I would be interested to hear about how you think Bitcoin is more of a Ponzi than the BitConnect "lending" platform was before it was shut down.
I have explained many times that bitconnect have made massive profits from the demand of their coin.
Nobody thinks that BitConnect didn't make a profit selling their worthless token to their victims. That was the whole point of their scam. The "lending platform" promises amazing returns which generates huge demand for their BCC token. They premined a load of those tokens and sold them to their victims for a high price. Later they take away the lending platform which removes almost all the demand for their token. They can say they paid back their victims but they paid them back with their token which is now trading at just 10% of the previous price.
They could afford to pay everyone three months 'interest' all at the same time in their coin.
The "interest" was promised in dollar terms, but recent investors took a 90% loss in dollar terms.
How were they a Ponzi?
They were a Ponzi because they were promising unrealistic returns and failing to actually made good on those promises.
Bitcoin or other cryptos can be dumped by devs or whales at any point but bitconnect (by far the largest holders and who stake millions too a month) are not able to dump their own coin, for the reasons I've said many times too (they pay all interest in their coin so the lower it is the more of the coin they need).
You think that BitConnect cannot sell their own tokens because selling it would lower its price? Did you not notice what happened? They paid back all their loans at a high price, all at once. Can they dump it now? Do they care now if it lowers the price? Do you think maybe they were dumping it before making their announcement? Why do you think they used a weight "average over the last 15 days" price when determining what price to use when cancelling the loans, rather than the actual price? Could it be because the actual price was already way down due to someone dumping a bunch of it just before the announcement?
There are also PoS coins (like bitconnect) that give users a percentage of extra coins per month.
PoS doesn't generate value out of nowhere. It is monetary inflation, and has a downward pressure on the per-unit price.
Bitconnect managed to get to its high valuation despite massive staking rewards and inflation of about 100% per year!! Are you calling staking coins ponzis?
No, I'm calling BitConnect's lending platform a Ponzi. Whether a coin is PoW or PoS has no impact on whether it is used in a Ponzi or not. BCC was in high demand because BitConnect's victims kept buying it thinking they were getting rich. They believed in the lending platform promises and thought they were making about 1% per day and also getting their loan back at the end. As they have now found out they didn't get their loan back at the end because the price of the token collapsed.
Remember when people lend the BCC, they lose the gain in the coin value (it is set to USD at the time of the lend and they only get the USD value back at the end too) and bitconnect have always PAID LESS BCC back including all the interest and capital releases.
I understand how it worked. While the price of BCC was going up the lending platform was a bad deal because it would have been better to just hold the BCC and keep all the gains for yourself. And when the price of BCC was going down and paying back loans and interest would have started costing BitConnect something, they cancelled the program, just as many people predicted they would.
In other words they are just sharing the growth of their coin price with the lenders. They are calling it lending but it is not much different to staking coins (PoS) BUT IN REVERSE cos lenders get paid less coins lol.
So it was like staking where people earn coins, but in reverse, so "lenders" were losing coins. That doesn't sound scammy to you?
Bitconnect always paid less interest than the growth of their coin so have always accumulated more and more BCC which proves they don't need to be a Ponzi (which they could have been if their interest payments were higher than the growth of their coin).
At some point if they had continued with the lending program they would have been needing to pay back more BCC than they held. You cannot continue to pay out at least 0.25% in dollar terms every day. It just doesn't work. The fact that they were temporarily able to use their pre-mined token to pay out their victims doesn't change that fact.
The way they paid everyone back also shows they could have easily carried on and weren't even going into their BCC reserves for the reasons given before.
Did you notice that they didn't pay everyone back? People were expecting to get more back in USD value than they put in, and they didn't. They got back 10% of their value in a collapsing BCC token.
Did you also notice that you didn't answer my question? How is BTC a Ponzi in any way?
There is no point going through all your responses. You are simply blind to the fact bitcoin is more of a Ponzi. The value of bitcoin is only there while people aren't selling it, like with any crypto coin with no assets behind it (fiat at least should only have enough supply to cover all assets and maybe slightly more to encourage business- but we all know now that it now operates in a bubble of boom and bust which repeats). Bitconnect created value with their lending system so their coin was in demand and kept rising despite 100% yearly inflation and scam accusations by many.
Remember, for a full year everyone in bitconnect probably profited from the system which guaranteed them steady income while the lending was operating. The BCC token can easily go back to previous levels and has about half the circulating supply of bitcoin (which is 250x times as valuable at the moment).
I also showed that nobody from bitconnect dumped the coins. There was no volume on the exchanges during the dump and there was huge volume in the buying yesterday when it went to around $90. I don't understand your point about them having no reason not to dump now (they are trying to raise another half a billion for an exchange, as you may have seen, and are not closing their bitconnect website). What about all the people in Wall Street with millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins ready short it now. I actually sold 50 BCC coins at around $80 each yesterday but am still holding a lot.
Someone else mentioned that they paid affiliates 7% immedtiately. This payment was in BCC tokens and remember they held millions of them which kept growng and staked more than enough for the affiliate payments.
The main point is they only received bitcoins in the ICO over a year ago!! Do you know how much they charged per token in the ICO?? It was based on the BTC price but at the time it was well under $1 each and they didn't even sell all that much in the ICO (I don't think they sold all $4million they had on offer - maybe a couple of million but I don't recall now)!!! It proved how successful they were at marketing their website and coin. Everyone involved in the first 6 months became rich. Even those coming in later haven't lost money yet unless they decide to sell thier tokens at a cheap price. I don't know if you heard but Trevon has said anyone coming in the last few months who haven't been able to recover at least their investment capital will be taken care of by bitconnect. They are probably going to do something about the market crash. They probably pumped millions in already.
There was no other point where they took anyone's BTC other than in the ICO. It is obvious from looking at the coinmarketcap graphs and the volumes and price increases. Their internal exchange was for users and hopefully they also profited from that too and not just the lending platform.