It's a Ponzi scheme, but it's a Ponzi scheme that is legal for now, worldwide, can be participated in from the comfort of your own home or mobile phone, and should be good for the next 120 years or so. It's had a lot of help from inflation, state failure, low interest rates and resulting high asset prices, and shortages of fundamental goods like housing and health care that lead people to believe that they'll never have them without getting rich. But fundamentally people invest in Bitcoin because they want to redirect other people's wealth into their wallets, and believe that they'll be the ones receiving wealth rather than losing it.
It's a cynical take, but fundamentally "other people are rich and I'm not" has been a prime driver of human behavior for millennia.
I don't think there's been any purely financial Ponzi scheme that lasted more than 50. And definitely not on this scale. At some point you run out of suckers :-)
I'm curious when this crash will happen and we see the hype go away and see some valid blockchain uses.
Bitcoin needs even more fresh meat than the average "purely financial" scheme because there's an unavoidable amount of value leaving the scheme every day just to pay for electricity to keep the whole show rolling.
Bitcoin yes, but the cryptocurrency market as a whole is moving towards proof of stake cryptocurrencies which don't have this specific issue. In 4-10 years I don't think Bitcoin will still be the most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap.
I think the problem is that the current nature of Bitcoin and its community is so silly, and so far from what it was intended to be, that it blinds people to its real potential. It is a good implementation of digital cash which could solve the problems that digital cash intends to solve, if it sorts out a few of its issues (computational inefficiency, latency, storage ineffiency).
TLDR: Bitcoin is a clever and nearly-adequate solution to the problem it meant to solve, which is being drastically misused, and yet that doesn't reflect on Bitcoin itself (any more than tulip mania reflected on the merits of tulips).
"Other people are rich and I'm not."
It's a Ponzi scheme, but it's a Ponzi scheme that is legal for now, worldwide, can be participated in from the comfort of your own home or mobile phone, and should be good for the next 120 years or so. It's had a lot of help from inflation, state failure, low interest rates and resulting high asset prices, and shortages of fundamental goods like housing and health care that lead people to believe that they'll never have them without getting rich. But fundamentally people invest in Bitcoin because they want to redirect other people's wealth into their wallets, and believe that they'll be the ones receiving wealth rather than losing it.
It's a cynical take, but fundamentally "other people are rich and I'm not" has been a prime driver of human behavior for millennia.