Comment by jcpham2

A lot of this rings true for me. Myself and maybe 40 other individuals all participated in what now in retrospect was an obvious Ponzi scheme - see SEC vs. Shavers (0)

I even have IRC transcripts to this day where I would ask the dude “this isn’t a scam right?” and I would be reassured until the next day and I’d think about it more, ask more questions and then deposit more damn monies! The greed will subvert all logic if the daily vig is high enough. Or it did to me and I learned an extremely valuable and costly lesson.

Don’t be greedy. Anything that’s too good to be true in investment terms is exactly that: too good to be true. Anyone that can pay 1% interest daily doesn’t need your money. In retrospect it’s obvious and some of the people participating back then were screaming “ponzi” while depositing more and more possibly trying to break it to prove the point. Eventually it got too big and broke.

“Break it to prove a point” would be an accurate description of your average Bitcoin dweeb in 2012-2014 or so. I spent considerable time Sybil attacking and dusting every namecoin address I could at one point. Not for any specific reason just because I could.

After the smoke cleared I punished myself for years, volunteering for things I had no business getting involved in. I hated that I allowed myself to be scammed but it was a multi-year “friendship” that developed pseudo-anonymously over IRC. I don’t make new friends on the internet anymore because I can’t verify authenticity or identity these days unless I can touch you and see you.

Back then it was $7500 I didn’t actually work to earn and I was just letting it ride for 1% interest daily, compounded. I was famously asked on IRC how much I lost and my answer was and still is “more than car, less than a house” - not an attempt to minimize it but to quantify it.

Trendon did his 18 months and if he’s reading this - Yo dawg please stop skipping out on your apartment rent and stay out of small claims court bro, seriously grow tf up.

(0) https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...

Court transcript is a wild read if you can find it. Bitcoin is possibly money today because of this case (and by extension, my actions) was filed in Texas where this guy wiped his AWS account, stonewalled both the SEC and FBI on discovery and attempted the defense “Bitcoin isn’t money, I did nothing illegal”

That defense didn’t work.

In any case the parent comment rings true:

-Escalation of trust -Pushing boundaries to find if they exist -Friend-like communication in what should be a business relationship -Trust networks and/or referrals to participate -“sold out” “sorry not accepting new customers” are the best “For Sale” advertisements -Betting bigger or digging a deeper hole

I went off script a bit here, apologies, but the comment triggered a brain dump. People get scammed for different reasons.