• nexguy@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      … in that it wasn’t a scam from the beginning…

      Scammers just saw an opportunity later.

      • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Yes it was, lol. By design it can only function as a ponzi scheme, the itention might have been something else behind it but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a scam from the get go

        • nexguy@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Who are the scammers? There is no company behind bitcoin and the soure code is open for anyone to look at at any time and anyone can participate.

          Edit: A ponzi scheme is a specific thing that people like to throw at any perceived scam. Ponzi means there is money being put into btc with the promise of more money being able to be withdrawn only because more people join… which is certainly not the case for btc. There is no account where money is being deposited… only a record on a block chain. There is no guy at the end scooping up money.

          • Asuka@sh.itjust.works
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            11 months ago

            By being designed a deflationary currency, Bitcoin price was “doomed” to repeatedly spike with every halving. The “scammers”, then, are the people who got in early and hoarded Bitcoin.

            • nexguy@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              So then the people who buy paintings from deceased artists are also scammers? They thought the exact same thing…I want to but this intrinsically useless thing that I think will increase in value because only a finite number exist and I think more people will want it in the future.

              A scam is a deception of some sort. BTC is open source. No one is tricked into buying it any more than artwork.

              • Asuka@sh.itjust.works
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                10 months ago

                Paintings are beautiful. Products are useful. Bitcoin is… nothing. It’s speculation. Any time when it could have been used as a practical currency is long gone.

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          11 months ago

          It’s known that the original guy mined a whole bunch of coins to start with and has never cashed them in. He doesn’t seem to care about money much and just wanted to work on something interesting. Bitcoin is really a garage project that’s gotten out of hand.

          Now, everyone who picked it up after that on a Greater Fool theory, sure, absolutely.

        • nexguy@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          If only anyone could actually prove btc is a scam in any way I’d gladly agree… any evidence at all. No evidence against an open source project since its inception 14 years ago. Is the evidence that impossible to reveal?

            • nexguy@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              Immediately in the first few minutes he describes in detail how btc was not designed as a scam. Thank you for proving my point

              • AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
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                11 months ago

                He also says that in order for anyone to make money by trading actual dollars for bits on a blockchain and then back again, or by mining those bits by paying an absurdly large power bill (to say nothing of single purpose hardware that becomes useless within a few years) and then selling them to the next guy, one must somehow convince some other poor soul that those bits on that blockchain are now somehow worth more dollars than they were when one bought them to begin with. No cryptocurrency can exist without bagholders. Categorically.

                • nexguy@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  Agreed. It’s not inherently a scam nor a ponzi since this rely on lying about how much money you have to pay back everyone at once. Btc is similar to artwork. There is no intrinsic value to it unless everyone agrees it has. Work is done to complete both and both are unique. Both are finite. Only 21 million btc will ever exist and only x numbers of paintings by this dead person will ever exist. If enough people believe both are valuable then their values will rise.

            • nexguy@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              I’ll watch it. I hope it’s not 2 hours of opinion but actual dive into btc source code that shows something that I guess everyone(including banks and investment firms) has missed.

              edit: This matches exactly what I said that scammers have taken an opportunity but btc was not created as a scam as was stated…so IS this a waste of 2 hours where btc is not the target but just a bunch of other coins and nft?