives—perps, options, maybe someday dated futures!  This list could be continued at length...  All with Tether as a less-painful proxy for when it’s lamentably necessary to deal with dollars!

In defi, I have access to an anonymous, permissionless, no-shotgun-risk exchange with much of the functionality of Binance—already most of the basic functionality, catching up and improving day by day.  (Not talking about Uniswap idiocy here.  The latest and greatest stuff.)  If, instead, you want me to kneel, ask permission, and submit KYC to a CEX, then I will tell you point-blank to fork off and go to hell with your hypocrisy.  I came to Bitcoin to Be My Own Bank, NOT to jump through hoops like a trained animal for an uninsured, more or less scammy quasi-bank that has the worst of all worlds.

Needless to say, defi needs a cleanup.  The “Yield Farming” nonsense and moonboy Ponzi shitcoins are trash—but not as trashy as pirateat40, as I noted in the above quote.


NFTs are a good technology being abused for >99% trash, instead of the use cases where they would make sense.^*  Not unlike early Bitcoin.  Notice the refrain?

^* For one illustrative example, merely to establish the threshold credibility of the idea:  I think that NFTs will someday revolutionize the recording of real property deeds and chains of title.  Real-world real property, not low-grade cartoons of bored apes.  Anyone who has real-life experience with homeownership or other real estate will see the benefit of taking the public records out of the current inefficient systems, and cryptographically authenticating them on a blockchain.

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By the way, cAPSLOCK:  When Richy_T civilly disagreed with me based on his outdated information about Blockstream Satellite, and I corrected him, he kinda-sorta acknowledged his mistake; and he continued with a constructive discussion.  Why do you dodge the factual correction of your very rude misinformation?


You also have not answered my point about a “dev tax”.  cAPSLOCK, you hate the idea of a “dev tax”; and you insult altcoins that have a “dev tax”.  So, over all these years that you have enjoyed Bitcoin, have you donated any nontrivial amounts to support Bitcoin Core development?  Developers need to be paid somehow.  I know that some big BTC HODLers are very good about this; they tend not to be the ones who sneer at little altcoins for having a “dev tax”, for they understand that developers need to be paid somehow.