Why does it need to be justified? I don’t think it’s scam or fraud. That implies some intent to deceive. But still, if you got rich just because you put some money into BTC 15 years ago, you didn’t really do anything, did you? You didn’t invest in a company that produced a billion dollars worth of new cars or invented a new drug. Nothing was created. No service was provided.
Granted, I am a very conservative investor, so Bitcoin would be unimaginable as an investment for me.
I see the possibility of insane profits in the first few iterations with a quick buy/quick sell strategy but aside from TrumpCoin, which even idiots could see as a scam, I struggle to believe how incredibly stupid people are with their money.
I’m not a model of success, myself, but I have amassed money in various funds with solid backing within the traditional investment sector.
I work with a large number of 23-30 year olds and a few 30-45 year olds. Young professionals earning $75k to $130k in a high cost of living area (Boston)
We (my wife and I) have amassed a net worth of several million by saving 30%+ of our earnings for 30+ years and investing in mostly index funds. We started our kid’s college fund five years before she was born, so she can attend a university at a cost of $300k debt free.
My colleagues find this a totally unrealistic model. I had the same income as they did, adjusted for inflation in my 20s. I lived at a consumption level way below what they have.
Their models are the few folks who invested $10k in bitcoin at age 25 and are now 40 year old millionaires. They seem to regard me as something of a religious fanatic in a church of Old Finance. They find it quaint that I’m not freaked out about “fiat money” and “paper assets” that can be inflated away in value by capricious governments and corporations.
And these are people with recent Finance degrees! I don’t know what they are teaching at the fairly reputable institutions they attended about money and banking. But it scares me. I hear about this institutions being “woke” but at least in the business school they seem to be acquiring dogma that is extremely free market oriented and very hostile to any kind of financial market regulation.
And more specifically, the creators of bit coin did invent something. They invented a mathematical entity that’s intrinsically scarce (like gold) but also can be expanded in supply as the economy grows (like fiat currency). These are both features that economic theory says it’s desirable in a currency. And of course, they also invented block chains to make bit coins something you could actually own, in a way that doesn’t depend on any government entity.
The key insight was to make it something like prime numbers that becomes more and more scarce as you “extract” it. That’s why back in the day people talked about mining bit coins. The really early ones were cheap to mine.
That’s a real invention. Like gold, cowrie shells, or $US, it only has value if other people want it. But it was designed to be an effective currency. And tulips hold real value but can be overvalued. I’m not predicting where bit coins will go in value. But they aren’t a fraud or a ponzi scheme.
I quite like tulips. They are pretty.
But at least, they are visible, and their bulbs will produce new tulips next season.
The catastrophic tulip mania was limited to actual physical things, as absurd as it was.
The latter point is completely totally untrue.
The protocol has an effective limit of 21 million coins. If you read the original bitcoin papers, the total number of coins was deliberately limited in part because, philosophically, they explicitly did NOT want the supply to be expanded like fiat currency (much libertarian-adjacent trashing of fractional reserve banking in the early days when it was mostly a few true believers and opportunity seekers).
But, perhaps recognizing reality, designed in such a way that the limit would not be reached for over a century. So while it is an invention, it would be a stretch to call it the invention of a full-fledged currency, which is the line where many of the scheme/fraud accusations may actually have some merit.
Bringing this back around to this thread, this type of common misunderstanding is common in any pseudo-philosphy. Once some idea or concept or artistic work or anything gains sufficient traction, adherents, academics, and critics often do get major underlying points of it wrong and often don’t realize some of the inherent flaws and contradictions. This is as true of Rand as it is of bitcoin.
I was at a business school (also in Boston) alumni function a few weeks back and I was amazed at the absurdity of some of the graduation plans of some of the undergrads.
Whether it’s finance majors who think careers in crypto are the future or woke college students who want socialism, to me that is a symptom of a society with too much money, disconnected from actual work, perhaps too focused on a youth-oriented culture. Like the concept of actual work is as abstract to them as hunting a fucking buffalo for food and shelter might be to me. Like money just appears from wherever and they can just use it to pay for whatever service they need.
So, is like the very concept of “interest” anti-Objectivist? Or again is real work defined as only designing (got to keep the engineers defined as real workers don’t we 
) or building physical objects?
Or is it even restricted to building physical objects that the OP deems valuable?
At least none that you approve of as “valuable.”
That’s a really weird set of examples for illustrating your intended point. People in socialist societies do actual work. (Vietnam, for example, is officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam; their major industries include agriculture, energy, mining, and manufacturing.)
The US even has some actual self-identified socialist politicians, such as Senator Bernie Sanders and the NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. They work, and they expect the people they supervise to work, and their plans for more socialist-oriented governmental structures are founded on thoroughly reasonable expectations of people in society doing work.
I don’t get where you’ve come up with the odd notion that just because somebody supports socialist principles, they’re automatically “disconnected from actual work” or burdened with “too much money”. Oh right, you got that notion from the anticommunist extremist fantasy scenarios of Ayn Rand.
Well, nothing…period.
Think of interest as the cost to rent money. No one is just going to just lend you some money until you are done with it.
This makes more sense if you think of the various schools making up a university as independent institutions that just happen to use the same email software and have their diplomas printed with the same color scheme. It’s not as if Harvard’s business school, med school, and law school all share some kind of “Harvard approach” to education.
And “socialism” means what to you exactly? I’m just curious because people throw this term around a lot meaning a lot of different things.
You may have confused me with someone who actually cares about Bitcoin? It, and the Blockchain the supports it, is an interesting invention. One that several people i know have lectured me about, even if i didn’t exactly remember the details. It really is a meaningful invention, even if you can’t tap it with a hammer.
Advertising can alert you to the existence of something you want or need that you would otherwise be unaware of.
The only practical use for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency on the other hand is criminal enterprise.
Sure, and that memory was the main thrust of my post, even if it wasn’t explained well.
A lot of people treat objectivism the same way as some take bitcoin now - they get their own vague take on it based on what they may have retained from their own reading or more likely from what others have told them but bearing limited resemblance to the original and hand-waving the inconsistencies away. We can see the OP doing this to some extent, e.g. using terms in a way others may not. And Ayn Rand rather infamously did this herself at times.
Well as I said earlier, it’s all sort of BS anyway, right? I mean I have no idea if Ayn Rand would look at BTC as a brilliant financial invention or digitized looting.
Libertarians and pro-Randians view any sort of revenue generated as sacrosanct, regardless of how dubious the source.
Leftists take a personal affront to Ayn Rand.
Conservatives cry “socialist” at any government spending they don’t agree with (which doesn’t include police, military, and their Social Security checks).
I have some former NYer friends who are all up in arms about socialist Zohran Mamdani ruining NYC by using city taxes to pay for free busses. But apparently they aren’t capitalist enough to raise their children in a $10,000+ a month apartment.
The underlying technology is not BS, and at least is intellectually interesting if definitely questionable as a practical technological innovation.
Its use as a ‘currency’ almost certainly is complete BS.
But that’s more of less the same thing as what true objectivist believers (or even just people who think there’s some ‘good points’) do - they see the parts they like, twist it a bit in their own heads, and say other people just don’t get it
It does mean a lot of things in real life, from specific socialized industries in democratic-socialist countries to the central planning/market mixes in a socialist republic like Vietnam. Actual socialists represent all those positions and many more. But only in Rand-style plutolatrous propaganda fantasies do you see the term used as shorthand for people simply having no concept of what actual work is.
In fact, given the populations and political histories of India and China as well as many other countries, I’d venture to bet that a majority of the actual work done in the real world is carried out by people who consider themselves socialist in some significant way and to some significant extent. Assuming that “wanting socialism” must mean that a person is totally disconnected from the realities of work just seems ludicrously naive and/or crudely propagandistic.