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title could be: "nerd tunnel vision" lead me to work in a Ponzi scheme.

Many many years ago Ethereum /smart contract hackathons way were more innocent, at least most participants acknowledged they were working on something useless but fun.

A Ponzi scheme still a Ponzi scheme even if it's using Rust.

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Give the author a break, he/she is 21.

I am giving them an out.

Not every bad person is a Nazi and not every scam is a Ponzi scheme. Most crypto scams are the equivalent of an old school pump and dump on a penny stock.

That’s not a Ponzi scheme.

It’s not so entirely different though. Early investors in a pump and dump can make a tidy profit, just like early investors in a Ponzi.

The main difference is the lifecycle: the dump is fairly quick and sudden, as the name implies, while the Ponzi can keep digging a hole for decades if it can reach a sufficiently large or wealthy base of fresh investors.

Wow I’m surprised someone else noticed the parallel between the overuse of these two terms. I feel their meaning became very diluted because of it. They’re good examples of semantic satiation [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation

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