+1
good ponzi scheme and did work. bastards!
Whatever happened, AM wasnt a ponzi. They already paid out ~6x more to investors than they collected from them. Thats by definition completely impossible for a ponzi and a very rare, if not unique occurrence in the whole of bitcoin history. Try naming two other companies that even paid out 100% of their IPO in divs, let alone ~600%.
Now its possible its a legit operation that turned in to a scam, but many things dont make much sense to me if that were the case. To name just one, AM could have collected a shitload more money by pretending to have finished BE3000 which everyone was expecting, and collecting sales and cloudmining sales based on that.
Reasoning is sound, but is also predicated on you having enough info, which, in Bitcoinland, is never the case.
Relatively intelligent folks make much better victims than average Joes. Because, unlike average Joe (who doesn't think much of himself so relies on horse sense), the "smarter" marks assume they would out-think/reason/smart the scammers. Most scams actually build on that misconception.
Outsmarting almost never works--scammers don't even need to be clever to ply their trade--there are cookbooks.
As I said tho, this probably didn't start out as a scam. But it was structured in a way making it almost certain to end up as one.
