/biz/ - Business & Finance

>It is not a ponzi because it has recovered after each crash.
Once more, that feature of past ponzis -- their ending with an abrupt, total, and permanent crash -- was a consequence of their particular features, not of the properties that made them fraudulent investments. Schemes that depended on a blatant lie, like Ponzi's or Madoff's, would crash abruptly when that lie was exposed; which usually happened when an excess of withdrawals over new investments made it impossible to honor the former. Once the truth got revealed, and confirmed by arrest of the operators, there was no further investment, and all investors demanded their money back.

However, as explained above, crypto ponzis sustain their expectation of profitability by technical and economic obfuscation, and claims about an indefinite future, rather than by a single and simple lie that implies constant income. Thus, even when new investments -- and consequently the immediate "payoffs" -- drop by 80% or more, as happened to BTC between 2017-12 and 2018-12, there will be a band of faithful investors who will continue to put all their spare money into the game, firmly believing that the price will "eventually" rise again and "go to the moon". And this money will be enough to keep the blockchain alive, even if with a lower hashrate. That is why even the most obviously broken cryptocurrencies can survive multiple crashes and years of dropping prices, and only die if and when the price finally reaches zero.

>People buy for the ideology, not as an investment for profit.
That is simply not true. For 99.9% of bitcoiners, when they buy bitcoins, they think they are investing -- and doing it because they expect to make big profits. One need only read what they write on forums to realize that. Those who truly buy it for ideological reasons (other than for criminal purposes) must be a very small minority.