Imagine the thousands of people that commit suicide when the Social Security ponzi scheme collapses.
That is true. When the bankers forced Italy to cut pensions, there were two or three pensioner suicides per day. And the same thing occurred in Greece, when it was their turn.
Many millions died in WW! and in WW!!. And many in the bubonic plague epidemics of the middle ages, and many of the Spanish infuenza.
... So? Dos that make scams less obectionable?
How many ponzi schemes were build on dollars? The original scam by Charles Ponzi was based on stamps. Are stamps bad? You can't blame Bitcoin for the actions of the people who use it. It's a tool that can be used for good or evil.
Bitcoin makes the MMM scam global and more difficult to stop (and adds bitcoin's own pyramid on top of it).
The Russian government was almost useless in stopping Sergei's previous Russian scam, but it did eventually put him in jail for a couple of years. Now that he uses bitcoins, who is going to catch and prosecute him? How can his gains be confiscated and returned to the victims?
The Real on the other hand is a scam that everyone in your country is FORCED to participate in.
The tiny difference is that no one is trying to convince Brazilians to "invest" their money in reals; quite the opposite. And no one is promising that the real will "go to the moon" -- like Andreessen, Silbert, the Winkles, and all other bitcoin peddlers are doing.
It's hilarious Stolfi is trying to claim Bitcoin is rising due to a Russian criminal that's running some kind of Ponzi scam. The scam doesn't even have anything to do with Bitcoin, he just accepts Bitcoin as payment, and it's already existed for like 3 years.
I don't know for how long he has been accepting bitcoin; but I only heard of it now. From the pages that I have seen, the scam is now called "Republic of Bitcoin" and
only uses bitcoin.
If it has always been like that, Itshould have been mentioned in the forums before. Was it?
I did see mention of a South African pyramid scam that at some point told its members to send bitcoins to the organizers with some excuse. (I don't know how it ended; an exit scam was expected), But I don't recall any mention of it being connected to Sergei.
As I noted, Sergei's previous scams moved 10 billion dollars, which is 2.5 times bitcoin's entire market cap; and that was actual money, whereas the market cap is only an accounting fiction. At one point, the scam turned 50 million USD per day, or 50 times the bitcoin miners' revenue. So, a ponzi on that scale, that requires people to buy bitcoin in order to play, could easily explain this rise, and more.
Bobby lee of BTC-China was the first to attribute the surge in Chinese trading volume to some pyramid scam that used bitcoin; although he did not refer to MMM specifically.
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