Topic: Why Ponzi schemes are called "Ponzi" - page 2. (Read 455 times)

But I guess governments around the world doesn't want to used the word Ponzi because of the negative connotation about it but its obvious that they've been pulling this kind of stunt for their populace hehehehe. Well crypto is a good way if you really wanted to have a retirement plan, just imagine investing just small amounts and accumulated it overtime like 10-20 years, it will be huge.

Great comparation bro, here in Croatia is same thing. We have ratio something around one worker for one retiree. I am a bit worried about that and I must have my own retirement plan where crypto could help me with.

Ponzi schemes are still everywhere. It is much popular in countries which are still developing or underdeveloped where many people would subscribe to investment deals with high interests as returns in order to  get rich in a quick way. Most of these investments ends up as being scam. Online ponzi schemes has also become much more popular in this digital era on the internet.

Some retirement plans are Ponzi schemes.

In Brazil the official retirement plan made by the government is a ponzi scheme.

The ones who are retiring now didn't contribute enough to pay their pensions. So the ones who are working now are paying for the olders pension. And so on.

The problem is that our life expectancy ia getting higher and people are having less children. So soon the new people wont be able to pay for olders pensions...

I listened to an audiobook and a podcast that is about Ponzi, the history of it. Where it builds a continuous revenue or until they call the bubble, bursting. And I have learned that they are just cycling that and indeed is risky. I have experienced and encountered right on Ponzi schemes that are too obvious, and I have asked this many times to them. ”How long are you existing? My rule of thumb when I hear about that. It's a chance to profit! It's risky but gives excellent returns. Too good to be true things are probably scams or someone would get hurt.

The similar scheme is well known for the Russians. I can intimate you that there was a quite famous person in Russia who could do the same in the scale of the whole country. His name was Sergei Mavrodi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Mavrodi) who was found the pyramid called MMM. Why is he so notable? There are some interesting facts about his activity. For example, he could accumulate and manage 1/3 from the all ruble cash in the country. Just imagine the scale whether it is possible that somebody in US will accumulate and manage 1/3 from the all dollar cash in the country. Also he had a direct dialog with the government where the officials tried to negotiate with him but as far as I know they could not. Eventually the pyramid was crashed and he did not repay money to his investors.

I have been read his history too through an internet article and scheme pyramid called ponzi because he was the first time to use this method to scamming people even more than a years he still can scamming many people use this method but unfortunately his legacy method still exist until now continue by greedy people who only care about money

The first time I learned about the Ponzi system was a very logical system, because my friend, who taught me this system, trusted this system incredibly. When I invested my money in the first ponzi system, even though I liked this system because of my income, I learned how dangerous the system was after. Of course, at the end of all these experiences I did a little research and I had a very good information about the system. Although it was not surprising that the system was taken from its founder, the logic used in the system was very interesting. Although I have no extra knowledge other than the points that you specify, I think it is possible to say a lot about this system. Finally I want to leave a note. The largest known ponzi scheme in the cryptocurrency market was BitConnect.

Interesting.

Has anyone ever thought insurance could be similar to a ponzi scheme? 

Well, I have wondered if insurance could be similar to a pyramid scheme or ponzi in that there are those on the top of the "pyramid" whose costs are being covered by those on the bottom. The main differences may be ponzi schemes relying more heavily upon a growth of their userbase to sustain costs, wheras insurance tends to be more institutionalized with a more thoroughly saturated userbase. And of course there is a necessity context to insurance.

I guess the main question is whether insurance policies are officially mandated to produce greater profits for various institutions. Or whether they're necessitated by other factors. I think historically people had healthcare long before health insurance was invented. There could be historical precedents for systematically analyzing and perhaps even putting forth a decent argument contending that various forms of insurance could be eliminated and replaced with better frameworks for achieving identical goals.

I was curious about this name, so I decided to dig a bit into this topic. I feel it may be interesting for other to know where this expression came from, so here´s what I found.


PONZI comes from Charles Ponzi. This Italian guy was born in 1882 and died in 1949, so 62 years old, not bad in those times with the two World Wars in the middle. The scheme was based on "investing" in postal reply coupons.

A postal reply coupon was designed to allow people to send a letter from any country to another without having to buy local stamps. For example, you live in Australia and send a letter to your mom in Germany. You send her a postal reply coupon so she can redeem it for enough German stamps to send you a letter back.

In theory, the money would be made with the difference in costs between the cost of the coupon in one country and others. You would pay 5 Australian dollars, but the coupon in USA may be worth more because it is more expensive to send the letter from there. So you would get in the USA stamps for a value that is higher than those 5 AUS, thus making a profit.

But in reality the profit is not nearly enough to make this a real business, so Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi (full name of the guy) was paying old investors with money from new investors. That is, I will pay you with the money I get from the next guy. The question is until when can I keep the whole scheme going forward.

The most ridiculous thing about these schemes is that they are still happening. The most world-wide known recently has been the Bernard Madoff scheme. While Carlo "Ponzi" rised 20 million USD, Mr Madoff reached around 50 million. However, the former is much larger than the recent one, since 20 millions at that time were like 1000 today.


I am glad I looked into this. You can learn more here and here.