I would love to understand the working of a mind who believes that Snowden would promote their ponzi scheme.

The Ponzi scheme person might have believed that Snowden was a Russian intelligence asset and not a whistleblower. In which case they thought Snowden would have gone along with the scheme for self enrichment. But they were wrong.

> person might have believed that Snowden was a Russian intelligence asset

I guess the question is how someone might be delusional enough to believe that.

The US government has gone to great pains to try and make people believe that.

I literally cannot think of a worse choice

Maybe Matt Levine?

He'd probably charge too much

has Matt Levine previously sacrificed his entire life for the cause of truth and justice?

No, but unlike Snowden, Matt Levine isn't stupid. Remember, Snowden thought that PRISM was an illegal government surveillance program that let the NSA look at anybody's internet communications. This was not supported by the documents Snowden leaked and, completely unsurprisingly, turned out to be false.

The organizers of this presentation probably thought that Snowden could be similarly duped here, and many of his fans are conspiracy theorists who bought Greenwald's reporting without asking the obvious questions it raised, so they would be easy marks. More recently, Ryan Cohen applied the same idea by selling NFTs to GameStop's cargo cult investors waiting for a MOASS that will never come. You would have to be bonkers to think you could pull the wool over Levine's eyes on a financial scheme, and even if you were to pay him enough to look the other way, his readers aren't the type who would fall for a crypto-scam.

He supports crypto, so why not other schemes?

Ego, mainly.

And a high risk / very high reward ratio.

If he pulls this off, he will get a lot of money.

If not, he will lay low for a while and come back with a new scheme.

Basically, no real negative for the guy, as he would have made a ton of money in his previous scam.

Desperation may be the alternative explanation.

The article that Snowden cited:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/sunil-tulsiani-speak...

is freely available. Tulsiani's reputation must be known to everyone involved in this organization, which certainly smells like a scam. What did Snowden hope to accomplish by first playing along, and then bringing this old case up again?

Wow. Encouraging people to cash in RRSPs to invest in real estate. This person has no soul.

Once a scammer, always a scammer.

I think title should include 2021.

Done

"But my advice to everyone on this call tonight is: Look up .."

Wow, so elegant.

I wonder if bad publicity is still publicity here. The hardest step here is to make people know about the "club". Then a charismatic salesman can persuade whatever. I've seen people being persuaded milk is black, bombs are food etc.

This is probably similar the debate around giving SBF a 'platform', which ultimately did almost nothing to help him, quite the opposite.

In this particular case I doubt it provided much negative press for the scheme (AFAIK, it remained very niche) and the runners probably tried to memoryhole it as soon as possible. The only real gain was probably the run-up to the event where Snowden's name could be attached to it.

I find this somewhat hypocritical given his support of crypto.

Funny enough despite my burning hatred of everything cryptocurrency Snowden has been my go-to counter-argument whenever someone brings up the wonderful "solution" that cryptocurrencies promise to be to zero-trust environments:

"Are you Edward Snowden or in a societal position comparable to that of Edward Snowden? No? Then society probably isn't quite dysfunctional enough for you yet to justify going to these algorithmic extremes."

You're pulling the classic "I've got nothing to hide, therefore I don't need privacy"

The utterly extreme zero-trust proof-of-work crypto algorithms that have been significantly contributing to climate change over the last decade are not necessary to achieve privacy, and most of the time not even used to achieve it either.

Significantly contributing to climate change? Nonsense. The US petrodollar has single handedly caused climate change. The greed of the upper class and their alignment with the middle east has caused climate change.

How anyone could believe a digital token of value, a keypair, and voluntary usage of energy to participate in a decentralized network could possibly be a major contributing factor in climate change, while shipping barges and oil rigs are in full operation, is beyond me. A part of me wish I was capable of such levels of delusion.

I am a strong believer in climate change, but I feel many are pulling the "causes climate change" card in their arguments like "think of the children!"—a subtly dishonest way to trap their interlocutor because no one sane would want harm to come to the children, or to climate.

I am also a strong knower in climate change. The evidence is irrefutable. But it is strange to me that the one real threat against the banking and financial industries, the one real opponent to a stranglehold on money, somehow coincidently has been associated with the literal destruction of this planet via climate change. And people are really buying it!

Crypto has a lot of flaws but climate change is not one of them. I guess I need to just deal with these lemmings parroting whatever the authorities have on the agenda to psychologically take out opponents, but never thought I would see them successfully wage war on mathematics like this.

"the voluntary usage of energy" is the referred part you also recognize as such. When that usage is the size of a small country consumption it becomes worth talking about - just like the shipping barges and oil rigs. You don't fix a wrong with another wrong.

Hey now, I like turning that on its head: what's going on with proprietary software? What wrong is it doing that it needs to hide?

crypto without the investment angle sounds great

I’d love to have electronically anonymous cash on my person that I could spend at will at any establishment, and transport across state boundaries

Unfortunately you need verifiable artificial scarcity which creates a bubble

And to protect said electronic cash which has a barrier to entry

crypto isn't a ponzi scheme inherently and allows for in his case dissidents cut off from financial networks to actually function.

Yes, it has other potential uses than Ponzi scheme. However, when it’s advertised as a probable positive ROI it comes from being a ponzi. If that’s not accurate enough, one could then say that it’s remarkably ponzi-esque.

Unless Snowden has advocated for crypto as an investment I don't see how he is being hypocritical. Has he?

Id claim some hypocrisy in that one shouldn’t advise crypto while disavowing a Ponzi scheme as both result in monetary losses and are supported by aggressively false advertising and new entrants.

> crypto isn't a ponzi scheme...

That's inaccurate.

Most fiat currencies today are characterized with the same elements as those of ponzi schemes, its slower over time, but nevertheless it is the same elements with the central bank printing money from nothing.

Crypto can be subborned into any existing ponzi scheme easily by allowing exchanges of these fiat assets and leverage from any of those fiat systems.

Those crypto systems which have ballooned as a result of that would then accurately and appropriately be considered ponzi schemes, even though its just a small leg of the entire ponzi scheme.

There is no effective way for an individual to tell inflows and outflows from the system, and any banker is aware of frauds that can create the illusion of price action through the use of leverage, and collusive wash-sale contracts (similar to options). That is how gold and metals commodities are largely suppressed.

Without visibility, those frauds don't come to light, but visibility is a tradeoff when it comes to privacy, especially in 0 trust environments.

You are right. Money without depreciation violates the second law of thermodynamics and hence it is a Ponzi scheme in a physical world. This also includes any gold based money.

There can be no economic perpetuum mobile in the real economy on earth because humans need food which is produced by growing plants which capture sunlight.

Gold will be there long after humans have gone extinct. That violates the concept of a store of value. It means that gold doesn't store any value. It means humans delegate the storage of value to each other by utilizing gold and in that respect it is identical to fiat.

The property that fiat and gold have in common is the lack of holding costs that anything including the human body has in the real economy.

First and foremost, from the guidelines:

  Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Nobody here that would otherwise just downvote will write a counterargument because you complained about it, keep the reddit bot downvote whining where it belongs.

> Crypto can be suborned into any existing ponzi scheme easily by allowing exchanges of these fiat assets and leverage from any of those fiat systems.

>Those crypto systems which have ballooned as a result of that would then accurately and appropriately be considered ponzi schemes, even though its just a small leg of the entire ponzi scheme.

This can happen to literally anything else that isn't prohibited from being traded using fiat currency.

>There is no effective way for an individual to tell inflows and outflows from the system, and any financial banker is aware of frauds that can create the illusion of price action through the use of leverage, and collusive wash-sale contracts (similar to options). That is how gold and metals commodities are largely suppressed.

I assume you're talking about the price in non-crypto currency that was paid for the crypto? if so yes, you can't really tell the inflows and outflows, but that is also true for everything that can also be traded outside centralized exchanges(including stocks), and commodities are even worse given most of them will be traded outside any exchange for industrial use and with even less transparency. I don't see the argument against crypto here inherently.

Yes, crypto can be used for scamming, this is a post discussing exactly one of those cases, but that's no different from anything else. It has a real tangible value in a world where you can be effectively cut off from global financial processing if 3-4 US companies -that got quite opinionated after the patriot act- decide they don't want to do business with you. Until payment processors aren't held to the standards of common carriers, crypto is imperative.