[qwerty456127]

What I can't understand is why do people demonize Ponzi Schemes so much while lotteries and bookies of all kinds are legally available on every corner. I know quite a number of people who have consciously taken the risk of investing in an open (so I can't logically agree it being scam/fraud/etc although legal authorities can insist it is) Ponzi Scheme and have quit it with rather serious profit some time later. And I don't know anybody who has ever won more than a couple of bucks in a lottery. In my opinion a Ponzi Scheme (unless the potential investors are actually told a false claim that it is not a Ponzi Scheme but a low-risk high-profit enterprise) is not a scam but a game, similar to fishing, and even much more nice to people than classic chance games played in casinos. Why not just teach people basics of risk management, warn them 3 times and let them play if they want to?

[scribu]

One difference between ponzi schemes and games of chance has to do with impartiality. Even if casino games are tweaked to give better odds to the house, once you roll the dice, neither you nor the dealer can influence the outcome in any way.

Another difference is that there’s no requirement to bring more and more people into the game, so there’s no risk of widespread adverse effects.

[blunte]

Agreed, a ponzi is just another scheme (where scheme doesn't have to be a negative word). The gamble with a ponzi is whether the person entering the scheme is the last person or not. If not last, they make make money. If to far at the bottom (too near the end, when not enough new people join to continue funding the process), then they lose.

There are people who make a living "playing ponzis", estimating which ponzis will be big, how long they'll last, and when to enter and exit.

What does make ponzis particularly bad is that they are almost always promoted as something else - some kind of magical investment (and now using tech terms that are either nonsensical or will otherwise confuse their potential investors). That is the fraud aspect, and is no different than promoting some investment fund as being typical while privately just deciding who to pay dividends to.

If you bought a McDonalds franchise, and the next day the world decided that fast food made them fat and ceased buying it, you would experience the same outcome as if you had joined a very expensive ponzi. But you know that going into it, and you believe that is not a likely outcome. With a ponzi, unless you know who's operating it and how good the promotion is, you're going to have a much harder time determining entry and exit timings. (I don't recommend playing at all!)

[walshemj]

Lotteries don't relay on adding more marks to grow and you can actually work out the pot odds where it makes sense to play the lottery - just as poker players do.