Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]
<i>edit: Weird, I thought I was commenting on another thread, about Nobel laureates criticizing Bitcoin. I saw it on my phone, then opened HN at my notebook to comment. I misread the title and commented here, but now I can&#x27;t find the correct thread (was it flagged?).</i><p>I am growing this idea that Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency that is affected by aggressive price growth) is an anti-fragile indirect multilevel marketing scheme, the &quot;diamond&quot; of the digital era.<p>It is anti-fragile because it does not have a single point of failure, it is decentralized, its creators are unknown, it is adaptable to several use cases. So each attack on Bitcoin (be it exchange hacking, scams or celebrities&#x27; critics) that doesn&#x27;t kill it, make it stronger.<p>It is a multilevel marketing scheme because it is mostly a zero-sum game, all earnings of bitcoin owners come from new money entering the game. It is indirect because the ones that are most fervourous advertising and defending bitcoin are holding it, not selling.<p>I believe it is the diamond of the new era because of some key similarities:<p>Both BTC and Diamond:<p>- Its original bump in value come from a marketing campaign (even if with Diamond it was centralized and offline, and with BTC is decentralized and viral)<p>- Its scarcity is artificially controlled<p>- Its main use case is black market commerce (for one side of the argument) or money laundry (for the other side).<p>For BTC owners the good news is that the &quot;diamond bubble&quot; it is still strong decades (centuries?) after its modern boom. The bad news is that Diamond was able to correlate to status, a strong (if subjective) value that is part of humanity since always. BTC only appeal is its value as money, so bubbly reinforcements (up and down) apply.