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

- Technical scaling issues

Anyone know?

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.

What makes you think it ended? People are still paying in and it appears to still be paying out.

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)?

I was seeing a cached version. Wonder why they chose to do it that way.

It looks like it stopped paying out at 20:27.

Money was still flooding in until around 22:55.

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.

People are still sending money in (!?) https://blockchain.info/address/1ponziUjuCVdB167ZmTWH48AURW1...

Paybacks seem to have halted https://blockchain.info/address/1ponziUjuCVdB167ZmTWH48AURW1...

Here's a cached version: https://web.archive.org/web/20140208200431/http://ponzi.io/

Edit:

With numbers: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

They still have the site up at http://ponzi.io/index2.html anyway

Couldn’t one somehow decentralize a ponzi scheme like that? Maybe with the scripting language included in Bitcoin?

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...

Here's another one: http://igjam.com/?pool

Except that one is just a copy of the html and nobody is going to get paid, the chat doesn't even work.

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.

https://blockchain.info/address/1AQxcdPgMTTQghPXt1EXHU8vEjSn...

heres the correct blockchain info on it.

https://blockchain.info/address/1AQxcdPgMTTQghPXt1EXHU8vEjSn...

now this one is a complete scam.

> 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 :(

Unless you're one of the guys without a chair when the music stopped.

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.

Waiting out the confirmations does impose a pretty high floor -- see how many of the transactions are still unconfirmed.

I already had a few confirmations when they quit, and it would show up in my client without any confirmation (as unconfirmed, of course).

New address: 1PonziAwQpnfj15Br4YFJHygWtd5LQKgN1 (without 1Ponzi in the wallet is not legit).

Interesting... This may be the first time someone's tried to use HN as a platform for phishing.

I foresee a low conversion rate here. HN probably attracts almost the complement of the audience you want to phish in.

There is a spammer in the chat room spamming a new address too.

And this is why no one should ever use vanity addresses.