It is likely that the ponzi site is going to steal all investor money in one swoop, not over any period of time. The first sign of trouble is that no one received their payout even though some people should. The ponzi "game" would obviously be abandoned and the operator would create a new account to repeat the process.
The skill is to try and determine when the site will stop paying. This may start with obvious signs like late or missed payments, but it may also be when the owner decides the ponzi has gotten to a certain size. So estimating the size of the ponzi funds and the rate it is growing at is is another way to tell. A really skilled player may even decide to invest more funds when they think the owner is going to close up in order to try and prolong the ponzi.
I don't see how investing more funds would prolong the ponzi. If the owner is going to run away with investor funds then investing more would just give them a bigger take.
I don't think a ponzi would have any real reason to be "late" with payments because the money is all "there" in the unspent inputs of their ponzi address. A missed payment would obviously mean they have run away with investor money.
The ponzi operator will have an unlimited amount of time to launder/mix bitcoin to make it appear that they are not playing against their players. The players on the other hand will have a much shorter time frame to check this. From what I have seen, many people "reinvest" their money back into the ponzi after receiving payouts so seeing money go from the ponzi back into the ponzi would be expected
Well if the owner is using mixers then a skilled player will find out which ones he is using and ignore payments that are tainted by those mixers. And of course they reinvest, you should reinvest if you think it is still likely to pay out.
It would be expected that many players would either buy funds from an exchange or withdraw from other casinos to play the ponzi. A ponzi operator could counter this countermeasure by depositing funds on various exchanges and casinos and then withdraw to fresh addresses.
Point is, not all ponzi's are scams, don't paint them all with the same brush.
They are asking to be trusted with gamblers' money. Most of the ponzi's that I gave negative trust to were brand new accounts. Picking a random ponzi that I gave negative trust to (
BTC-Pyramid-Ponzi) their first post is advertising their site. Looking at their site their minimum investment is .005
BTC. This is very similar to a brand new user asking for a loan on their first post. Would you trust a brand new user with .005
BTC if they promised to repay after x days? I assume the answer is 'no' and the reason is because you do not think they will repay. Why do you think it is that so many
brand new accounts were created to promote ponzis? Do you think it had anything to do with the fact that they plan on eventually running away?
Your points about how a skilled ponzi player can avoid loosing money all involve ways to detect when the operator is trying to cheat. Do you think it would be fair to say that any casino that is actively trying to cheat players would be considered a scam?
