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Its only worth is that someone in future will pay for it. It's not like, say, a share where there are assets and potential future income that provide value, or cash that is backed by (to some extent) gold and by future government taxes. That's what I mean by inherently worthless - its value is...

So when we have done our research and discovered that bitcoin has no ownership, the assets are inherently worthless, and there is no-one in charge when things go wrong - is that when we invest?

How do you do that research? Is there a government regulator that you can ask? Where is the balance sheet of bitcoin that shows the coins issued and the underlying assets backing them up? Who are the individuals on the board of bitcoin that are ultimately responsible for the performance of...

The libertarian dream of money free from government control is also money free from government backing. Sterling is relatively stable because everyone is willing to accept it for value, and part of the reason is because the government (on behalf of the people) takes action to make it keep its...

No way will the government bail out crypto failures. If any crypto organisations go bust, then people who have lost their savings, that's tough, but they won't get bailed out any more than Woolworths shareholders did. People who have borrowed money to buy crypto and can't pay it back, well...

T'other way round. What I'm saying is that although people in your circle use cash only to buy drugs, other people still use it for legit purchases.

We're not all the same. You appear to be projecting your own lifestyle onto everyone else, but not everyone lives like you.

A Ponzi scheme is one that pays interest to existing shareholders/members out of funds generated by the capital received from new shareholders/members. If the entity doesn't earn income but claims to pay dividends out of income, then it's a Ponzi. Crypto doesn't generate income, so if it...

It doesn't have a sustainable past. Crypto doesn't generate income, it doesn't possess assets. If you buy it, all you own is a bit of computer code, and all it is worth is what someone else will pay for it. There are no underlying assets and no trading income. The future prospects are based...

New ways of doing business, and shifting views of how industries can operate - I don't dispute that. But they're still doing the same things that people always used to do - Airbnb has made renting property so much easier on both sides, but it hasn't invented the idea of renting property...

Have Amazon and Ebay created new models of business and economy? They're just shops, made bigger. Amazon is much like Argos but on the computer, and Ebay is a second hand shop/auctioneer. They vastly bigger and more efficient at finding the customers than the old systems were, but that's the...

It's certainly an investment. Anything that you buy for the purpose of making money simply by holding it, is an investment by definition. Whether it's shares, pictures, gold, property, bitcoin, tulip bulbs, South Sea companies, or the first shares in IBM.

Not really Ponzi, because Ponzi is where somebody is raking in money from new investors to pass on to the old ones to give the illusion of dividends. In Crypto, someone is producing there essentially worthless bits of code and selling them to anyone who wants to pay for them. And because these...

The money hasn't gone anywhere. The value of crypto coins, like the value of pretty much everything, is dependant on who wants it. A shop full of dryrobes may have stock with value of thousands of pounds, but if suddenly dryrobes are out of fashion and they can't sell them at half the price...

I suspect most people would still rather give up their smart phone than their car, so that's one up to the naysayers.

That's how Ponzi schemes work.

It would be a strange publicity stunt. He's supposed to be in favour of cutting carbon emissions, not investing in the purest form of carbon emissions generation in the market. I suspect it's a gamble that he hasn't thought through. Watch for the sell, fairly soon, with a public apology.