BitConnect Closes Exchange as States Warn of Unregulated Sales

I've been to a MLM conference once (or well, a conference by a company who distributed purely via MLM) and I saw people buying into it as well. When I googled them (this was back around 2006), I saw tons of domains and websites with these products all from people with their own "company" (lol).

You know what sells? Sampling, and success stories. The first thing I got told is that I must believe in the product. Yeah, that's true with any product, but where's the proof? Well, you can convince people with sampling. As for the success stories, people high on the pyramid are around at these conferences as well. The brother of my aunt (cold side) had earned more than a million with this MLM scheme. Which got me to check out the conference in the first place. At the conference he appeared to be well respected within the scene. I didn't know this beforehand (my aunt told me afterwards even though she got me in contact with him) but what did he do before that? Well, he was in a cult. Now he was a hardcore Christian in a MLM scheme. As they say, "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."

I'm not at all surprised there's these MLM-esque videos related to cryptocurrency out there. As far's I'm concerned, BitConnect is just the tip of the iceberg. We haven't witnessed the mask falling from Tether yet (many red flags have been raised though), nor Bitcoin in general (many red flags as well). Bitcoin value has been going down the past days, btw, even before BitConnect announcement. You can esp see the decline from Jan 15.

Had a very similar experience - a friend of our family (also a member of a, let's call it, high-intensity christian denomination) got started in a MLM (MonaVie) and invited me to their "internal" event (one aimed at people already in the network).

Oh. My. God. What I saw there was a textbook definition of a cult, a pure affective death spiral[0] instantiated in our material world. People were literally one-upping one another in telling how happy they are by being the part of this MLM, and how happy they will be when it makes them rich. The overall atmosphere was pretty similar to that Bitconeeeeeeeeeect video.

> The first thing I got told is that I must believe in the product.

Yeah, that's the thing that kept me from getting recruited into MLMs back when I was more naïve about people involved - I could tell the products were bullshit, and selling them required you to lie about either the qualities of the product or your expertise on the topic (in case of financial products). Both of which I find to be despicable behaviour.

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[0] - https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Affective_death_spiral

"An affective death spiral (or happy death spiral) occurs when positive attributes of a theory, person, or organization combine with the Halo effect in a feedback loop, resulting in the subject of the affective death spiral being held in higher and higher regard. In effect, every positive thing said about the subject results in more than one additional nice thing to say about the subject on average. This cascades like a nuclear chain reaction."

I'd never heard of MonaVie so I Google'd it and read the Wikipedia page - was slightly surprised to get Amazon adverts for $40 bottles of fruit juice at the same time....

Fortunately, they seem to be defunct now. Good riddance.