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Re:Texas man charged with running $60M Bitcoin Ponzi scheme by brazzy on Wednesday July 24, 2013 @03:23AM (#6094887)
I 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.

Re:Texas man charged with running $60M Bitcoin Ponzi scheme by ROFISH on Wednesday July 24, 2013 @03:44AM (#6094951)
Those 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.
Re:Texas man charged with running $60M Bitcoin Ponzi scheme by brazzy on Wednesday July 24, 2013 @04:06AM (#6094997)
So 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.
Re:Texas man charged with running $60M Bitcoin Ponzi scheme by DanBC on Wednesday July 24, 2013 @04:40AM (#6095066)
Maybe those were fake profiles generating confidence among potential 'investors' / marks?
Re:Texas man charged with running $60M Bitcoin Ponzi scheme by Luc on Wednesday July 24, 2013 @06:42AM (#6095362)
I 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.