Across so many people, and at BTC's market cap though? I think that's unprecedented. Penny stocks or pyramid schemes, sure, but they never affect this many people or hit 12-digit valuations.
(By the way, fiat money doesn't count as an example because it is backed by a variety of government support structures (which are very much not hocus-pocus) and it does not appreciate in value indefinitely relative to the cost of goods.)
But Bernie Madoff's $65 billion is all real dollars paid into the scheme. Bitcoin market cap doesn't track the amount of the money that has been paid into the current Bitcoin market. It simply estimates the current market price, then multiplies that number by the total of number of Bitcoins.
So the amount currently paid into the current Bitcoin market is going to be much, much lower. Experts estimate that nearly 30% of current bitcoins are 'lost' forever in non-recoverable wallets. Also, the gal who bought 1000 bitcoin at 5 dollars hasn't re-paid another $6 million into the system. But, if Bitcoin crashed to zero today, would you also need to account for dollars lost by investors who built mining stations and gear?
I guess we will never know. But, I think it is fair to say that the Madoff scheme is in the same ballpark of Bitcoin.
At least with bitcoin, there is no company. So, all it is is price * shares outstanding (held shares).
Given that there is some portion of btc that is 'lost' as well as the fact that we don't know what people paid for what is held, I don't see how anyone can come to a conclusion about the "the size of assets with different supplies."
In fact, the definition of market cap says nothing about that conclusion. The description says that it was just a way of grouping companies of various sizes. So, we are back at square zero, bitcoin is not a company.
Maybe I'm totally wrong in my feelings about MC, but at the end of the day, this is not an indicator I would use for TA or popularity of a cryptocurrency. For example, Volume is a much more interesting high level number.
It's not quite the same as the Madoff Ponzi scheme, because in that, all the money went into Madoff's firm, and relatively little came out as redemptions. In a trading market, every dollar that comes in from a buyer goes out to a seller (minus exchange fees, which reportedly have netted Coinbase close to $1B this year, again supporting a >$100B trade volume). They can then be used to purchase more crypto later, and show up in the volume statistics again.
But this alone indicates that Bitcoin may be a bit more resilient than Madoff's ponzi scheme; when multiple people get rich off it, there's much less of a single point of failure for the scheme to collapse.
I.e. that %500M and $90B is unique dollars being transacted and not just promises being passed back and forth.
Most things in the economy work that way though - the total supply of hard currency in the economy is only $3.6T, so when you speak of the $18T US GDP or the $20T US national debt or the $524T value of the derivatives market, it necessarily accounts for the same dollar changing hands multiple times. That's what makes it a currency, that it can circulate and change hands while holding its value.
It might be closer to the abuse of sub-prime mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. Is feeding a bubble the same as pumping and dumping? Sure can be.
I was going to comment on this, but I was blocked by my time manager. :(
Current market cap of BTC, at $111M, puts Madoff's scheme at about half of BTC. Compared to BTC's peak in 2017, Madoff's $$ is about a quarter. (supply * rough BTC price of $20,000).
Additionally, Madoff's scheme affected 4800 clients. [0] The amount of users on Coinbase as of late 2017 is about 2400x that amount [1]. So while amount "paid in" is lower, market cap is much higher. The affected userbase is also many multiples higher than Madoff's clientele.
So, my point: the difference in $$ is higher, and the difference in userbase is far higher.
More practically, note: we are comparing BTC to the largest grift in history. That's a lot of money.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/27/bitcoin-exchange-coinbase-ha...
That said other tokens have similar characteristics..
Mortgage crisis?
Sure, Bitcoin is different. But it's kinda the same...
Creating tether out of nothing to buy bitcoin is similar to the Fed creating dollars by QE to prop up asset prices.
So I'd pick "Fed-coin" as the last one to go down.
You have to pay taxes in the local currency, but if the currency crashes you just have to pay a higher nominal amount of taxes.
You can outlaw competing currencies, but you can only do that in your own country, and it doesn't necessarily keep your official currency from going down the toilet.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untol...
It only has value because a government can ask others to settle part of this debt or take their property otherwise. Naturally, the amount of debt a government can issue this way is limited by the value of property it can threaten.
Zimbabwe, for example, cannot reach much of valuable property despite having some guns and boots. But the USA is a very different matter.
Sure... if the Fed claimed some secret mega-investor was bankrolling it all, and that of course there are audits but uh they're not finished yet and we fired the auditor but this random guy says he saw our bank account balance so it's all OK...
Creating money by printing is not a new thing. Making people believe that the money you've created with whatever hocus-pocus is real and that investment X will just spew money indefinitely is not at all a new thing. It is one very standard old thing.
That by itself doesn't prove bitcoin is this. But in analyzing investment that's rocketing up in value, one should remember that what Hyman Minsky called "speculative finance", ie, bubbles, should not be excluded or treated as "something really weird". "Are X many people really that foolish?" Well, how often has this happened before? There is an answer to that question.