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The Brooklyn Bridge example was a rhetorical question about when you lose the money. When you buy something worthless, or when you find out it is worthless? I think I have already elaborated on this a few times. But no, I did not actually claim that “everyone that has ever purchased crypto has lost all their money” because, as you quote, “Everything won in crypto, someone else lost”, i.e. clearly that statement says that someone is winning something, but that gain comes from someone else. So there are winners and losers, or early buyers and bagholders. Anyone who resell before it collapses will have won something. But the total sum of money won, will be less than the total sum of money invested. I have explained this to you a dozen times now. This is a widely accepted truth...

Actually, 35 times as many, yes (it was a 1:7 split then a 1:5 split).

It is always hard to do these comparisons because rates change, and a SWIFT transfer may take a day or two, but I concur, in my experience, I have also gotten pretty good rates from Krungthai when I did SWIFT transfers, but I think I had to send > $10k for them to give me the better exchange rate, which was not listed on their site, but seemed to be a market rate, as initially they would call me to have me OK the rate they could get for me.

Uhm… yeah… that was not really what any of us said. We said that (in a zero-sum game) someone’s profit is another person’s loss. I think we have been over this a dozen times already.

The stock has split twice, so I have 21 more stocks than I initially paid for. And in split-adjusted price, my first share in Apple was bought for about $2.5 and that now gives me a yearly dividend of $0.88. So yes, effectively the dividend has double many times, and yes, I do have a lot of shares today. And you know what? All this money comes from people buying Apple’s products, products that have an extremely high consumer satisfaction rating, so nobody is being cheated here, nor is the money I earned, as an investor in Apple, somebody else’s loss.

And @Yellowtail can’t even understand what is being argued. I brought up Amway as an example of a scheme where 99% of people (according to the FTC) makes no money, and yet it has existed for more than half a century. This was in support of him saying that bitcoin is not going away, i.e. I think the same, bitcoin can exist for half a century with 99% of people not making any money, Amway is precedence for that, but it is sad, just sad, and I really hope people get smarter about their money and don’t waste them on stupid stuff like crypto or MLM schemes, but history has taught us that people are easily lured by unrealistic promises of riches…

Doesn’t match with what was said. The micro lending platforms I have seen, you create an account on the platform, deposit funds, and then you lend out via the platform, both so that the platform can get a cut and control who repays what etc. You also actively select who you want to lend to, although they may have some auto-pilot stuff / pools that you can select, and you receive money after you have sent it (i.e. not before being repaid). You implied everything goes through her personal bank account (not a platform) and that she receives money before she pass them on. This does not at all sound like micro lending. Also, Shopee appears to be a marketplace, not a micro lending platform. So the hypothesis proposed by @mtls2005 still sounds like the most likely. Could be that the person using her just told her it was micro lending as a cover story, but I don’t think it holds up to scrutiny.

You pay a fee for all outwards transfers, unless they happen through your debit card. But if you never need to transfer money to other people, it could work. As for security, Wise keep customer funds separate from their operating cash, this is required by law, so if Wise goes bankrupt, your funds should be safe. I’ve actually considered something like this myself, but I need bill pay and other stuff that Wise can’t handle.

If you can get her bank statement then it should be possible to see if the origin of all these small transfers are the same or not, and if they are direct transfers from another Thai bank account, through a debit/credit card, or other payment processor. This might give a better idea of what kind of scam she is involved with.

Small for new investors, I started buying Apple shares > 10 years ago because of their ridiculous low P/E compared to their earnings potential, so the dividend must have paid for the cost of my shares many times over, and I don’t have to worry that all of Apple (and thus my cashflow) is gone tomorrow because of a tweet, as they actually produce highly desirable products that they sell worldwide with a 40% profit… ????

Who brought this up? Why do you need to compare and rank? Again just deflecting… You can seize whatever assets there is, punish the fraudster, and take steps to make it harder for this person to commit fraud again. E.g. the CEO of Tether is banned from doing business in China because of their past behavior, which should send a strong signal to people who have blind faith in this company. But regardless of how hard it is to recoup your loss, you asked if you sell a stock for a company that goes bankrupt an hour later, if you owe them anything, and I answered that there is a very likely chance you, or whoever was lying about the company’s finances, do owe them something. It is beyond the point whether or not you can actually get it back (which you often can, see e.g. Bernie Madoff, they did get a lot of the money back). But she was. Jurors found Holmes guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud against investors and three charges of wire fraud. She was acquitted of defrauding the public. That refers to the people who had paid $10 for a blood test and gotten a wrong diagnosis (or whatever).

So you think Amway is a great example of how we can have schemes (like crypto) going on indefinitely, and it is great as long as a handful of people get rich, who cares about the millions of suckers losing money?

You’ll have to tell me the date, and I can look up for you if something happened on that date. But are you still not getting how stocks work? Because I am getting tired of repeating myself.

More whataboutism… But since you ask, it is because some people think Tesla will soon earn 10 times as much as they currently do. This is somewhat consistent with Tesla’s own guidance (50% vehicle sale increase over the next couple of years), and they did have a very good 2021, increasing vehicle deliveries with 87% compared to 2020, so better than their guidance. Personally, I am not bullish on Tesla, but there is clearly a lot of momentum here. No way Apple can increase number of sold iPhones with 50% over the next couple of years, so that is why Tesla trades at a higher P/E, i.e. more likely to grow earnings significantly in the near future. So again, there are actually real stuff that drives this! Sure, fans of Elon Musk are are definitely creating upward pressure on the stock, but if it becomes too extreme, shortsellers will come in and short the stock, because in the short term, the market might be a popularity contest, but in the long term, it is a scale, and hype surrounding a stock will not last forever, if the company does not deliver.

So why do we have regulation, oversight, and consumer protection? People buy demonstrably worthless stuff all the time. Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain. Still in business, but I certainly wouldn’t consider it “making good money”, as I quoted, the top 10% has a median income of less than $4,500/year. And that is the number from Amway themselves, if you go by the FTC numbers then they found that “less than 1% of MLM participants profit” where the rate for a legitimate small business is 39%. My point was that you can have these schemes, where tens of thousands of people are losing money year over year, and it can go on for decades. So in that respect, I do unfortunately believe you might be right that crypto can go on for a very long time. I personally think these things are bad for our society, but I guess you don’t. If you buy stock in a company which took steps to hide or simply withhold information that would have told you that they were about to go out of business then the CEO and board of directors will be liable for your loss. You will of course have to fight them in court, but this happens, we just had Elizabeth Holmes convicted of conspiracy to defraud Theranos investors, and before that, we had Trevor Milton (Nikola founder) indicted for lying about “nearly all aspects of the business’.

Care to elaborate?

Bernie Madoff ran a ponzi scheme for more than a decade. The point isn’t about how long it can run, it is about the lack of value being created, so on average, nobody is making any money with crypto, even though it can go on forever, we are just moving money from one person to another, and burning a lot of energy in the process.

It takes a 3-5% cut of the zero-sum game going in in the casino (by giving you less than 50% odds of winning on all their games). The casino owners here are equivalent to the bitcoin miners, which also get a cut of all your transactions. But notice that in a casino, you start by buying tokens that you use to gamble. These tokens keep their value throughout the game, while the casino owners get their 3-5% profit. And when you cash out, each token is worth the same as when you bought it. My other reply was a little long-winded: The profit comes because Apple has grown to a company with higher earnings. Simpler example: I invest 100,000 baht in a noodle shop. After a year, the shop is making 75,000 baht a year. Would you buy this shop from me for 150,000 baht? Let’s assume yes, because you make back your money in two years. So where did my 50,000 baht profit come from? It came from the economic activity of the noodle shop. You can view the 50,000 baht as a loan secured by the future economic activity of the noodle shop (its cashflow).

You are buying a share of Apple’s cashflow. The share price for Apple has historically been priced around 15 times earnings, but after they have entered services and shown that they can not just keep subscribers (guaranteed repeated revenue) but have also consistently grown it, investors are now willing to pay around 30 times earnings for a share of this cashflow, as they are now convinced that Apple is here to stay (15 times earning has always been a low valuation of Apple). If Apple goes up 10% in a week (I don’t think that has actually happened, but let’s just assume) then it is generally because they showed much better earnings than expected, i.e. their cashflow increased, or possibly, that rumors/supply chain leaks indicate more demand than expected for their products, or even new products in the pipeline). There are also macroeconomic factors, e.g. initially we all thought that COVID-19 shutdown would cause people to stop buying Apple products, because all their stores had to close, and Apple also warned about not meeting their guidance wrt. earnings because of supply chain disruption in China, so the stock fell in price, because suddenly the cashflow we bought was expected to decrease. Of course once they started to release numbers for how much they actually sold during COVID-19, people saw that their cashflow had only increased (with record breaking sales), and so, the stock went up accordingly. There is of course an element of speculation with certain stocks, e.g. if I buy Coca Cola, I pretty much know what their earnings will be, so their cashflow is pretty consistent, and so is their stock price, but if I buy Apple, I may expect them to introduce AR/VR googles or a car, and therefore I overpay for their share, compared to current earnings/cashflow, because I expect the cashflow to increase, and I know, once they actually have released the AR/VR googles and we can see how well they sell, it is too late to get a discount on this future cashflow. Remember cashflow is what gives us earnings per share and what funds my quarterly dividend from holding Apple shares, or the share buybacks, that increase my ownership ratio in their cashflow. Now, please explain to me what fundamentals cause Bitcoin to go up and down!

Many coins have already gone to zero. But I am also skeptical that all will go to zero, as we have also seen obvious scam coins go through several pump and dump phases. The supply of greater fools is almost infinite, but as it is not actually infinite, continuous growth is impossible. The question is basically just how long this can be dragged out via wash trading, unbacked stable coins, staking schemes that keep people from cashing out, and people who will continue to be in denial, and still pour money into crypto, look e.g. at SafeMoon, it reached ATH in April of last year, but people still pour money into it, and the SafeMoon subreddit is full of optimistic people that try to talk up the coin. And this goes back to what you seem to have a problem with. If I bought SafeMoon in April of last year, did I already lose my money, or are they first lost when I sell at a loss? My view is that when you buy something that has no value, you lose your money, but maybe you can recover some or all of your loss, by finding a greater fool. Though this part is irrelevant to the points that have been made. Regarding going on indefinitely, there are several multi-level marketing companies that have existed for decades, e.g. Amway has existed for something like 50 years. If you look at their numbers, the median earnings among the top 10% is $4,402. That is pretty lousy, and that is top 10%, now imagine how much the bottom 90% make? Probably many of them lose money. Amway is not a zero-sum game per se, so in that respect it is actually better than crypto, but crypto could end up being something like Amway, and probably already is, i.e. a few on the top make money, majority lose money, but for unknown reasons, they keep pouring money into crypto/Amway products.

At this point, I think @Yellowtail is just trying to save face by arguing that “lost” and “will lose” are not the same thing. It seems he understands perfectly well that no value is being created, demand is driven solely by speculation about being able to resell to a greater fool, and that in the end, it is just a zero-sum game with those who cash out early making profits but those who are left holding the bag will have paid for all of this profit, and also the billions of dollars that it has cost to run the entire scam from start to finish.

OK, so no final consumer, no value, just speculative bubble. Seems we are then in agreement.

You keep ignoring the actual question: What drives supply and demand? It is meaningless to say that price is driven by supply and demand by itself. For example higher demand for natural gas was driven by an unusually cold winter in Europe and China switching away from more polluting energy sources. Lower supply of coffee was caused by drought in Brazil and that 2021 is an off year for the growers. For bitcoin? Sure, price is driven by supply and demand, but we basically have infinite supply of crypto coins and blockchains (I can run my own, if I need one), and demand? Nobody actually need the coins for anything, they may need transactions but that demand would manifest itself in the mining fees, not in the price of the coins themselves. We can actually see this with ETH gas fees which are often quoted as costing $50 or more.

This goes back to my Brooklyn Bridge example: I.e. do you lose your money when you buy something worthless, or when you find out that you cannot resell it. This is rather pointless though, as we seem to be in agreement, you just don’t think our terminology is correct, because we talk in past tense, rather than future tense, but that is because we look at it in the abstract, i.e. in a zero-sum game, someone’s gain is another person’s loss, but that person may not have realized it yet. If you say “will be” or “is” doesn’t make any difference to me, and does not make my statement “a lie”, as you have postulated a handful of times. It was a definition, taking inputs, such as labour, materials, time spent on training/education/transportation/storage, and produce an output, be it service or product, that someone need, but is unable to create themselves without spending more resources, than they would need to spend earning money to just buy it: That creates value for the buyer, as they get something they need cheaper, than it would cost them to make/do it themselves. It provides information that previously would be more difficult to obtain. E.g. in the past, I would have to buy a guide book to learn about things in Thailand, I would have to call up a bank and try to find a person that speaks English to answer my basic banking questions, etc. So definitely there is a “product” here that would cost me more to create myself, without this website. That said, you are right that it is probably more entertainment than true value, which is also why neither of us pay to use this website, because it doesn’t actually give us that much value. This is where you are conflating things, as was also pointed out before. Two things: Yes, a casino makes money for the owners. But you can run a zero-sum game and still earn a cut of this zero-sum game. The point about zero-sum game isn’t that no money is being made by any of the participants, the point is that money is simply being moved from one person to another. So if we are ten people going to a casino, we don‘t expect all ten of us to leave the casino with a profit, and the casino itself to run at a surplus. But for crypto, which is also a zero-sum game, many crypto-proponents do think that we are all going to be rich form this. Take the person who started this thread, he claims investing in crypto is a no-brainer, cause it only goes up. It is in this context that we point out, that it is a zero-sum game, so everything you win, someone else lost, sorry, eventually someone else will lose. And this is where we also bring up the lack of value creation, because crypto-proponents also tend to say things like “it’s the same as stocks” (again, this thread has an example where someone called stocks a pyramid game), but a company with a business model does create value, so it increase the money for all investors, not just the first investors who resell their shares before it becomes worthless. Penny stocks though are a zero-sum game, i.e. a company that doesn’t actually produce anything of value. There’s a long history of scams related to these, it’s basically your crypto-currency of yesterday. The second thing conflated is the game itself and the ecosystem surrounding it. You are right that a baseball stadium / the leagues creates lots of value, if it was not clear, I never disputed that. This is a real business with lots of activity, we could go through each of them, but I digress. As have also been said before, sure, there is an ecosystem around bitcoin and other crypto-currencies, and yes, these are real businesses and do create value. What I have been talking about is solely buying crypto and expect price to go up, not buying shares in a business that sells shovels to gold diggers. I don’t think such statement has been made. There is a massive collective delusion, who fail to understand that, at best, it is a zero-sum game (but in reality, it is a negative sum game), and this delusion gets propagated by mainstream media like CNBC or the person who started this thread (who have dozen of threads talking up crypto as a sure investment), but that’s it, well, apart from all the fraud going on, see e.g. my comment above about Tether, but that is a lesser thing, because there will always be fraud, the problem right now is that people think that buying crypto is a good investment, and many people spend more than they can afford to lose, but mathematically the total sum of money gained from buying crypto will be less than the total sum “invested”. This last statement though has often been disputed by crypto proponents, but no-one can explain how the sum gained can ever exceed the sum “invested” when crypto itself is a non-productive asset with no final consumer.

This is what we are saying, this is what a zero-sum game is. A zero-sum game does not look at a single transaction, it looks at the entire game, from start to finish. And I think my amended definition of creating value was pretty good ???? And also, betting on sports, lotteries, casinos, etc. are also all zero-sum games. It is simply moving money from the many to the few, giving a cut to those arranging the game, but not creating any value. This is probably why gambling is either illegal or highly regulated in most jurisdictions, because it is an easy way to lure money away from people without providing them anything of value, other than maybe a dopamine rush.