Yeah. If wealth redistribution to early investors makes something a Ponzi, virtually every public company is a Ponzi.

Some of them are...because they don't actually have any value and have just been growing in value because hey, they've been existing and getting people to buy shit for a while now. Then one day they just tank and you realize that they weren't worth anything. But some other ones are actually worth something. But you can't know if the value of a stock doesn't necessarily show if something is just a worthless product that's appreciating in value just based on lies.

I think crypto does offer an option to have custom coins that can replace stocks with something more unique. You can create debt instruments with them or an alternative to stock that has an actual value in addition to what the crazies on some floor somewhere say something's worth.

Stocks and other things these days aren't literally ponzis...but sometimes I kinda feel like they aren't quite as far off from them as we'd like to think.

The fact is, if you were in the right place at the right time with Bitcoin, it wasn't enough. You had to also take a fair amount of personal financial and other risks.

Tell me about it. I was paying attention the whole time. I wanted to buy Bitcoin...but unfortunately, I listened to the idiots with FUD saying that it was too risky. There were some that got prosecuted, the the risk to reward was probably a lot better than many of us feared. If only I had decided "WTH, I''m gonna buy some Bitcoin! The first time I heard about it." Of course, I also was wanting to do crypto forex trading back a number of years ago and now that's exactly what I'm doing!