BitConnect Closes Exchange as States Warn of Unregulated Sales

For those unaware, Bitconnect was a Bitcoin-based ponzi-scheme that had operated 'successfully' for quite some time. I don't say 'ponzi' as an insult in the way some do for cryptocurrencies, it was quite literally just a bare-bones ponzi scheme, where you deposit your money (Bitcoin) on their website, buy their token, 'lock' your funds for some amount of time, and you are promised very high interest rates while encouraged to re-invest your returns.

What has happened today is Bitconnect has closed the exchange on their website, and so users flocked to some of the only other exchanges (of dubious reputation, since no reputable exchange wanted to list the BitConnect coin) in order to sell their now-worthless tokens, resulting in losses of around 90% today: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitconnect/

Many famous Youtubers and other individuals with influence convinced hundreds of people to put their money into BitConnect in order to profit off of referrals, leading to a lot of unfortunate losses and a lot of delusion and misinformation among devoted investors. The general sentiment towards those that lost money due to BitConnect has been a mocking attitude in the cryptocurrency investment communities, as BitConnect has been referred to by many as a blatant ponzi scheme for months.

I know a few people who fell for this, despite my warnings. When you tell someone "these returns are astronomical, teams of PhDs in hedge funds cannot come anywhere close, do you think they're so dumb that they wouldn't put billions in this if it were legitimate" and they reply "yes, I do", there's no helping them.

People love to think they're smarter than those 'experts'. It's a combination of Tall Poppy Syndrome [1] and the Dunning-Kruger Effect [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

You can add to that that "experts" are pretty clueless as well, 2000 and 2008 are reminders of that. Close to none saw it coming and the ones that did where laughing stock amongst them, you have to be a pretty remarkable person to swim against National bank presidents, government officials and other high ranking people like Alan Greenspan, that was a super respected economist but also has made some of the worst mistakes in history of the world economy and still has power to swing things around I really distrust any finance specialist, but I am also aware that if any high yield information ever reaches me it's either a crime or a scheme to take my money away from me. So it's tricky.

Perhaps then your definition of 'expert' is incorrect? Would it not be that the ones who saw it coming were really the experts? And those who laughed at them were anything but? I would argue that those who laughed at the doomsayers of 2000 & 2008 are the same as those now arguing that BitCoin can only go up. Your reply is a rather odd justification for self-destructive financial behavior.

> Would it not be that the ones who saw it coming were really the experts?

No, because there are people that predict fiscal doom all the time.

* People predicted that 2016 would have a huge crash.

* People predicted that 2017 would have a huge crash.

* People predicted that 2018 would have a huge crash.

* People will predict that 2019 would have a huge crash.

* People will predict that 2020 would have a huge crash.

If there's a huge crash in 2019, are you sure the people that predicted the 2019 crash are geniuses? Perhaps some of them were simply lucky. You have to be super careful if you are going to go by a small sample of past predictions, because there are a lot of people that make a lot of predictions. Statistically, some of them will make predictions that are correct by random chance.