The ICO industry has been growing unbelievably fast throughout this year. Unfortunately, apart from revolutionary projects, there is a significant number of suspicious ICO projects and outright Cryptocurrency SCAMs. We feel very strongly about keeping ICO industry transparent so when we come across a dirty fraud such as Bitconnect we cannot stay silent and just observe. In this article, we will dive deep into characteristics of cryptocurrency scams and reasons why we think the biggest one of them — Bitconnect — is a Ponzi scheme.
The irony of the current state of ICO industry
Let’s start with a short story. True one. Last week we received this email from an ICO founder who was interested to know how to get listed on our platform. We sent him our terms and received the following answer:
“Please excuse me, i don` want to be rude. But how much of a idiot does somebody have to be in order to pay close to ***$(censored by editor) and then you can say ’We reserve the right to mark any ICO project as suspicious if the project communicates fake, incomplete or misleading information.’”
So we answered them along the following lines:
“We reserve the right to mark a project as suspicious to protect visitors of our page, who trust us to bring them an independent view on ICOs and who visit us to find projects to invest in. Without this right, we would not be independent. Look into the suspicious and scam category to understand which kind of projects end up there to judge whether your project fits in that category (I hope it does not ;)…”
To our surprise, we received the following answer:
“First of all let me just clarify one thing: i think that you are wrong to classify an ICO as a scam. And by this i make a direct reference to what you say (for example) about Bitconnect. The idea is that you made it a scam, but it seems everything is fine there. I, myself, am a user of Bitconnect and i think i can understand it pretty good.“
HOLY COW!
Let’s make this even more clear. There is an ICO founder who:
- accuses us of being incompetent to judge if an ICO project is a SCAM AND
- brings Bitconnect as the main argument of our incompetence AND
- says he is a user of Bitconnect AND
- says he understand Bitconnect pretty good.
So he is either A) not able to judge correctly if Bitconnect is a fraud or B) he knows that Bitconnect is a fraud but he does not care. Option A is more probable in this case. He just thinks that Bitconnect is an example how legit ICO projects should look like. Poor guy. Poor investors. By the way, we dug into his ICO and it does look a bit suspicious. Oops!
This story shows how SICK this industry is right now. There are people who are consciously running frauds and on the top of that, there are people who believe that this is how legit projects should look like so they copy some of their characteristics.
This is the very reason why we decided to write this lengthy article about a Ponzi scheme called Bitconnect.
Bitconnect is an outright fraud and a Ponzi scheme
First of all, let’s clarify common characteristics of a Cryptocurrency SCAM project.
Now let’s elaborate on each point.
Marketing communication focuses mainly on the investment part, promising high and guaranteed returns.
The conference has everything that an MLM Ponzi scheme needs: Expensive car giveaways, rewards for the top promoters (read: top scammers), money falling from the sky, you name it they have it.
“If it seems too good to be true, it probably is”
There is not enough information about team members’ history and achievements.
There is no information on the official website who is actually behind this project so we could not do a background check on the team members. No wonder they do not want to expose their true identity. Who would?
MLM scheme and referral program are involved.
No more needs to be added here…
The whitepaper has very low quality or is completely missing.
Bitconnect has no whitepaper at all.
There is no new technology created
As you can see there is only one person that made GitHub commits to Bitconnect source code, moreover the person is anonymous. There are very few lines of code because creating a Ponzi scheme is just so simple.
Source: https://github.com/bitconnectcoin
Bitconnect has very few lines of code in their GitHub repository because creating a Ponzi scheme is just so simple.
The business model is not sustainable.
More than 90% of all BCC tokens are traded on their internal exchange. This allows them to manipulate the price the way they want. There is no wonder respectable exchanges such as Bittrex, Bitfinex, Poloniex, and others will never list Bitconnect at their exchange because it would make them indirectly responsible for this massive Ponzi scheme.
Let’s do some math to see why Bitconnect is not sustainable at all.
This a simplified formula for calculating compound interest:
Where
A = the future value of the investment/loan, including interest
P = the principal investment amount (the initial deposit or loan amount)
r = the daily interest rate (decimal)
t = the number of days the money is invested or borrowed for
According to this table, Bitconnect promises up to 40% Per Month + 0.25% daily interest for amounts higher than $10 010. For simplification, we count in this example with their maximum promise of “up to 40% Per Month” and with 0.25% daily interest that Bitconnect promises to pay their users.
$10,010 invested in Bitconnect, in 1 year, compounded 0.25% daily interest and compounded 40% monthly interest provides: $1,411,789
$10,010 invested in Bitconnect, in 2 years, compounded 0.25% daily interest and compounded 40% monthly interest provides:$199,115,595
$10,010 invested in Bitconnect, in 3 years, compounded 0.25% daily interest and compounded 40% monthly interest provides:$28,082,830,383
This is a clear unsustainable Ponzi scheme.
Sources: The Bitconnect Whitepaper Maths of a Ponzi, Bitconnect scam alert! Is this 800 million dollar cryptocurrency a ponzi scheme?
There is no or very weak roadmap.
The roadmap of Bitconnect includes only mainly PR, marketing, promotion, and conferences.
See for yourself: https://bitconnectcoin.co/roadmap
Conclusion
Ponzi schemes are ruining the reputation of the whole crypto-economy. Before Bitconnect there was Onecoin, ETHtrader.org (now defunct), and there will be more Ponzi schemes like Dascoin, ETHconnect and many others.
If you are not sure whether something is a scam or not ask us on our slack channel and do not forget to subscribe to our newsletter.
If you know about another Ponzi scheme, please do let us know immediately and we will list them in the ICO SCAM category to prevent as many investors as we can from losing their money.
