Would you call Peloton's VC backers "ponzi schemers"?
Cryptocoins, not being part of a circular economy, must, by definition, keep attracting new money to pay for earlier investors. Sounds much like a pyramid.
A more apt analogy would be a public company that does not do any real economic activity and simply issues more shares to cover expenses. Cryptocoins cannot exist without the network running and the only way to cover those expenses is to attract new money without any product. While stock speculation is a zero sum game, cryptocoins are negative sum game. Quite a major difference in my book.
If you look at the revenues generated by OpenSea or Uniswap or Compound, it's not exactly an outlandish idea.
What does Ethereum contribute to GDP?
And that's why it's worse than MLMs, at least those pretend to be retailers.
The best thing for crypto as a currency is for Etherium to be worth in 10-20 years exactly what it is now factoring in inflation. The fact that this is horrible for "Crypto" because this means eth won't be giving the 10-100x returns, is exactly what's wrong with the whole thing.
Have you guys ever even used any dApps?
Crypto currencies are like stock tickers. The price does not have to have any bearing on the actual value generated by the stock or the company it represents.
There is a speculative element to all markets, including the stock market. And I think you know that as well.
No it's not. When an asset prices in cash, that price is dependent on it's ability to generate future cash (Goods/Services price based on the utility from consuming that thing). If you think that model is wrong, then you are wrong.
>As far as GDP, Ethereum spawned an entire new industry with tons of companies paying actual salaries to people (in fiat, if I might add), all of whom bought lattes and cars and houses, and some, I'm sure, also bought Peloton bikes.
Oh no no no. You are not buying any of that when you buy Ethereum. We are not talking about whether or not Coinbase/Binance/etc. are Ponzi schemes. They offer services in exchange for fees. That is GDP full stop.
Again, I can argue they are bad businesses because their fees are dependent on a Ponzi Scheme, but they are not the Ponzi Schemes.
>Crypto currencies are like stock tickers. The price does not have to have any bearing on the actual value generated by the stock or the company it represents.
This is a very weird argument. When an acquirer wants to buy a company, they need to pay the stock (usually plus a premium) price to own that company. Stock prices reflect the theoretical takeout price of a company (and this is put into practice every day).
Cryptocurrencies are marketed to you as similar to stock tickers, but they are currencies (it's sort of in the name) and currencies are valued by the demand for goods/services/assets you can buy with them (i.e. this is why export economies, all else equal, have strong currencies).
I would agree that cryptocurrencies would go up in value if you could buy an increasingly large amount of things with them (and only them), but heuristics imply the exact opposite is true.
>There is a speculative element to all markets, including the stock market. And I think you know that as well.
You're really not getting that there's 'overestimate future cashflow' speculation (bad but not so bad) and 'funamental misunderstanding of the asset' speculation.
But, it's your pocketbook so good luck.
But that's precisely why people were valuing Ethereum at x,xxx per token - the belief that Ethereum will one day have the network effect to generate future revenues. And honestly, a lot of projects built on Ethereum did generate an absurd amount of revenue in a very short span of time.
OpenSea and Uniswap are probably the most prominent examples. Both generated a combined total of over $1B in revenue and used Ethereum as the fee token. The speculative price of Ethereum - or any other cryptocurrency, for that matter - relies on the belief that the number of apps like Uniswap and OpenSea will likely increase over the years.
> I would agree that cryptocurrencies would go up in value if you could buy an increasingly large amount of things with them (and only them)
That's precisely what's happening with Ethereum. There are more and more dApps that all use Ethereum to process transactions. There are even SaaS tools that you can pay for in Ethereum, with a single tap from your Ethereum wallet.
I feel like you're attacking me without fully understanding how this ecosystem works, nor have you actually ever used a dApp.
Paying developers goes in the cost column, not the benefit column. (If you hire a bunch of developers and pay them to sit around twiddling their thumbs all day, you're not growing the economy but rather damaging it - they could've done something more productive instead). The question is what value the ecosystem produces that people are paying in for. And there's certainly a subjective element to that, but the market price should be a sanity check.
Peloton sells exercise bikes and delivers virtual spin classes etc.. And while you can certainly argue they're overvalued (and I'd agree with you, FWIW), it's easy to see how they're actually doing something valuable in the real world - something that, in a small marginal way, improves peoples lives. We can have a sensible conversation about whether a weekly Peleton class is worth $45/month, but people are paying that much for it, not as a speculative "investment" but as a simple exchange of money for goods and services. Real people are better off - in that they were able to take the class and get fitter or whatever. There's certainly a speculative element on top of that, but at the foundational level there's real value being produced.
Where's the product or service for Ethereum? They've had long enough to come up with one. People used to talk about doing cross-border currency transfers (genuinely useful) or that cat breeding game (potentially genuinely fun), but nowadays fees are too high for either of those to be worthwhile and people don't really talk about them. It's not just excessive speculation on top of a fundamentally sound business; there's simply no there there.
This is like the Broken Window Fallacy.
All that money that was spent building Ethereum could have been spent on activities that were far more useful to society.
Like all the billions that went into building...Facebook?
Again, I don't understand how you can get into the morality of it all when literally tens of billions of venture funding goes into everything from juicers (remember Juicero) to companies that literally help instigate ethnic cleansings [0]
0: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
If you've got a non-voting non-dividend stock .. you might want to ask what you've actually got there.
Some tokens share revenue with token holders. GMX, for instance, distributes all of the nearly $2M daily fees it generates to holders of the GMX token. Goldfinch, which loans to real-world microfinance companies, also gives back its fees to Goldfinch token holders.
Some tokens are necessary for paying for transactions or any on-chain asset (most core blockchain tokens).
It's not as much hot air as it appears
How is that different from dApp?
We're about to see this process unfold for FTX. How exciting!
Airbnb has no hotels
If these companies don't generate profits, then what assets are shareholders holding onto? The app? The algorithm? The design?
Then that's just IP. And if the asset is just the IP, how is that different from any blockchain dApp, which is just code?
I don't think you're making the point you think you're making. An unprofitable SaaS startup has no assets besides its code either.
First, stock buybacks are not tax exempt. If a firm earns $100 in profits and buys back $50 of shares, it still pays the corporate taxes on $100, not on $50. Unlike paying interest, corporations don't get to write off money spent on stock buybacks. So it doesn't affect their tax situation.
Second, for the investors in the company, the total aggregate amount of taxes is paid whether the investors are holding 10 stocks and get $1 per stock in dividends, or if they are holding 5 stocks and get $2 per stock in dividends. The number of shares outstanding does not raise or lower the ultimate value of the dividend stream, nor the tax obligation applied to the dividend stream.
What if a company never pays any dividends and just buys back stock? Then it's value is just the terminal liquidation value, and each time investors sell stock back to the company, that is a taxable event for them, probably taxed at the long term rate which is the same as the dividend tax rate, up until the company winds down, in which case the rest is taxed at the long term rate. The set of taxable events is the same as if the company had paid dividends, but the difference is that investors self-select as to who realizes the gain and who doesn't.
Really this is the difference when companies buy back stock -- some shareholders don't want to take any gains, while others do. The total gains are the same, and the total paid to the government is the same, and the time it's paid to the government is the same, but investors can sort themselves into those who want to to take the gain and those who don't. You get to decide when you want to take the gain, and this optionality has value for you. It's as if you could signal to the management -- don't pay out a dividend, re-invest the money that you would have paid out this quarter so that I'll get more later. That's basically what is going on for the individual investor, but for the government, they still get their quarterly taxes paid just in terms of capital gains by those who sell their shares.
But I agree that many do prefer buybacks, for the reasons I outlined -- it gives investors a choice as to when to realize the gain. Some investors may not want to receive the gain each quarter. And this can be a tax benefit, not because the rate is different, but because the timing may be more convenient.
