The bet that this thing will implode in the next 120 days is risky. Plenty of Ponzis, including some BTC-related, have lasted for longer than BT's current age. I can see it going for another 4 months and even longer depending on how many suckers are still out there.
It will go boom, eventually, but I think 1 year is a safer bet.
You do understand these guys are online over 9 months. Add 1 more year to this time and they would be 21 months online. Since full ROI is under 4 months, including reinvesting, this would mean people would reach ROI 5 times during this period.
Your math is correct!
You really think something which is not legit can survive to pay out 500% return on investment to 2000 of its members just from ponzi earnings?
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IMO, this just does not add up.
Bernard Madoff - Ran a ponzi scheme for an unknown period of time, but at least a decade.
Trendon Shavers aka Pirateat40 - Ran BTCST, now known to be a ponzi-scheme using Bitcoin for almost a year offering a constant 7% per week (note: the higher the payouts, the faster it collapses)
These are the most famous examples, but there are many, many more lesser known schemes that lasted for quite some time. An overview, obviously not complete, can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ponzi_schemesBT has a few things going for it that make it more stable than the average Ponzi scheme. The payout rate is rather low. It's still too high to be realistic for arbitrage trading (as I've already explained in this thread or the other one, an argument that never got an attempt at a rebuttal), but lower than most schemes. Also, the 120 day lockin period prevents bank-runs when there's a scare among investors due to downtime or some other negative event.
Also, I never said that BT would last another year. I said that "1 year" would be a safe bet for the timeframe in which the scheme to have collapsed. I give it reasonable odds that it won't make it another 120 days, especially with their "audit" being stalled (people will get suspicious eventually), but I certainly think it's possible that it'll live another 120 days, which is why I recommended against making that particular bet.
Oh, and I would still like to hear some counters to my arguments for this scheme being a Ponzi-scheme. "They are paying" doesn't count as an argument, because every Ponzi-scheme pays perfectly. Until they don't.