15 years for number 2.
Madoff was first investigated in 1992 and shut down in 2008 for 16 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal
Madoff was paying cashflows to his clients. Bitcoin pays nobody.
What are the longest running pyramid schemes? Gold sees to be running for nearly 5000 years, seems like plenty of runway here.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160127-the-conman-who-p...
Of course there is, that's what the Brazilian guys in the article we're commenting on were arrested for. Schemes worth 5 billion in total that included false promises of delivering monthly returns of 10% on bitcoin 'investments'.
Pretty much the entire value of countless of coins, nfts or other largely imaginary financial products is a game of bigger fool. People paying tens of thousands for NFTs of pictures or tweets makes no more sense than that old scam of buying an acre of land on the moon or of an imaginary country.
And of course the other big similarity is the shared psychological reaction. Rather than people waking up to the fact that they're entangled in increasingly bizarre financial transactions, the rationalizations for the behavior become weirder and weirder.