What if you bought Bitconnect in 2018?
Crypto · Ponzi. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0× · S&P 500 same money: $2,519
Every dollar is gone. Bitconnect collapsed as a Ponzi scheme in 2018, so $1,000 invested in any of these years is worth exactly nothing today.
The story
Bitconnect launched in 2016 and became the most notorious crypto scheme of the 2017 boom. Investors bought its BCC token and then lent it to the platform's lending programme, which claimed a proprietary trading bot exploiting bitcoin volatility could pay returns of around one percent per day, compounding. Generous referral commissions turned users into recruiters, and slick promotional events and YouTube testimonials spread the word. The token's price rose from cents to several hundred dollars, and Bitconnect briefly ranked among the largest cryptocurrencies by market value.
Sceptics noted that guaranteed daily returns paid in a token you had to buy to participate looked exactly like a Ponzi scheme. In January 2018 securities regulators in Texas and North Carolina issued cease-and-desist orders, and Bitconnect abruptly shut down its lending programme. The token lost over 90 percent of its value in a matter of days. US prosecutors later charged promoters, and in 2022 indicted its founder Satish Kumbhani, who had disappeared. Investors were left with tokens that were effectively worthless.
The lesson: Guaranteed high daily returns, paid in a token you must buy to participate, are the signature of a Ponzi scheme however sophisticated the jargon around it.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | $400 | $0 | $2,519 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
There was no good entry point: every starting year ends at zero. The same $1,000 in the S&P 500 from 2018 would be $2,519 today.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Bitconnect is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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