This industry is supposedly valued at over 100 billion dollars. Hundreds of coins exist and ICO's pop up every day...

that's why you should just keep the majority of your holding in BTC/LTC

Buy the rumors, sell the tumors.

It's all about hype, but some will eventually end with a working product. It's just goes that the amount gained from successes will vastly outweigh the risks.

It at least that's what I'm hoping.

youre not wrong OP but look at the insanity OUTSIDE of the cryptospace

snapchat went public at a 29 BILLION evaluation

so yeah most of these shitcoins are useless. but this space still has a long way to go... all that worthless fiat money has got to go somewhere after all

cryptohustle.com/why-bitcoin-isnt-a-ponzi-scheme

Recently the SEC delayed its decision on approving a bitcoin ETF, likely due to the complex nature revolving around security. During the review process the public was free to submit comments expressing any concerns around the ETF.

One critic submitted a comment about how Bitcoin is like a Ponzi scheme or penny stock. This is a common fallacy that gets circulated amongst naysayers, so here’s a rebuttal to his arguments.

BITCOIN AS A PENNY STOCK AND PONZI SCHEME

The critic makes the following statements regarding Bitcoin as a penny stock or Ponzi scheme:

“Thus, bitcoins are more like “penny stock”, shares of a company with no assets, no products, and no staff; or shares in a pure ponzi schema, like Madoff’s fund. The value of bitcoin is supposed to come only from the existence of an
(allegedly) secure ledger that records the distribution of coins among numerous accounts (“addresses” in the system’s terminology), and therefore allows their use as a means for internet payments. But penny stocks and ponzi funds offer that capability, too.”

Like all money, bitcoin derives its value as a medium of exchange, based on a social contract amongst the participants of a society. The blockchain keeps an immutable public ledger, which allows it to operate without the backing of a bank or nation state.

Let’s take a look at the exact technical definition of a Ponzi scheme and penny stock.

According to Black’s Law dictionary a Ponzi scheme is:

“A fraudulent investment scheme in which money contributed by later investors generates artificially high dividends or returns for the original investors. Money from the new investors is used directly to repay or pay interest to earlier investors, usually without any operation or revenue-producing activity other than the continual raising of new funds.”

Look at the insanity inside it! Bitcoin is at $2600 right now. People have lost their minds.

Bitcoin does not fit the definition of Ponzi scheme for various reasons:

There are no paid dividends to any investors.
The purpose of using bitcoin isn’t to recruit new participants.
There’s no centralized body that funnels money up to the top.
Unlike Ponzi schemes, Bitcoin will still have value and continue to function even if no new participants join the ecosystem.
So is bitcoin like a penny stock? According to Investopedia, the technical definition of a penny stock is:

“A penny stock typically trades outside of the major market exchanges at a relatively low price and has a small market capitalization. These stocks are generally considered highly speculative and high risk because of their lack of liquidity, large bid-ask spreads, small capitalization and limited following and disclosure. They often trade over-the-counter through the OTC Bulletin Board (OTCBB) and pink sheets… The SEC, however, has modified the definition to include all shares trading below $5.”

Bitcoin is not like a penny stock for multiple reasons:

It’s not a stock and doesn’t represent a company.
If it were a stock, it would be considered a mid-cap stock with a market capitalization of around $10 billion.
Bitcoin doesn’t trade for under $5 and has much better market liquidity than most penny stocks.
Many penny stocks lack disclosure of information, whereas Bitcoin is open-source and completely transparent.
The critic goes on to say…

That's true for any other new enterprise OP, since the industrial revolution. There's a lot of waste and redundancy. But don't give up on this stuff, there are many gems lying around like Golem, Mysterium, Litecoin, Sia, etc. that have actual plans for real world implementation of a decentralized service. Don't buy into these as a means of speculation in itself but as a service being seeded by speculation. Even if many of them fail, there is great (and growing) demand for decentralized networks of service providers.

This is indeed a multilevel marketing scheme, and most of it is pure scam. But that doesn't mean it isn't the future either.

Also, the earliest you get into crypto the better, because the market will just keep growing, almost any coin (that is obviously not shit) can be safe to buy.

this is another good point.

The normie economy is FUCKED. Companies have P/E ratios in the hundreds. PEople are just looking for somewhere to stick their inflationary wagebucks but everything around them is a scam.

bitcoin is one of the few Id consider undervalued at this point actually

The market price of bitcoin, like that of a penny stock or ponzi fund, is entirely speculative, based on expectations of traders about future prices, which will be based on expectations of future expectations…”

Welcome to the global economy. Speculation on future profit potential is the backbone of commerce…

Entrepreneurs start businesses by speculating on future profit potential.
Investors purchase stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies based on making speculative returns.
The price of everything is determined by buyers and sellers who make a market by trading.
The critic furthers his arguments with…

“Unlike legitimate stocks and bounds, that infinite regression is not ultimately grounded on fundamentals — because bitcoin does not have any. In fact, its primary use as speculative financial instrument causes extreme price volatility, that prevents its use as a currency.”

Bitcoin is a new paradigm unlike anything history has seen before. It can be used as a currency, commodity, network and immutable public ledger. As its own economy, Bitcoin absolutely has fundamentals such as:

Daily transaction volume.
Electricity, hardware, bandwidth and storage used to secure the network.
Network difficulty.
Supply, demand and rate of inflation.
Number of Bitcoin businesses and their fundamentals.
Amount of investment capital used in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Market liquidity.
The argument also states:

“Ownership of bitcoins does not yield any dividends or interest. While eventual users of bitcoin as a currency would be required to pay transaction fees, those fees will not be paid to bitcoin holders, but to the “miners” that maintain the public ledger.”

>invest during ICO
>dump during the initial pump for ~300-1000% profit
>repeat

You're not going to be riding a lambo to the moon like if you had jumped on the BTC or ETH train early, but you'll still get there in the end.

If you haven't yet seen a comparison drawn between crypto and the dotcom boom, many (most) people in this market recognize it's about 1996 now.
Plenty of coins are worthless and will die in time. Much like plenty of internet companies were worthless and eventually died. That doesn't mean you can't still enrich yourself.
People who are worried are people who bought at inflated prices. The rest of us welcome inflation because it's free money, especially when you have a large margin of safety in these coins.
I never dipped below profit in this recent "crash" which is why a bubble isn't scary. An opportunity really

Miners collecting transaction fees doesn’t make Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme. Miners operate like a business and offer the valuable service of securing transactions on an immutable public ledger. By that logic we could call NASDAQ, NYSE, Banks, Paypal and just about any business that charges a fee a Ponzi scheme.

Another argument made is…

“The only way to make a profit by investing in bitcoins is by selling them to other investors, for more than their purchase price. Thus, bitcoin has the essential character of a penny stock, or a pyramid schema: the profit of early investors comes entirely from the investment of later ones.”

The only way to make profit on anything is to sell it for more than what you payed for it. In fact this is the very definition of the word…

Profit: a financial gain, especially the difference between the amount earned and the amount spent.

Last but not least…

“Investment in bitcoin does not contribute to mankind’s real wealth or well-being: it does not finance the creation of any material goods or real services. On the other hand, it has ruined many naive investors who have been induced to put their savings into it, by spurious promises of fantastic price increases in some undefined future.”

Bitcoin as a currency can finance many things. Bitcoin can be used to finance startups and pay for goods and services. People don’t need to “invest” in bitcoin in order to use it. As far as contributing to mankind’s well-being, Bitcoin can be used to donate to many charities such as the Red Cross, Greenpeace, ChildFund International etc.

Yes, people who speculate on bitcoin as an investment run the risk of loss, as they would any investment. We could easily flip that story and say that people who invested $100 in bitcoin in 2010, made $1.8 million at the end of 2013. Or perhaps a speculator who shorted at $1200 made money by the price going down.

>
Snapchat had a product with millions of global users in a coveted demographic. Most of these coins have no product and no reason to tie that product in with a coin.

These are the new High Yield Investment Programs. Any oldfags remember those?

Everyone would put their money in and it was a rush to see who'd get it out before the program disappeared or shut down and the creators ran off with the money.

All the storage coins provide value and Factum actually does shit

other than that everything else is trash and should be avoided and shunned.

the market is entirely speculative that is true, but so was the dotcom bubble, and a few enormous stocks emerged and survived from that (Google, amazon)

the dotcom bubble reached $2.5 trillion before it finally burst, I think we have a long way to go still for this one.

Yeah I think the definition gets stretched beyond all measure when anything that makes a profit is called a ponzi scheme.

Like the ice cream man. He pays 0.30 for a ice cream bar and sells it for 2.50. Obviously he is a scammer.

I don't think it'll get that bad.

It's much harder to hide money now than it was even 5-10 years ago. That's the ultimate benefit of most for having this shit.

Jamaal on the street corner no longer has to take yo $20 for cash when you can use your Coinapp on your MetroPCS Obamaphone to send him $20 worth of cooncoin or whatever the fuck he wants to take.

Yeah, I thought about it. Almost none coins have actual utility. You go to their website and it says
>Decentralized blockchain secure communication open source efficient global economy

It's a self-perpetuating system. The demand is created by existing demand, nothing else. No one buys fucking bitbean hoping it will have utility eventually, they do it because they hope other people do it and they can eventually bait someone into buying from them, at a higher price.

I'm fairly new to this, but from what I have gathered I think that our current situation is similar to the early days of the internet. Some coins will grow from now on, while most will fail, which is equivalent to the rise of websites such as Google and the death of many others.

Sooner or later there will not be high gains from our trading; it will eventually just transform into a normie-accepted from of currency and we won't be discussing shitcoins.

lmao great post

> muh userbase

snapchat is a useless POS platform for teenage retards to share pictures

it lost over half a billion dollars last year and the user growth is already slowing

the point is tho that EVERYTHING is overvalued nowadays because central banks are printing money as if theres no tomorrow... and all that money has to go somehwere

stocks, real estate, bonds all those markets are already overvalued to the limit. now this money is streaming into cryptos and there will be a lot more coming

>it will eventually just transform into a normie-accepted from of currency and we won't be discussing shitcoins.

we got a long ways to go and a lot of gains to make before that day

Point is, if you're at bit a little diversified you can safely ride this boat right up to buying actual boats when the normies catch up. There's plenty of time since the fiat scene is probably going to crash or at least face a major bearish trend in the next couple years.

This guy gets it, you think your federal reserve money isn't a scam?

Fuck the Rothschilds, fuck the government, I want to become an independent, strong and free person. I don't want to be programmed into wagecucking the rest of my life.

Scheme or not, it's about how you grow by using/exploiting these systems. There are people on top trying to influence and control the world for better or worse. I don't want to be influenced and controlled if I don't want to. I fell for their trap and have some student debt accumulated. Now they're basically forcing me into wagecuckery.

These cryptomoneys give me growth and soon will be able to live and do as I want.

Literally the same as .com boom. Doesn't mean technology is shit though. Just got to pick the right shitcoin and always remember it all can end any day.

>yfw there's a shitposter on Veeky Forums that will be the next mark cuban

Who gives a shit as long as you're making money?

I use bitcoin to pay my web hosts and virtual private servers. I agree that 95% of crypto right now are created for the sole purpose making money out of everyone's greed.

But I don't think we are in a bubble. Unlike products (Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc), a currency can reach up to trillions of dollars and with that perspective in mind, we can see that this industry is still undervalued.

Yes, Bitcoin has its problems, Ethereum too. But that doesn't mean they will not get better in the long run. There are many competent coins out there hiding on 20m - 200m marketcap (better than Ethereum really). NEM can handle 10,000 transactions per second (tps), Paypal can handle 193 tps while Ethereum can only handle 20 tps.

The /biz community has been too involved in short term gains and hype. People don't even realize there are many genius developers hiding on undervalued coins.

>Smart contracts? Bitcoin has check lock time verify which does the same thing
It is far from the same thing. Bitcoin's scripting language isn't even turing complete. Prior to Ethereum's smart contracts, there was no way to verify what code is being run on a server. Companies could claim to be open source and then run something else. You can argue that current ICOs are shitty but we are in the equivalent of the 1990s era of plain HTML sites with regards to what can be done with smart contracts.

Why not let it be you, user?

Same here, i used to be gamerfag (playing CS and watching twitch) but started trading crypto and haven't touched any game for months now

Truely, I'm waiting for CoonCoin to debut.

Burn your fiat, it's a scam as well pulled off by your government. Faggot.

Haha literally this. I went from a hardcore gamer to watching buy/sell orders all day and haven't even thought about playing a video game in recent memory.

Are you up?

Same to you, are you up?

Because its in the seed stage. The tech is developing. Consider yourself a venture capitalist in the early days of an emerging new technology that WILL become mainstream. Ill be selling once normies start using this stuff. Have some vision or leave aggressive speculation its not meant for you

Also 100 billion is peanuts op. And most of that money is in the top 5 cryptos.

>not just fucking mining through nicehash and getting small but nonvolatile returns

gg no re

The price is arbitrary. We could be valuing it in terms of mili bits or micro bits the price just "sounds" expensive because we compare it to other things we buy.

It would have made Jordan Belfort's life a lot easier. Instead of having to use a drug dealer's wife's family to smuggle cash to Switzerland under their clothes he could have just emailed it over there.

This isn't 2010, you won't reach the moon by mining on your home PC. Hell, you won't even reach poverty level.

Mining seriously is essentially the same as creating a startup. You need tens of thousands in capital to buy the hardware, probably need to lease space in an industrial building to have access to enough power to run it all plus the cooling, and you'll constantly be doing maintenance and running spreadsheets and changing what you're mining to maximize your profit at that current moment.

Kinda.

Now buy my bags. Good goy.

this
with all this electricity youre better of growing weed these days

Ethereum will be able to handle 1 million transactions per second once raiden (superior version of segwit + lightning network) gets released

What if i dont pay electricity? Im planning on dropping 6k in antminer s9 rigs and pay no electricity, will i make it?

Im netting $5.60 a day just leaving my computer on while i go to class and shit. I dont even have time to play games. No harm in any of this desu. Utilities included in rent.

You think Decred is useful?

>Own a bunch of stocks.
>Stocks literally do nothing. Just show that I 'own' a part of a company.
>Company is centralized, can do reverse stock splits, can fudge accounting numbers, can pump and dump, hold 50% of their own shares.

It's strangely similar. You could argue that Social Security, Stocks, Government, Banks, whatever are all MLM schemes.

That said, blockchains have some true, real life value. I think it will play out like the first internet bubble - a few will be resilient like Amazon and eBay that have real use cases (ETH, GNT. XRP). Some will be like Pets.com, Keen, etc and raise a bunch of money and fuck the dog (BNT).

My two cents.

It takes time. People building real technologies using blockchain technologies have just started. Most attempts will fail, the market will crash with the end of this hype, and will stagnate for several years. During this period, the serious companies are being built.

Come back in ~8 years, and let's talk again.

>Factum
>Only useful one
>Can't spell it right
>Is about to crash desu :^)

FACTOM is a pile of shite. Their network is constantly fucking down all the time.

Take a look at 'past issues': status.factom.com/

Do a little research, buy it, and thank me later.

WE WUZ COINERS N SHEI