This fantastic post entitled “Why Bitcoin is a Ponzi Scheme” is one of the best living examples of what I refer to when I write about people trying to wrap their mind around a new concept starting from their existing dataset of ideas and logical pathways between them, using the ancient-greek-philosopher approach of starting off with a pre-composed idea, and rewriting the world around it to make it fit to that initial, static, immutable idea, rather than inducing about the world as they discover new things in life, and adapt their logical construct according to the changing of events and of their own knowledge about them.
Don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate the “wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee” warning he’s trying to issue to people, identifying patterns of the bitcoin economy to those of traditional economy scams that have happened in history. The fundamental flaw in his thinking is exactly this though: he’s using traditional economics models to analyse something completely new and different, a true non-economy, that redefines everything we had taken for granted until today about money itself, with the supposition that big-name historical economics professors’ opinions are worth anything more than zero in these new and yet-unexplored horizons.
The fact that you’ve never seen a green cat doesn’t exclude its existence from the realm of possibility, as they say, so scoffing off sights of such animals as fake once documented evidence had been provided would be just as idiotic. If he just had taken the time to figure out that all of the “warning signs” about bitcoin he’s spotting here are exactly what we needed to fix in a traditional currency [or consequences thereof], he maybe would have noticed that it’s the nature of the latter that is distorted and dystopic, not the other way around.
I hope you take the time to read through this brilliant showcase of limited-mindedness and self-ridiculing ignorance and arrogance: it’ll make your day just that much brighter. If you want my take on this topic by the way, here it is.