Topic: Ponzi-style Investment Scheme || Don't think this would work, would it? (Read 757 times)

This was that I thought was the fatal flaw.


Exactly. Money can't be generated or lost, and in order for it to be a totally honest Ponzi the owner must take 0% fee and never run away, which is uneconomical.

Thanks for the input guys, just wanted to see what you guys thought. Locking thread.

Ponzi never works. Not when they don't have any other source of fund to pay the depositors for the profit. It will always end up someone's gonna losse some coins.

tho if a ponzi owner could generate income other than the profit he gets from the depositors it could work. Let's say monetize the website or have a specific fund that will serve as a investment from him to pay all.

The referral works great to let the ponzi run longer because people are enjoying having percentage of it. Without it I doubt most people will want to invite other more people.

People are greedy. Let's face that.

Isn't this basically a pyramid scheme? After you run out of depositors, the whole thing collapses because there is not constant money flow to continue to pay out the older depositors.

This is not a ponzi but is either called matrix or mlm because you have to use part of the money paid by one member to settle another and on and on but ponzi involve an high risk investment whereby you (gamble or trade) with the money that members paid you and runaway when you feel you had enough.
Ponzi life span is very short.

Having worked for a "company" that had this style of business practice aka young and dumb I know why this is viable and not viable at the same time  so say your three guys are the first three investors great cool awesome so now they are getting deposits from everyone that joins in however as you get more and more people the lowest adopters of this are going to get shit on basically as they will probably never see a return on their investment for years however at the top those people who first adopted are going to be stupid rich however eventually if you are just splitting say the 0.99 up the ladder even their investment after awhile will be garbage anyways as you have to keep splitting the 0.99 by say 10000 people just really a dirty business practice that too many people use because its tough to get funding to do a true business I know personally as ive been trying to get my gaming company off the ground for 3 years but back to that big bucks for the first adopters making them pretty much instantly rich as long as people buy into such business


however most ponzies run by offering percentage down the line however there's a time where even that's not viable because too many people are doing it and no one can sell the products anymore even though the product isn't really making them any money its getting people to join under them that makes them the money

So, not going to scam. Don't leave me negative trust... Read first -ve later

I was wondering if something like this would have economic longevity:

When users deposit, the amount of their deposit is added to a pool and 99% of their deposit is distributed back to the previous depositors in the pool by amount deposited to total pool amount.

A separate balance is kept for profit, and only the profit amount is withdrawable - the original deposit is locked in forever.

Eg.

Deposits so far
CoolGuy - 0.1BTC
NotCoolGuy - 0.1BTC

Now, MaybeCoolGuy deposits 0.1BTC. 0.099BTC is distributed between CoolGuy and NotCoolGuy equally, and MaybeCoolGuy joins the depositors.

Deposits after
CoolGuy - 0.1BTC
NotCoolGuy - 0.1BTC
MaybeCoolGuy - 0.1BTC

Profit

When NotCoolGuy deposited, CoolGuy would have gotten 0.099 from his deposit, solely to himself, so:

CoolGuy - 0.1495BTC
NotCoolGuy - 0.0495BTC
MaybeCoolGuy - 0BTC

Would this work? My dumb brain can't figure it out. As far as I can see this would not work as it requires the constant stream of income from new investors just like a normal Ponzi.