I'm curious - anyone know what happened to cause the (inevitable) end?
From what I can tell, it doesn't seem to be the lack of new interest/money. Possibilities I can think of:
- Author got scared (of legal repercussions)
- Author got greedy (pocketing much of the last deposits)
- For some reason (research?) it was intended from the beginning to only run to a certain point
No idea but if I had to guess... author got scared. BTC deposits were rocketing in just before the site went dark and he would probably have shot past the 1000BTC mark in hours rather than days if he'd have left it up. Running a public ponzi scheme that attracted over half a million dollars worth of deposits in a week with no signs of slowing down would have certainly given me sweaty palms :D
I feel it was technical scaling issues, probably from the sudden surge.
I say this because I received an absurd amount of BTC compared to what I put in (bare minimum, only a few cents) which would only have happened as a side effect of a technical issue.
Or they realised too late that they had a bug which caused some people to get back 900% instead of 120%. That would break the model. Underpaying is something you could correct retroactively, overpaying not so easy.
I'm looking at the huge text on the home page saying "The experiment is over." If that can't be trusted, then why in the world would anyone expect to receive a payout at this point (as if it weren't already incredibly risky)?
Overall with 344 BTC recieved, if everything was paid out as expected, the site operator would lose around 69 bitcoins.
As it stands, the address still has ~20 bitcoins left in the wallet, but obviously owes a lot more than that even if it were to pay the remaining payments 1:1 rather than 1:1.2.
this would probably be possible in etherum. might even be a killer app because it establishes a completely transparent and trustable ponzi scheme, which might not work out terribly different from giving loans in the end...
actually I just put in 0.01 BTC, got back 0.015, put that back in again, and now I have 0.0225. I dare not try again, quite pleased with my USD$7 profit. There is definately something much scammier about it. The # of transactions doesn't increment, and with 150% payout it will die much quicker.
They're not incrementing because all of their HTML is still pointing to ponzi.io's web sockets. All I can see from their address on blockchain is lots of receiving and one sent transaction.
> We will pay back everyone we can. We are not making money from this.
Paying people back can be done instantly. Adding 20% needed a wait. If they stopped the experiment an hour ago, I'd say my coins should have returned by now :(
They already paid back some people at 20%, so it's impossible for them to pay you back now. They are in 'debt,' even if they just gave coins back at 1:1 they can't repay.
