Someone please convince me that Cryptocurrencies aren’t pyramid schemes or MLMs.

In my opinion, I don’t see a real use case in the world, everyone is buying with the intention of holding it for a long time. And i don’t see any other use case for it. So one point of time it is bound to come down. Also there are articles stating that the bitcoin mining takes up so much power that it is not sustainable in the long run. I maybe wrong though. Let’s wait for other’s input.

Sadly, most of them are actually just that. Pyramid Schemes :p I see them as nascent prototypes of a future digital currency. Crypto : Digital Currency :: Barter System : Current Money

Crypto started off well, had a real use case to make money transfers cheap across borders.. but quickly devolved into this mess.

It's the govt which stops me from investing in crypto. Also I'm sticking hard to one of my core investment beliefs: don't put money in things I don't understand.

I put money in crypto in 2019 thinking it’s tech and I understand it and I can track projects on github. How naive I was lol 😛

I am afraid I will have to disagree here with the other responses. Cryptocurrencies are simply digital ways to capture trust (using blockchain) with one of the use cases being building a decentralized monetary system. Of course, it might fail in the long run. Because of reasons beyond an individual's control (for eg. govts banning it). Highly unlikely but might happen. But that does not mean the tech doesn't work. It's been 10 years since Bitcoin started and the lindy effect is only getting stronger. With regards to your specific question about it being a pyramid scheme, I am not qualified to answer it, but here's a blog post that does a good job.

The distinctions should be glaringly obvious, but because bitcoin is complex and the very idea of money is not well understood, it can easily be confused. Bitcoin will only become a global reserve currency if hundreds of millions (if not billions) more adopt it. And seemingly everyone that goes down the bitcoin rabbit hole ends up on the other side explaining it to their family and friends, pitching it as a better form of money. Sounds kind of like a pyramid scheme, right? Wrong. When Dell started selling PCs on its website in 1996 and everyone told their friends to get a Dell, was it a pyramid scheme? When Apple released the first iPhone in 2007 and everyone told their friends to drop the Blackberry for its superior successor, was it a pyramid scheme?

Technological shifts often happen fast. Ten and twenty years later, smartphones and PCs are ubiquitous. It is all about the quality of the product and the incentive structure. If someone owned Apple stock or Dell stock, did it change the fact that the product itself provided a real value proposition? Was there a direct benefit for telling people about a new technological innovation? The value proposition of an innovation trumps all else. It does not matter how you learn about it; all that matters is whether the innovation provides utility. If it does, people will want to use it; if it doesn’t, they won’t. That is what makes a market.

Happy to answer further questions on #crypto.

IMHO. The tech behind crypto is great. It has applications but the situation right now is that the most of the coins are useless. People pump prices and dump the coins to people with less knowledge. As of right now, you can’t gain even a rupee without someone else loosing it, which kind of makes it a pyramid scheme (not technically but you get the point)

+1 on what @calm-grass-85557 said, it's huge and it's jsut beginning. Top tech folks will not waste all their hours, all their years if it was a tulip. Do your research well. Unfortunately, most people who call it a bubble or a pyramid scheme - have 0$ invested and/or no understanding of it and can't fathom how much the gains are psychologically - it's another bias you should be careful of Lastly, govts can never truly ban it. every country that banned it, adoption went up through the roof.

Thinking from an investment standpoint, the biggest risk now is governments getting together and banning it. Crypto might still survive but that ban can lead to a huge winter. You can say crypto is a pyramid scheme in the sense that people who got in early benefit from the late entrants. But unlike an MLM, it actually adds value to the world. So it’s no different than an AMZN investor telling everyone to buy AMZN after they bought AMZN. One difference between stocks (like AMZN) and cryptos (like DOGE) is that it takes very little to bring cryptos to the market. So there are tons of scams. But not all of them are. To an outsider, every crypto looks like scam/pyramid scheme/MLM. And it is MLM in the way I describe above. But some cryptos can add “value” to the world (like BTC, ETH) and some can’t. Therein lies the difference. What “value”, you say? For that, you will have to research. I can’t point to any single resource that helped me with this. It was many books, podcasts, articles over many years. If I had to recommend a resource, I will start with the “The Bitcoin Standard”.

unrelated, but there was a coin that was all MLM, fun read 😄 https://medium.com/the-capital/onecoin-the-15-billion-fraud-3407c2a1110c