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Comment by huffpopo | Hacker News Reader

I live in a retirement town where many of the retirees have put their entire life savings and more into USI Tech. As far as I can tell USI Tech has properties of a classic pyramid scheme. I wonder how much this and other similar schemes are driving the price of bitcoin. I also wonder what will happen when entire towns get wiped out without recourse.

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I feel bad for them, but putting one's own entire life savings in _any_ risky investment seems like a bad idea.

I feel bad for them as well. They are very trusting of their friends and USI Tech has a MLM mechanism to it.

At the moment they are pretty obnoxious about it and are feeling bad for me.

Can they get out? I mean this run must have made them money; isn't now the time to jump?

Have to wait up to 7 months to be able to get your money back out of USI Tech (they sell contracts that pay 1% per day for 140 business days) but the pyramid scheme will probably crash before then.

Is there a cash analysis of that anywhere? I guess the question is what happens if BTC drops n% for n days...

I see a lot of similarities in the kind of people that get pulled into Amway/Herbalife/etc and Bitcoin people.

In my experience there's stark difference between those who got into the cryptocurrency culture at large, and those who just trust some specific platform/service to make them rich riding the Bitcoin wave. The latter group certainly tends to have MLM mentality and the services they use usually have all markings of a scam.

You would be mistaken, but I can see how you may conclude that. See Dash/ Bitconnect for a more apt comparison.

What area of the country is this?

Google Trends put Hawaii at the top for the US, Guam for global.

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