How to scam everyone

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The mechanics of a Ponzi scheme are not complex, but they are devastatingly effective. First, you lure investors with the promise of consistent, above-average returns. You collect capital from early believers and then use that very capital to fabricate 'returns' for the earliest participants. These returns create buzz. Soon, trusted voices and respected figures begin to vouch for the system, amplifying your scheme through the echo chamber of credibility. The money doesn't come from the success of the investment; it comes from other investors.
And so the pyramid grows until it bursts.
This model has been around for centuries. I have written about the South Sea Bubble in the past, but in summary, the South Sea Company was a debt-restructuring and speculative play created to service England's war obligations and stabilize finances. It promised absurd profits based on colonial trade potential. But it had no real profits. To cement its image, the company seduced one of its fiercest critics, Isaac Newton, into investing. His involvement brought credibility. Eventually, even the king and the British Treasury got involved.
The result? A national catastrophe.
South Sea Company can't be a scam because Isaac Newton got the King to invest! — Kurt Wuckert Jr (@kurtwuckertjr) April 23, 2025
Charles Ponzi's name has become synonymous with the scheme itself. He promised investors 50% returns in 45 days by exploiting postal arbitrage. It was all a lie. There were no real profits, only the illusion of success built on inflows from fresh victims, but he was a talented marketer and ruined a lot of people with his scheme.
Bernie Madoff did the same thing on a larger scale. Madoff, a respected figure in New York's financial world and a trusted member of the Jewish community, built his entire empire on the trust of people who believed he would never scam his own. But he did. With nearly $65 billion in fabricated returns, his fraud became the largest of its kind in history. The saddest part is that it took his own children's disgust to bring it all down. When they discovered that he had scammed his own community, including charities run by people in his real life, they couldn't stomach doing anything but turning him in for his crimes.
Bernie Madoff died the same day as the Coinbase IPO.
And you don't think there's magic. #PassTheTorch
Sam Bankman-Fried ran the 21st century's first crypto mega-scam. FTX was a house of cards built on a token (FTT) with no intrinsic value, propped up by artificial liquidity and incestuous accounting. By wash-trading FTT against BTC and Tether, reallocating fake paper profits, and cycling it all through Alameda Research, he made an illusion of success so powerful that it lured in celebrities, regulators, and major venture capital firms. Tom Brady. Sequoia. BlackRock (NASDAQ: BLK). It was all a lie, and when it came crashing down, SBF was sentenced to die in prison for his crimes.
The best thing about the FTX situation is that it strengthened my thesis about 'crypto.'The gains & the losses are basically all fake, real businesses just say 'who?' about the SBF news, and bitcoin is still almost completely untested opportunity.
What a joke! pic.twitter.com/3lJ2w0vzlu — Kurt Wuckert Jr (@kurtwuckertjr) November 15, 2022
So here we are again. And this time, the face is Michael Saylor.
Saylor, formerly known for one of the biggest single-week losses in stock market history (approximately $14 billion in erased value due to MicroStrategy's (NASDAQ: MSTR) accounting misstatements), has reemerged as BTC's evangelist-in-chief. He lost his credibility once and then lost his tax residency in a more recent scandal involving fraudulent claims about his primary home address. But rather than face disgrace, he pivoted. And it had him under water for quite some time, too.
Fun Fact: Michael Saylor might be the single worst investor in history. He lost more money than anyone else in the Dot Com crash.
Now, he is under water over a billion dollars on the best performing asset of all time because he timed it wrong and bought the top with leverage. pic.twitter.com/VSlDA9RaiR — Kurt Wuckert Jr (@kurtwuckertjr) June 30, 2022
By rebranding MicroStrategy as a 'Bitcoin treasury company,' Saylor leveraged the same playbook as Ponzi, Madoff, and SBF. He borrowed money to buy BTC, told everyone BTC was going 'up forever,' and encouraged others to invest in his company: a leveraged BTC play wrapped in the facade of tech legitimacy. As long as BTC rises, he looks like a genius. But if BTC falters, the entire MicroStrategy house of cards crumbles.
And it doesn't stop there. Jack Mallers, once heralded as the everyman of Bitcoin, is actually the third-generation heir to a Chicago TradFi dynasty, and he's running the same book of business.
He is starting a direct competitor to 'Strategy' and hoping to create FOMO among as many businesses as possible to create a demand curve to pump BTC forever.
But it can't pump forever, and you know it!
None of this is accidental. It's the scam. It's always the scam. You front-load the scheme with influencers. You pay off critics. You create a trusted mythology about the project. And you extract capital from believers while propping up the illusion of momentum. When the bubble bursts, you're either gone or you pivot to the next grift.
Bitcoin wasn't supposed to be this.
It was created as a tool for freedom. A bearer asset that real people could hold like a gold bar and spend like global, liquid cash at a moment's notice. Peer-to-peer electronic cash, not wrapped derivatives, smart contracts, and custodial magic shows. It took a decade of social engineering to convince people to trust custodial BTC, to lock their holdings into platforms with no proof of reserves, and to relinquish their own keys in exchange for paper promises, but it happened, and we're watching the product of the first real paper BTC pump.
This isn't just another cycle. This is the bubble. This is the moment that every lesson in financial fraud has been trying to warn you about. And if history repeats itself again, the collapse will wipe out trillions in paper gains and real capital alike. And instead of blaming Saylor or the other people who convinced them that bad ideas were good ideas, too many people will blame Bitcoin itself.
And, I think that's the real goal: make as much money off of 'Bitcoin' the meme, while destroying the trust of Bitcoin the idea.
You've been warned.
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