LogFAQs > #979185202

People buying crypto, because they think crypto will go up, because other people bought crypto and it went up, is what makes crypto go up. It's the definition of a ponzi scheme. In the end, someone is left holding the crypto bag when no one else is left to buy it.

A lot of people in crypto know this. That's why there's so much urgency in crypto to try to get other people to buy crypto. It's not altruistic. No one's urgently telling me to invest in my 401k. Some people did it with NFTs, and to a lesser extent meme stocks with Gamestop though. Because those were similar "greater fool" schemes. If you can get other people to invest in crypto, then the holdings of people already invested in crypto are more valuable. That's why it has that kind of cult following. Some people in crypto don't seem to realize that that's why they're proselytizing it so hard. They're proselytizing just because they were proselytized to, and think it's what you're supposed to do if you're a crypto investor. Those people are probably going to be holding the bag in the end.

Could you make money in crypto? Yes. You could also make money going to a casino and betting it all on black. You also would have made a lot of money if you invested in Bernie Madoff's investment fund. As long as you exited the investment before it collapsed.

At some point a few years ago it felt like crypto nerds started to realize the optics were looking bad and that it was obviously a ponzi scheme tightly associated with scams and ransomware. And so I remember a big pivot to "actually, I'm in it for the technology. Blockchain is the future". But it's been over a decade and we still haven't found the thing that blockchain is supposed to solve that regular distributed databases don't already solve. And the promise that it's gonna solve anything starts to ring hollow as time goes on and all those blockchain startups went nowhere. So I notice people don't even really pretend that blockchain or bitcoin are useful anymore. Just that you should invest because it will go up in value (because other people will buy it, because they think will go up in value... etc....)