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I remember when egold was a big thing, and every other site called itself a 'HYIP', high yield investment program -- they were all ponzi schemes, but the popula
by mmanfrin 13y ago
I remember when egold was a big thing, and every other site called itself a 'HYIP', high yield investment program -- they were all ponzi schemes, but the popularity of the larger ones spawned an entire ecosystem of these sites that were propelled only on the naive fantasies of those buying in to them. People truly believed that these programs worked.
- brazzy 13y agoI recently heard about HYIP for the first time and did some reading - the amount of self-deception I saw was breathtaking. There were even sites that rated HYIPs by their "investment" structure and current payout status. People knew it was a Ponzi scheme and still believed that they could profit. Truly, money eats brains.
- ROFISH 13y agoThose HYIP forums felt, to me at least, like it was Ponzi meta-investing. Many of the HYIPs paid out for a little while to encourage more 'investments'. So the part of the game was to get into early ones, but then get your money out before it closed.
- brazzy 13y agoSo there were absolutely no differences to "normal" Ponzi schemes, except the participants went into into fully knowing what it was, but believing they knew how to beat the odds.
- DanBC 13y agoMaybe those were fake profiles generating confidence among potential 'investors' / marks?
- Luc 13y agoI uh... think I may have supplied one of those operators with software to automate payments. It was all rather arms-length and I didn't enquire, but it involved paying out interest to hundreds of e-gold accounts. And I got paid well.
- morsch 13y agoBTCST also spawned a huge ecosystem of "pirate pass through" operators -- the operator of BTCST went by the nickname PirateAt40 -- who gathered small deposits, offering small time "investors" the opportunity to piss away their BTC.