Ditto if they'd all bought winning lottery tickets, but that doesn't seem like a sound investment strategy to me either.
This is a silly argument. Maybe like a grandfather saying back in the early 2000s that 'investing in that Google stock is like buying a lottery ticket', when their grandson could see the opportunity there as it slowly defeated the other search engines before growing into the tech giant we see today.
It was new technology. No-one even knew if the internet was going to be a big thing (few suspected how integral the internet has become to our lives & the world economy). There was lots of competition. It was loss making. It wasn't even clear how they would monetise.
Similarly, bitcoin is new technology. There are some futurists who predict it will up-end the world. That sound money that governments can't steal, inflate away, or contain within their borders is going to usher in a new renaissance of human flourishing. Just like Google it has lots of competition, 20,000 'cryptos' & counting. Many promising to be the 'next bitcoin' or to be faster, or offer more bells & whistles. They come, they go. A thousand scams & ponzis & dreams crash against bitcoin every year, never to be seen again. The promising 'next bitcoins' in 2014, 20216, 2018... all gone or sunk into irrelevance. Bitcoin isn't a business, it doesn't make any money. It's a new thing that many tax & financial authorities classified as a commodity. It's an emerging speculative asset, just as Google was a speculative investment back in the day. Comparing it to a 'lottery ticket' just exposes your ignorance. I heard the same claim over the years when it was $150, $600, $20,000, $60,000. At some point, people will have to revise their mental model.
That's an interesting claim, and I'd genuinely like to know how you distinguish between cryptocurrency and Ponzi schemes. After all, if I tell you that I have an investment opportunity for you which involves buying an asset now which will be economically inactive but someone else will pay you more for it in a year or a decade or whatever because they will also be in a position where someone will buy that asset for a greater price at some point in future, then the asset in question is purely valued by Grater Fool Theory, which makes it indistinguishable from a Ponzi scheme.
I make no claim about 'crypto', I'm talking about bitcoin.
According to wiki, 'A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors'.
There's no payouts, there's no-one luring, there's no-one in charge. Bitcoin isn't masquerading as equity, just treat it like a (speculative, digital) commodity. Gold is 'economically inactive', so by your definition is a ponzi! Bitcoin is open-source software that people are voluntarily interacting with. Buying something in the expectation that it will increase in value in the future is exactly the behaviour of people investing in stocks, or buying commodities or real estate.
38% of US investors that were surveyed recently hold 'some kind of cryptocurrency', with the number rising to 60% among millennials! The comparative figures that I've found for the UK are around 3% across all ages. This isn't telling us that the people in the UK are more sophisticated investors, it's showing what a backwater the UK has become. Once again, just like the internet, all the innovation & value creation/capture will happen elsewhere while UK investors debate the merits of buying a slowly-growing insurance company with a good yield while the £ inflates their wealth away.
H