The people gaming the system to increase its "value" have slowly brought the price up - and they will keep working together (indirectly and directly) to convince/manipulate/trick consumers into buying into this global, decentralized Ponzi-Pyramid scheme to further their wealth through unreasonably redistributing wealth towards earlier adopters - while increasing the "army of HODLers" who now have vested interested in pushing these crypto-"currencies." Everyone who's lost money to the earlier adopters are heavily incentivized to talk positively and promote them so they can attempt to at minimum break even from their losses - which is the main mechanism as to why these are so dangerous for society, the incentive and alignment of working together - to adopt something that has shown little to no value to society; blockchain is a separate conversation as to its value for society. The "killer app" that no one seems to have been able to create for society yet seems to actually be that its structure allows for a Pyramid-Ponzi scheme - and the people selling the shovels during this modern gold rush seem to be the ones best capitalizing on the hype and frenzy.

It also helps when you can print "Tether" out of thin air to manipulate the price until the media notices and you can get grandma and grandpa pulled into the scam.

To be fair Tether is basically just mirroring the US treasury

Are you against any asset where visionaries got in early? VCs and wealthy investors reap the vast majority of rewards when companies like Uber go public, and let the retail investors hold the bag. I don’t see much of a moral difference.

I'm not sure if you're purposefully trying to conflate legitimate stock market companies with the likes of Bernard Madoff Ponzi Scheme et al?

And are you trying to argue the VC industrial complex is the best and/or only method of developing large, useful organizations who develop products and services?

Uber is a company that provides a highly useful service. Bitcoin is just a decentralized long con.

You can make an argument against the asset itself and it’s utility. But parent was arguing that the fact early adopters captured a majority of the gains makes Bitcoin evil doesn’t make sense to me. I’m happy that crypto nerds won this time over the usual suspects of VCs, family funds, etc.

What value has Bitcoin et al brought anyone other than earning them "profit" because they were earlier in the Pyramid-Ponzi scheme - or at a low point before price went up and sold before the bubble(s) popped?

Ok, I'm not a huge fan of the crypto craze, but ignoring providing a solution to the problem of trust in decentralized networks and implementing a working payment network on top of that is just a blatant ignorance.

The solution is massively unelegant and unlikely to be worth so much long-term as markets are predicting now, but it definitely does provide some tangible value and it's pretty stupid to imply otherwise.

Simply asking for what value has Bitcoin et al provided isn't the same as a statement that states it doesn't cover some areas of value, however pros existing doesn't necessarily negate the cons - doesn't mean there's a net benefit to them existing. Ignoring that a solution for 'trust in decentralized networks' can't be solved in other ways, like normal real-life trust networks, where people make a decision of who they trust for this vs. having "blind trust" is in fact blatant ignorance.

This ponzi has better rules than the ponzi your government created for you by default. It is as simple as that.

Very easy to argue that's not the case.

Albeit Uber is overvalued for the service they provide, and their play is one of the VC industrial complex to ramp up to high value as quickly as possible in the eyes of the financial markets (large money pool controllers) to get on stock market at unreasonable valuation, exit some early investors/founders and provide a fun lifestyle for themselves during the process - offloading risk to general public, society via the IPO etc.

> but how would that be good for Bitcoin?

It generates hype for cryptocurrencies generally and bitcoin is the most well known of those.

I mean long term Libra is a potential competitor (if it ever gets that far, I have my doubts).

That said I've maintained crypto is insane from the start, the technology is interesting but it seems like a classic solution looking for a problem (and it suffers from the "if it is better, is it so much better to overcome inertia).

Everyone thinks that everyone else thinks that Libra is positive news and will buy more bitcoin. Then when everyone sees these news articles on top of their feeds, they will get FOMO, and everything becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Fundamentals dont matter.

Scarcity has a lot to do with it, which is fundamental.

There have been quite a few stories about how many people in Venezuela have been using it to escape the devastation of their currency. So there might be some price-affecting demand there.

This was mentioned during the last spike and used to provide justification to crypto. In reality no one there was using it for this as they couldn't even wire their cash out of the country and into the exchange

> They seem to be random and not based on any relevant real-world event

There are some events that trigger movement, but in macro it just looks like a very regular pattern of bubbles interspersed with long periods of not much movement. Even now I think there are enough ideological and greedy fools that I think the bubble pattern will remain strong that even a dispassionate amateur can reliably make a profit.

It started to show signs of a strong upward trend a month ago. Now that mainstream news is covering it I'm confident it will start to grow faster into a very obvious bubble.

New currencies always fluctuate very much when they start because no one knows what the value is. Most of the time this will settle after some time (years) because then the market decided it's value.

I even think there are countries where the currency fluctuates more than Bitcoin.

Crypto busted last year and that took a lot of people out of the system including the secondary coins (which was the main driver of bitcoin prices as people mined newer coins and exchanged them into btc). Btc is rising simply because it's the last man standing (sort of).

Sounds like you understand the fluctuations as well as the rest of us. Still it's a fun ride

the important thing is that the ledger works. Coins are like gems in the middle ages: some people would price them at $1000 some others at $1. Without mass adoption the discussion about price and its fluctuations is not meaningful.

> Libra as a reason in the article, but how would that be good for Bitcoin?

There are many ways, e.g. bitcoin holders may exchange for libras to cash out.