not in the case when things are just digital fun tokens that geeks traded among themselves. It would have never gotten this high without fake money.
If it was fake money as you describe, don't you think this so-called ponzi would have blown up several times by now? I mean, it's been 9 friggin' years. How many more years does it need to keep continuing before you drop the whole argument? Come on man!
it’s just like tulips! Except it crashed over 75% 5 times, came back every time, has had triple digit annualized returns for over a decade with a sharpe of over 1. so actually nothing like the tulips at all lol.
Bitcoin 15 short years: An asset worth over 800 billion USD (from an anonymous fucking white paper) Legal tender in 2 countries Corporations holding it on their balance sheet Financial products based around it (with the biggest of them all coming now, a US spot ETF) 10s of millions of transactions per month 100s on millions of wallets A huge mining network that is changing the energy industry Several publicly traded miners An emerging macro asset class for traditional finance bc of its low correlation So @orbit23 @RedDuke these are pretty amazing in 15 years from nothing. Especially since it’s just open source software nobody controls. You don’t think?
BS Bitcoin has a feature set that is practically tailor made for criminals. Instantaneous irrevocable settlement across international lines is exactly what you want if your business is extortion, kidnapping or murder. If you're selling an actual normal product to regular customers you need a totally different feature set, more in line with credit cards and wire transfers. The whole "but there are records" nonsense is a smokescreen. It deliberately ignores the existence of different legal jurisdictions. Criminals would much rather have their money set as Bitcoin to a non extradition country than have to deal with trying the meet Jeff Lebowski with a bag full of cash. Real businesses do not want some random person in accounts payable to be able to screw up and instantly, irrevocably transfer six figures to some random party. The want to interact with accounts tied to a verified name and address. They are not going to rent you a car just because you have a few hundred dollars in Bitcoin.
No. You're trying to argue a point in absolutes. Nobody in this thread has stated that crypto transactions should be the standard protocol for all financial transactions. GlobalMacro90 was simply making the point that in the era of blockchain analytics and tracking, executing massive criminal activity on the BTC blockchain is not where smart criminals gravitate towards, especially with the rise of substantially more privacy-centric cryptos like XMR and others.
A fraud like a ponzi and a bubble are two different things. Who is recruiting you to invest in btc promising you amazing returns? Zippo. Social security is closer to a ponzi
Madoff managed to run this fraud for over 2 decades or more if I recall. still waiting for that audit from BDO Italia from August of 2022. Have you seen one ???