Bitcoin is a Giant Ponzi Scheme
It’s time to get brutally honest about trust-based currencies
I had an interesting conversation with an activist short-seller yesterday. He’s taken down more than a dozen corrupt companies, exposing billions of dollars of fraud, literally saving lives, sending criminals to prison, and personally reaping millions in his efforts to make the world a more ethical place. I asked him if there were any similarities between all of the fraudulent companies, and his answer was immediate:
“Oh, that’s easy. At the end of the day, they were all a variant of a Ponzi scheme.”
Charles Ponzi
The Ponzi scheme was the brainchild of an Italian thief with the grandiosely magnificent name of Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi.
Ponzi guaranteed his investors he could double their money within 90 days, telling them he was an expert in IRC coupon arbitrage. In reality, Ponzi simply paid his earlier investors with the investments of later investors.
Such schemes obviously cannot last forever — doubling your profit every quarter forever is mathematically absurd. For a while, Ponzi lived like a king, buying himself a mansion, honeymooning in Italy, opening a winery, even buying a macaroni factory on the side. When one reporter grew…
