Again, I've said I'm not trying to convince you or anyone that it's not currently in a bubble or risky. No doubt there is some money laundering (BTC-e) and securities fraud going on. The pyramid scheme accusation has been aired here for like 5 years now. One day, maybe soon, there will be a few prominent doomsayers here and elsewhere who'll be lauded for calling the crash, when they'll really have called 15 of the last 2 crashes.
"They're self-proclaimed in the sense that the value of the whole field is entirely questionable" -- putting aside that this doesn't really make semantic sense, I think we're past the point where we can say this is objectively wrong. The field may be inflated to bubble proportions, but, yeah -- no offense -- I do think it's stupid to be arguing at this point that PoW cryptocurrencies -- Bitcoin at the least -- are valueless and/or a pyramid scheme.
> I do think it's stupid to be arguing at this point that PoW cryptocurrencies -- Bitcoin at the least -- are valueless and/or a pyramid scheme.
I completely agree that BitCoin is not a pyramid scheme, but we're not talking about BitCoin. We're talking about <AltCoinX> which is being used in a similar fashion to shares with an ICO (except the token isn't worth a portion of the company, it's "worth" a portion of some product that may exist some day). Bringing up BitCoin is muddying the waters.
Claiming that a token used as part of a product (that doesn't exist yet) is like Bitcoin (and is not a pyramid scheme or at least, not vaguely some form of confidence scheme) is a bit like claiming that you can use gift coupons or poker chips as a fiat currency. That just doesn't make sense to me.
OK, fair enough. There are definitely tokens that either could be in-app-purchases backed by a company's database, some that are accidental securities, and some that are outright scams.
Coming back to the original topic -- I don't think ZRX is any of those. Is it worth a quarter billion dollars? Technically and literally yes at the moment, but it's almost all speculative value. I think one thing we could agree on is it would be really nice to be able to short some of these things. (You can short a handful on some exchanges, but none of the ones I can see going to near zero in less than a year)
"They're self-proclaimed in the sense that the value of the whole field is entirely questionable" -- putting aside that this doesn't really make semantic sense, I think we're past the point where we can say this is objectively wrong. The field may be inflated to bubble proportions, but, yeah -- no offense -- I do think it's stupid to be arguing at this point that PoW cryptocurrencies -- Bitcoin at the least -- are valueless and/or a pyramid scheme.