Comment Ponzi scheme clawback (Score 0) 239
My opinion is Bitcoin is a Ponzi Scheme. It's a complex one, so that it's not obvious. It's not even intended to be one, but that doesn't matter.
Bitcoin will at some time reach the point where it makes no financial sense to mine Bitcoins at all (energy required will greatly exceed the mining return even for ASICs). Then, mining will collapse, but not stop because some people will still do it, such as botnets. As soon as Bitcoin mining rate becomes 50% of it's peak, Bitcoin is in trouble. Now Bitcoin become vulnerable to fraud since it's only secure if enough independent people are mining. So someone with lots of ASICs will attempt to grab all the Bitcoins by monopolizing the mining operation and putting in fake transactions to grab all the Bitcoins, and putting in enough mining power to dominate the network and push the fraudulent transactions. This will be hard, maybe even impossible to reverse, especially if it's done well. Then Bitcoin will crash. I'd love it if someone could estimate when this might happen--I'm not interested in Bitcoin enough to collect the data.
Then everyone will scream, and call it a Ponzi scheme. And it will then appear to have been one.
And Bernie Madoff has shown us that clawback has no statute of limitations--anyone who's ever taken any profit out of Bitcoin will be sued by the losers for all the profit. So then no one will have made any money. And you'll be dealing with courts. Anyone who made money with Bitcoin will lose all that they made, plus lawyer's fees. Even if it's 10 years from now.
Only lawyers will do OK out of this. Sigh.