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Comment by vertoc | Hacker News Reader

Hey all! Earlier this year, I launched a parody ICO called PonziCoin (http://ponzicoin.co), and I found that it was fairly difficult to easily accept Ethereum on a site and support all the major wallets (hardware, web, mobile) so I decided to make Etherglade. It's a drop-in UI that you should be able to add to your site in less than 5 minutes and start accepting Ethereum - it even supports smart contracts! In the future, I also hope to add features to make interacting with Ethereum and smart contracts easier for the average person.

I would love any feedback, comments, or questions :)

Side Note: Don't start a pyramid scheme, even if you explicitly state that it is a pyramid scheme and it's clearly a parody. It turns out a significant amount of people will still put a significant amount of money in

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There are people who "play" ponzis for a living. They use whatever information they can find to determine if they believe they can get in and out before the ponzi reaches the start of its collapse. Then they hop in, make some money, and hop out.

I think it's contributing to the decline of civilization, but you have to admire how a business investing approach can be applied to virtually anything.

Yeah, it's called The greater fool theory.

It's just a different form of PvP gambling, like poker.

Except that I doubt anyone approaches a poker table not knowing they are entering a competition.

Ponzis prey on greedy, foolish people - some of whom actually believe the lies being promoted about it being a real investment. It's even worse in the cryptocurrency world, where fools are convinced that they are buying shares in mining operations or super-secret trading bots.

There are plenty of legitimate scams in the cryptocurrency world, but the games we're referring to (PonziCoin, PoWH3D, CryptoCelebrities, CryptoKitties, etc.) are very transparent about the fact that they are zero-sum games where you have the chance to lose a lot of money.

These games should really be considered simulated bubbles instead of Ponzis. A Ponzi scheme collapses when the operator walks away with everyone's money. PoWH3D doesn't have an operator since it's totally decentralized. It will collapse when everyone decides to sell. Likewise, CryptoCelebrities will never crash but inevitably somebody will get stuck with a collectible that nobody else wants to buy. It's akin to buying a beanie baby or a tulip for an exorbitant price, only to find that there's nobody to resell it to.

Previous HN discussion of PonziCoin: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16225383

PonzICO is another parody ICO started 11 months ago. Great white paper! https://ponzico.win/

You should tell the story of your Ponzi scheme somewhere.

Planning to write a blog post soon! :)

Can you talk more about your plans for smart contract support? Will this mean I can paste my ABI in and it will auto generate a UI for it? This could be amazing if so.

Yes, that's exactly how it works! Once you paste in the ABI, you can pass in a function name and any parameters to Etherglade and the UI will reflect that :)

See the docs here: https://etherglade.readme.io/docs/smart-contract-support

Please me know if you run into any problems/bugs or the documentation is confusing at all!

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