Quote from: JoelKatz on August 28, 2012, 03:02:25 PM

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2) I'm scamming - This would only be true of people who went into this believing they would never lose anything (this can't be true either as they will have gone into it knowing what I knew) and me expecting my returns to come from those that invested after me (which I didn't).

I can't follow this reasoning at all.

Say I promise you a 10% weekly return if you lend me $500. I have no intention of paying you back. I am trying to scam you.

You say, "I won't have $500 until payday. But if you buy me lunch today, I'll lend you the $500."

If I buy you lunch, now my $500 loan scam, that I still fully intend to carry out, isn't a scam because you might not lend me the $500?

I don't quite follow. I agree it's still a scam but I don't follow the 'lunch' part of the analogy.

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Did anyone invest believing they wouldn't lose anything?
Did anyone invest expecting their payments would come from others who joined later?

Neither of those are true of me but I can't speak for everyone else.

The operative question is this one: Did anyone invest knowing that this scheme was indistinguishable from one in which interest payments to earlier investors come from later investors and no (or insignificant) legitimate investment actually takes place?

And, by the way, several people have admitted that they thought it was a Ponzi but invested anyway. Necessarily, they expected their payments to come from others who joined later.

The scheme being indistinguishable from a ponzi doesn't make it a ponzi. I'm not saying that shouldn't be the conclusion to be reached but in this case, if you've been told it's a ponzi and everyone else participating knows it's a ponzi, I don't see the harm of people joining in. Haven't there been multiple ponzi threads on Bitcointalk where people participated of their own volition?

(BTW, did your avatar previously have a photograph of you wearing glasses or am I thinking of someone else?)