I am not a lawyer, but my gut says that a hilarious, tongue-in-cheek financial crime is still a financial crime.

Any lawyers want to weigh in on whether you have some sort of first-amendment right to parody crimes?

> We suggest shilling this coin heavily to your family and friends like a fucking sociopath.

That line made my day.

> Q: Is this site secure?

> A: We use Equifax-grade security.

haha

Clearly this person has minimal experience in fraud, this is a horribly set up ponzi scheme. The investors can make a profit purely with their own actions, and remove any ETH that is currently in there. I thought about doing it, but don't feel like getting into cryptocurrencies and putting up $30K to get a positive return.

The way you can rip this off is buy a bunch of coins at once, push up the value, and then sell them all. You have to buy a maximum of 400 PonziCoins before you can start making a profit, but then the more you buy, then cash out, the more profit you make.

This is if the current price is .02 ETH per PC, which I've heard it's not anymore.

  +----------+------+----------------+
  | numCoins | cost | return if sold |
  +----------+------+----------------+
  |      100 |    2 |             -1 |
  |      200 |    6 |             -2 |
  |      300 |   14 |             -2 |
  |      400 |   30 |              2 |
  |      500 |   62 |             18 |
  |      600 |  126 |             66 |
  |      700 |  254 |            194 |
  |      800 |  510 |            514 |
  |      900 | 1022 |           1282 |
  |     1000 | 2046 |           3074 |
  +----------+------+----------------+

You can't make money forever, you will just take all ETH that has been put in before, which will be a small amount. Then nothing is left and it will be bankrupt until someone else puts money in. But it's a guaranteed way to get your own money back, if you can afford to go at least 4 rounds, if it works exactly as the site says, and if no one cashes out coins before you do. The risk is that someone waits and cashes out after you put your money in and before you have cashed out, you have to do your transactions all at once to be successful.

I don't know how this works behind the scenes, I don't advocate for any of this, and I won't be trying it myself. I also am a little disappointed to realize I may have provided the best argument yet to make this thing go. So don't put your money in there, you are probably going to lose it.

UPDATE:

> This has gotten crazy out of hand, I apologize but we will no longer be selling PonziCoin on this site because this was a joke. I cannot terminate the contract but I will not be selling any coins that I own.

The Buy button is disabled on the site. Also, if you checked the eth contract you will see it has basically $0 in it, down from over $175,000. I think what happened is that the BUY button was disabled on the site, the message added, and then people started dumping their coins and it was all gone.

https://etherscan.io/address/0xe3f64dc522a66405c51d96aae2342...

Warning: this is a scam. The real one is at https://ponzico.win

This has seen ~$10,600USD worth of love so far [1]. The contract source is comedy gold [2].

[1] https://etherscan.io/address/0xe3f64dc522a66405c51d96aae2342... - accessed at Wed Jan 24 16:10:39 EST 2018

[2] https://etherscan.io/address/0xe3f64dc522a66405c51d96aae2342...

SEC as the symbol was my favorite part:

I wonder if there's liability for the author when people get damaged by this

Great news. I have always believed Ponzi and alike schemes should be as legal and available as any other kind of gambling and lottery as long as the people introduced are well informed abut the nature of the scheme and the risks it means. I know some people who had participated in a distributed Ponzi scheme consciously and with notable success while I don't know a single person who had won anything above $2 in a lottery.

This was done with Ponzi.io a while back. Founder shut it down as they were afraid of breaking laws.

>The World's First Legitimate Ponzi Scheme

I'm pretty sure this was done before. As a dapp even.

I mean, a real decentralized ponzi should not have a centralized founder. It should randomly reassign the owner of the contract (is that possible?) or at least the premined to a random member.

Now that is a ponzi i could trust

Q: Is this a scam?

A: It's as much a scam as 99% of the ICOs out there, but it's more transparent about it.

If only real life had such easily spotted scams. "Warning: This is a scam" labelling would be so helpful.

Can you see how many tokens have been bought till now?

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This isn't the first. Not by a long shot.

I remember these 'transpararent ponzis' from years ago.

Awesome! Just bought 100K worth.

The white paper is great

This is a pyramid scheme and not a Ponzi. I'm disappointed.

This is fantastic. Cant lose more than 75%? I'm in

Finally, an honest pump and dump ICO for me!

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The white paper made my day. haha

That logo is fantastic

Why are people putting money in this? it has like 70k already..is everyone stupid?