re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme—the Internet’s favorite currency will collapse.

Bitcoins are Anonymous? Not according to Bitcoin Developer Jeff Garzik, just check this out: The fun starts at about the 3:00 Mark


The ironic part about this is that anyone and everyone who has participated in illegal activity using bitcoins, presumably because they thought it was anonymous, now has a permanent record of every single one of their transactions contained on the public ledger.


Since I have your attention now:



I'm also going to tell you a story.

During the 1970's, when consumer price inflation was an actual problem, someone went ahead and developed an alternative currency. Of course, there were no computers in the average household, no internet, and no peer-to-peer during that stagflation.

Coinstamp Parable
An entrepreneur named Wei Boyang sets up to take advantage of the situation. His proposal is to print a total of 1,000,000 units of what he calls coinstamps. He goes through great measures to insure that there would be no coinstamp counterfeits in the future, using various methods such as signing each stamp, classified materials, codes, et cetera. For the sake of argument, the coinstamp truly is counterfeit-proof. The only entity that could create more coinstamps is Wei Boyang. However, Boyang just happens to be a really nice guy, and having read Lord Acton, he even goes so far as to cut off his hand in order to make sure he cannot make more coinstamps.

Some may cry aloud that coinstamps have no intrinsic value or that they are not backed by anything. Wei Boyang, having also read his Carl Menger, points out that there is no such thing as intrinsic value. Value, explains Boyang, is a subjective phenomenon. Moreover, Boyang argues that it is actually a good thing that coinstamps are not backed by any commodity. If they were backed by something, such as platinum, then the underlying asset could easily be seized. Moreover, since there is no underlying asset to coinstamps, there are no storage fees and transfers are far cheaper than they would otherwise have been.

With inflation approaching double-digits, people who are worried about gold or silver confiscation start to pile into coinstamps. Similarly, investors who are worried about holding the least bad fiat currencies such as the Swiss Franc or the Deutsche Mark due to potential inflation in order to help exporters, also start to pile in. Coinstamps truly seem to be a stroke of genius. People start using them as a means of payment worldwide, even for long-distance transactions. The Federal government is unable to do anything meaningful about coinstamps because it does not have the resources to check every envelope that happens to be mailed. Moreover, since the stamps are so light and thin, lots of people mail them discreetly inside of other items, just to be on the safe side.

By all measures, coinstamp seems to be a hit. Through various ingenious methods, Wei Boyang helps prevent counterfeiting of the stamps. Moreover, Boyang ends up being labeled a domestic terrorist and arrested, which has the unintended consequence of increasing the popularity and awareness of coinstamps, leading people start piling in big time. There is but one problem, other fellows such as Jean de Meung, Johann Georg Faust, and Tycho Brahe also get in the game. While they are unsuccessful at counterfeiting coinstamps, they are successful at copying the protocol and making their own version. Although different in name, the knockoffs are virtually the same in substance. Jean de Meung makes meungstamps, making only 1,000 units, with his own fingerprints on every meungstamp as one of the security measures. Subsequently, he burns off his fingertips as part of a rigorous public relations campaign. With coinstamps trading at $750/cs, the new protocols start to gain traction. Since Wei Boyang wants nothing to do with the government, he has no patents on his invention. The fact that he was first to develop the alternative currency makes no difference to those flocking into the more affordable protocols. The lack of a moat on the scheme eventually sends the entire house of cards collapsing.

Can you feel it?

While bitcoins cannot be hyperinflated in name, they certainly can be hyperinflated in substance. Already, there are numerous knockoffs such as namecoin*, freicoin*, and litecoin* in place. This is a particularly valid point because bitcoin is a starfish i.e., it is fully decentralized. As put by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, ‘The starfish doesn’t have a head. Its central body isn’t even in charge. In fact, the major organs are replicated throughout each and every arm. If you cut the starfish in half, you’ll be in for a surprise: the animal won’t die, and pretty soon you’ll have two starfish to deal with‘*. After Napster went under, Niklas Zennström (the creator of Skype) stepped in with his creation called Kazaa, which had no central server that could be shut down. Eventually, the peer-to-peer programs got more and more numerous, including Kazaa Lite, eDonkey, eMule, BitTorrent, et cetera. While this may be good news for people who like to download and share content for free, it certainly is not for people who are under the impression that bitcoin is a hedge against inflation.