Collectibles are their own thing. I'll allow that there is some value in the preservation of the item itself. But the reality is that with collectibles, it's the scarcity that's the thing. And with digital goods, scarcity is artificial.

Your lumber comparison is vastly over-simplifying an issue to make it look similar. Lumber is useful. It has value as a building material.

I've yet to see a cryptocurrency/NFT/whatever that has any value outside of its own ecosystem. I also like how you say the "new entrants condition does not qualify anything as a ponzi scheme" before pasting the definition which says "the promoter pays out current investors with the money of new investors".

Which is how crypto works. That's the only source of increased value, new investors. The only quibble is that there's not a single promoter. In which case, fine. Crypto is not a ponzi scheme. Crypto is a vehicle by which people can easily create a whole bunch of ponzi schemes.

For baseball card I basically agree, with the main difference being you won't reliably make money on a given card. Some will go up and make you money, but realistically it's a collectible.

For lumber, there is an end user who wants the lumber to e.g. make a house. There might be some middlemen who buy it and then resell it, but they are also generally providing value in some way: storing it to smooth over demand variance, doing arbitrage to improve pricing, moving it from one location to another, etc. There's never just an infinite chain of middlemen selling it for ever increasing prices.

> For lumber, there is an end user who wants the lumber to e.g. make a house. There might be some middlemen who buy it and then resell it, but they are also generally providing value in some way: storing it to smooth over demand variance, doing arbitrage to improve pricing, moving it from one location to another, etc. There's never just an infinite chain of middlemen selling it for ever increasing prices.

What about something like Ethereum? There is an end user who wants the Ethereum in order to pay network fees so they can register a domain name, move a stable coin, etc. I realize this isn't the primary use, but people are betting that it will be. Is that really any different than speculating on a startup that isn't yet profitable, but could be in the future?

And since something like Bitcoin is fundamentally trying to be a currency.. Why is this any different than something like the Russian Ruble? People want it because other people want it (medium of exchange). The differences are that:

1. You're required to use it to pay taxes, or people with guns will put you in jail

2. A central party can issue unlimited amounts of the currency and give it to whoever they want

Fundamentally, why is it so crazy to have a native digital currency that isn't owned by any one entity, has a set issuance schedule, and can be used as a medium of exchange. Governments have been doing this for centuries, and now we have the technology to make an arguably "better" version. Why not at least try? The real arguments against it seem to be: people are speculating on it.

The additional context here would be that easy money policies and cheap credit create the atmosphere for speculative bubbles. These are the products of financial central planning and regulation. Consumers have negative real rates on their savings accounts. There's nowhere to go, thus they are forced into riskier scenarios to preserve their wealth, much less achieve a yield.

Just as lumber has value as a construction material or baseball cards have value as a collectible, cryptocurrencies have utility for those of us willing to transact or create dapps. This may not be the majority of users, but there are some of us who perceive value here.

While I don't personally value baseball cards, I don't malign those who do. Value is subjective. Even if baseball cards enter into a tulip bubble, nobody is forcing me to buy them. Similarly, if people want regulated financial products there are plenty of options available.

There's no need to malign cryptocurrency or cryptocurrency users with wild generalizations. Different strokes for different folks. Live and let live. Not sure why this should be controversial in a liberal society. The demands for regulation are paternalistic and authoritarian. They are a few steps away from demanding that we, "Think of the children". See the posts elsewhere lamenting the average Joe, who can't be bothered to write a key phrase on a piece of paper. Just too technical for him.

In that context, the ponzi accusations are better understood as scaremongering. Deliberate misrepresentations comparable to "Reefer Madness" hysteria.