> None of the people I know involved with crypto, including miners, daytraders, and HODLers, have not crushed the market in the last nine years.
This is what we call survivorship bias.
> Also, if mainstream crypto is a Ponzi scheme, how is fiat currency not?
This is utter nonsense.
Fractional reserve lending means that money enters the supply on loan. It has to be returned to the issuer, and once its returned, it blinks out of existence. The demand for repayment of the loan is what backs every dollar out there. Each dollar is fully backed by the demand to repay the loan that issued it and the social and institutional mechanisms that enforce this including the courts.
The attributes of a Ponzi scheme are:
1. People invest into it because they expect substantial profits, and ...
2. ... that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. And...
3. ... there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead...
4. ... the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, while ...
5. ... the operators take away a large portion of this money.
Go ahead and explain how that maps to the world's reserve currency. After all category (1) is patently invalidated because nobody holds USD expecting a return in USD. They expect to lose 2% on average to inflation.
Forex is a highly-leveraged speculative zero-sum game where you're betting against a different trader. It's provably zero-sum like futures trading. Negative sum if you include the rake. The total supply of both sides of that trade remains the same, it's simply a redistribution of wealth from the losing trader to the winning trader.
It's also strictly a pair trade meaning that you're buying one currency and selling a different one at the same time, on the anticipation that you can unwind that for more than you spent to enter it. Forex trades are never just "USD" it's always "USD/YYY."
This is completely different than expecting to earn money by holding USD.
Also, if mainstream crypto is a Ponzi scheme, how is fiat currency not?