Comment by user-the-name
4 years ago
This is the most crucial question about everything crypto-related.
Because it turns out every crypto market is a negative-sum game. If you invest, you are guaranteed to lose on average. If you do happen to win, your gains are coming out of the pocket of someone else who lost even more.
The price of the token in question doesn't enter into this at all. It can rise, fall, anything. It is still a negative-sum game, but some people have not yet realised that they lost.
>It is still a negative-sum game, but some people have not yet realised that they lost.
And some people have not lost at all. As a lifelong poker player, the calculus is very much the same. A poker game where rake is taken out is a negative-sum game. But that doesn't mean that every player loses, even if they play forever. There will be more net losses than net wins, but these are not evenly distributed.
That's a pyramid scheme and/or gambling. You're relying on many marks to lose money to make money.
There's a reason we regulate or ban that.
Yeah, that's gambler thinking.
In reality, you're going to lose money.
As long as there are 2 or 3 guys like you sitting at the poker table its very difficult to lose!
> Because it turns out every crypto market is a negative-sum game.
[Citation needed]
You can't just hand wave and assume this to be true. If the world's major investors decide that crypto represents a store of value, then that's a positive-sum game for crypto. If stablecoins transacted on smart contract chains generate demand for Ethereum to pay for the network transaction fees, then that's a positive-sum game for crypto. If new enterprises start raising capital through DeFi and DAOs instead of traditional capital markets, that's a positive-sum game.
What major investors decide has no bearing on it. Mathematically, it is now, has always been, and will always remain a negative-sum game. This cannot change, it is part of what bitcoin is and how it functions economically.
It is a negative-sum game, no matter how hard you wished it were not.
If crypto is a store of value and its value goes up who exactly is working longer hours to create that additional value?