alt Hacker NewsThat's not how Ponzi schemes work. Yahoo had a defacto _monopoly_ and the market had bad discovery leading to bad price information. There was no point at which the internet was /not/ worth investing in and everyone who had experience with it knew that.
The real problem seemed to be that you can only put so much money into pets.com before it becomes stupid. You had more short term investment capital than could be _effectively_ spent at the time. The long term players, as usual, avoided the Archimedian idealism, and were heavily rewarded anyways.
pg has startup brains.
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pg has completely clairvoyant vision, if only about historical events
Why is it so popular to "akshually, Ponzi schemes are different!" these days?
Words have meaning in context, and calling something a "Ponzi scheme" these days means any pyramid-like system that only works as long as new investors come to the table, because that new investor money is the sole source of gains for earlier investors. But once you run out of new investors, which is inevitable, the whole thing collapses. What pg described was exactly a Ponzi scheme in that sense, even if it wasn't a deliberate scam. And that's very different from other types of business ventures that eventually fail because of the more "normal" reason that they just don't gain traction.
Same issue with LLMs - there probably is real value there, but investors have rammed 10 years' worth of investment into the market in 10 months.
That means: 1) Late investors end up taking a bath because it will actually take 10x longer to get a return than they thought. 2) Investment becomes inefficient - there are lot of GPUs being bought in 2025 that should have been bought in 2030. By the time 2030 comes along, those 2025 GPUs will be outdated, so the value they will provide will be less than if they had been purchased at the correct time