Bitcoin Forum

Came across this gambling website. It's a transparent ponzi schema website.

www.pon-z.com (http://www.pon-z.com)

Of course this is just a gambling site and no value is created, but if you like that kind of thing it's best to get in now right?

People are already validating they received money. If you want to know more, it's being discussed here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/y2lng/ponz_the_worlds_first_honest_ponzi_scheme_using/

I risked a few coins for fun, and payments are already coming in. If the rate of payments holds I'll definitively get the initial coins back and then some more  ;D

Yeah I started to receive mine as well :) If this rate holds up I beat the casino ;)

great project, I wanted to make something very similar too!

btw, is it really the world's first honest one? :)

If you were going to send 1BTC isn't it better to send .5 and then .5 so that part of your second goes to you, but you end up with the same share? And better yet to break it more and more?

Yes that would be better, however, the minimum deposit is 1B if remember correctly. Your argument does however stand for splitting up larger amounts still.

Yeah I don't think it's the first one (those are their words) - but it makes for a great subtitle I guess :)

Just passing, but this looks more like a simple pyramid scheme than a ponzi.

i like the idea of it because you dont have to make refs on your own :)
hm but i think there is a bug in it. when you see the transactions mostly there is 1 BTC send.. but one of the last transaction were 665533334666 BTC !!! holy shit :) somebody is really stupid????

ah see it. you are right!

would be a good idea to combine many transactions and send only one transaction to each user at one day.
if this is heavily used there will be a big amount of very very small transactions..

what a great fun that is! I also kicked in some coins, let's see if it beats our casino payout  :o

Is your casino payout that bad? If you start here at rank 90, with you and everyone before having bet 1 BTC (which is not the case, there are some big participations), you would have to find around 155 people to join the system after you to get even.

thats the fun part of this site :) you simply dont have to find 155 people! just sit back and wait. no advertising do be done. you participate on every user which is joining

I meant, and you know it, that if less than 155 people join the system after him, he can only lose. And that would be if any of the people before him had put only 1 BTC. This is not the case.

In fact, the total of people shares is 649 so far. That simply means that if someone puts 1 BTC into your system right now, and other people after him also put 1 BTC, he must wait until approximately 1100 more BTC are collected before he is even. And of course, the situation is worse for people after him, who have to wait even longer every time.

propably thats right. i dont have done the math :) but in fact i got 50% of my "Investment" 2 days later back.. so i think there are good chances that i will make a win out of it. if not than its a "gambling loss" for my. no risk no fun.
maybe this ponzi is running over months/years... than you will get some free coins every day.. we will see what the future brings

Our global payout for current year is 95.3% while some games like live roulette and live baccarat (97.1% respective 100.2% as of today) have higher payouts.

I don't know exactly how you calculated the 155 needed depositors but I believe that 155 is not that many especially knowing that some deposited 50BTC at once.

Let's see what will come out, it's gambling and it's fun the way it was setup make full use of the amazing bitcoin technology so I like it.

return <= sum(i = 90+1 .. 90+155) (1/i)

And as I wrote, this is much below the real number, as here the computation assumes that depositor i gets you 1/i of the share (only the case if noone bet more than 1 BTC before you do, which is obviously not the case).

I missed that part! So in fact, if everyone (including you, the 99 people before you and the 100 people after you) all give 1 BTC, you get your money back, minus the fees. So you don't lose much.

This is how I understood it, so if the next 100 after you deposit 1BTC you are breakeven (less fees) if they deposit more than 1 BTC you win smthg.

Why do the charts stop there? It would be interesting to see how many people receive less than 100%. Also, how much the first addresses, which purportedly belong to the creator of pon-z, have received. As a creator, you can play as much as you want before letting other people in, as all the money you put in is redistributed to the previous players, that is you.

The first address seems to have received more than 147 BTC for 1 BTC invested (http://blockchain.info/address/18DEHVMSfKHJyLmoKEcrorVKpJnzv1DbTJ). The second one, which belongs certainly to the creator as well, has received 231 BTC for 50 BTC (http://blockchain.info/address/1HsXuUEmdMeBtZAz6oiB3BxBt9HJ2tqtAx). You can bet that number three and four, all above 1 BTC, also belong to the creator, and together have received more than 168 BTC for 54 BTC (http://blockchain.info/address/1FsARshLM2ek5cfsvAtGf97ejUzYzSWuk9 and http://blockchain.info/address/18DEHVMSfKHJyLmoKEcrorVKpJnzv1DbTJ). I am confident that at least those 4 addresses belong to the creator of pon-z.com, as they also exhibit the pattern of not having been touched at all. This is the case for a few addresses more, then the pattern changes and people get their "wins".

So, with only the first four addresses, the creator of pon-z.com has made at least 546 BTC for an investment of 105 BTC. Not bad, eh? Those BTC won't be received by other "players". The fact that you only gain from the next 100 transactions makes it even less profitable than a real pyramiding scheme for participants, except for the first ones, when the new incoming BTC are not split amongst 100 people.

No: if the guy just before you deposited 100 BTC and everyone else deposit 1 BTC, then out of the next 100 transactions you'll get 99/199 + 1/100 = 0.5075, minus the fees.

Why?

It should be 0.01 x 100 = 1 less fees; the previous depositors -100 don't get anything anymore so at time speaking total 128 deposits the first 28 depositing addresses are out of the game so any deposits will be split only by 100.

Each new entry gets split between the 100 previous depositors, weighted by the amount they have put in. So if every one before you puts 10 BTC and you only put 1 BTC, you get 1/991 of each deposit, not 1/100, that is a total of 100*10*1/991 ~ 1.009082 BTC minus the fees. And this is the ideal situation. If you put 100 BTC and everyone else put 1 BTC, you get 100/199 of every new deposit, that is, after 100 deposits of 1 BTC, 100*100/199 ~ 50.25 BTC: you loose almost half of the money you put in.

For you to win any significant money (say more than 1%), you have either to be near the top of the list, or to make sure people before you put less than you and people after you put more than you at an increasing rate (because they will start to split the new income with you and since they put more than you they get a bigger share than you).

Yes, this correct. So the correct strategy is to deposit more than the max deposit from the 100 previous depositor?

Well, you also have to ensure that people after you deposit enough to make your investment worthwhile, because you will get a share of only what the next 100 people put in.

If this scheme works this way, does that mean it is sustainable? As in, even years into the future, it can in theory still offer payouts to new players at the same magnitude now?

Not much of a Ponzi scheme then.

FYI

I've now 1/5 of my deposit after 1/3 of my 100s income so i guess that without "miracle" I won't break even  :D

is there any newer one availlable?

is there any formula for the correct strategy?
(e.g. x+n-1/....)

This isn't really the first honest ponzi in bitcoin land, there was one when GLBSE started last year.

Wasn't too popular though.

and gone...

spended 1 BTC, got back 0.5422... i think they got 50% of the fundings.. some users added 30 BTC or 50BTC so that was huge win for this scammers  :-\

does anybody know the owner of the site or the domain owner?

It was not a good ponzy formula except for the first 50 maybe. The way of using bitcoin and the blockchain was good so maybe some better long term concept will emerge out of it.

i could think of a game where every one can only deposit a fix amount and it get distributed randomly between x/10 of the participants. Some account will win some will lose.

I like it. Something like that could easily work for a sustainable linear (non-pyramidal) redistribution scheme that was still entertaining.


This actually adds up. Checking my copy of received.txt, you were depositor number 65. There were 140 total deposits in the game so there were 75 beneath you. These 75 show up in blockexplorer (http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MGBBnuZyZZYJMuAodQ9k8tuYviJpgsoWM). Furthermore, the amounts of those distributions are correct. I added two columns to received.txt to make this (http://pastebin.com/g0dig8XJ). Sum the last column to get your 0.5422.

ok when they did everything right -> why are they offline??
if i get the source i will keep it up running ;)

They didn't do it right but if we change the formula we could make it fun. I would be wanting to host/operate a corrected version if we can get the source of it to save some dev time. If the owner or OP could contact me.

Right, I think they operated pretty much like they said they would, but the way it was setup caused the thing to fizzle out really quick.

Another unrelated idea: setup a site based on a progressive betting scheme like martingale. First depositor puts in 1, second depositor puts in 2. 1.1 goes to the first depositor, 0.9 goes to a jackpot, and 0.1 goes to the house. At each round the required deposit doubles, while the probability of winning the jackpot increases. "Jackpot" is probably a bad term because you really don't want to win it. It probably doesn't pay you back fully. Rather, it ends the round, pays you something, and starts the next deposit at 1. Hope I'm making any sense with this. Probably needs a lot of tweaking. May be able to make something better based on labourchere. I guess the main thrust of the idea is that because ponzi schemes require increasing numbers or amounts of deposits, you simply enforce this as part of the game.

but this will lead quickly to very high amounts of bitcoins to payin