Slate declares "Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme"

[El Dildo]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_pol...l_collapse.html

 

apparently it's all one big scam on the part of Bitcoins vendors; the local sellers and online wallets.

the house of cards is about to fall too. as if the people running the con are preparing to pull the rug out from under the users.

 

I haven't actually used Btc for anything since 2011 but it always worked fine for me.

depositing cash (or running plastic) at my local bank would fund an online account within a few hours.

 

has anyone been using it still recently?

anyone personally been ripped off by a vendor or seller?

[Devyl]

Bitcoin is for stupid people that have too much money to spend. Unless you got in super early, you're only wasting money at this point.

[Chunkyman]

I got a bitcoin wallet with like 0.0005 bitcoins in it that I got from begging.

 

I think it's a very neat idea, and is a great way to buy... stuff. Although I personally have no significant use for them. I believe bitcoins will stabilize in value after all of the speculative bubbles that are currently fueling it's high prices die off. If that happens, it could very well become a commonly used currency for online transactions.

[orbitalraindrops]

I used to use it alot but I stopped now. Interesting to see what happens. There is a new online currency around in the form of lite coins.

[Creed Bratton]

I don't know much about Ponzi schemes, but I saw the crash coming from a mile away.

[sivispacem]

I thought the idea of a Ponzi scheme was that the person who designed the scheme profits at the expense of the participants? With the Bitcoin, the only people to profit are Botnet controllers who use their slave armies to harvest the currency, that they then spend on more bulletproof hosting and New malware to enslave more computers for actual financial fraud (identity theft, clickjacking, banking trojans). Basically, the Bitcoin is kept alive by the black market demand for untraceable currency.

[nightwalker83]

I thought the idea of a Ponzi scheme was that the person who designed the scheme profits at the expense of the participants? With the Bitcoin, the only people to profit are Botnet controllers who use their slave armies to harvest the currency, that they then spend on more bulletproof hosting and New malware to enslave more computers for actual financial fraud (identity theft, clickjacking, banking trojans). Basically, the Bitcoin is kept alive by the black market demand for untraceable currency.

How do we know that the people that started Bitcoin are not criminals?

[sivispacem]

I thought the idea of a Ponzi scheme was that the person who designed the scheme profits at the expense of the participants? With the Bitcoin, the only people to profit are Botnet controllers who use their slave armies to harvest the currency, that they then spend on more bulletproof hosting and New malware to enslave more computers for actual financial fraud (identity theft, clickjacking, banking trojans). Basically, the Bitcoin is kept alive by the black market demand for untraceable currency.

How do we know that the people that started Bitcoin are not criminals?

Because it wasn't created as a currency, but as a peer-to-peer encryption standard. The currency itself came about as part of an open source network and thus has no real creator.

[bluetops]

I actually find the "mining for money" stupid and I knew that this will collapse. The money will just inflate and inflate then BOOM!!

 

CRASH

[Icarus]

One of the Ph.D. students I know in the department was having a conversation about Bitcoin last week and asked if I heard anything about it in the news recently (something about the value going up).

 

He was saying to me that a few years ago, he bought $5 worth of Bitcoins (or a $5 Bitcoin - I'm not sure how it works) and that his $5 investment is now worth $237 dollars. He was also saying that he's read of people becoming millionaires off of Bitcoins, mostly from playing the "stock market" and through investment in people using mathematical algorithms to access more coins.

[sivispacem]

One of the Ph.D. students I know in the department was having a conversation about Bitcoin last week and asked if I heard anything about it in the news recently (something about the value going up).

 

He was saying to me that a few years ago, he bought $5 worth of Bitcoins (or a $5 Bitcoin - I'm not sure how it works) and that his $5 investment is now worth $237 dollars. He was also saying that he's read of people becoming millionaires off of Bitcoins, mostly from playing the "stock market" and through investment in people using mathematical algorithms to access more coins.

It's basically a currency meant for geeks and system builders. One of my colleagues has a Bitcoin-mining desktop machine with about £5k worth of hardware in it. The initial outlay was huge, but due to the rapid growth in the currency he made his investment back in about 3 weeks. I get the impression that people who are sensible accumulate for a few week and then cash it in for products that can be bought using Bitcoins, or in one of the exchanges where you can buy currency for Bitcoin. I wouldn't want to hoard the stuff for too long.