I would’ve missed one hell of a story telling opportunity if I didn’t join this weeks featured topic on time. I’ve always been of the conviction that the greatest achievements are borne from taking the biggest risks. The bigger the risk, the bigger the potential return. This is not always the case though, and I found that out the hard way.
Image designed by me in canva
In my early days in crypto and blockchain, I happened to have stumbled upon one of the surest ways to have your money stolen from you, sugarcoated as an investment. I’m talking about ponzi schemes. If you know anything about ponzi schemes, you know that there is no bigger financial risk and stupidity greater than putting your money in a ponzi scheme.
Somewhere around 6 months ago I think, I happened to have stumbled upon a ponzi scheme called CG. You know how ponzi schemes work- early investors mostly profit from the new money late investors are brining in, and when there’s no more people coming in with new money, cash flow problems arise and the ponzi collapses.
Gif from tenor.com
Greed is our greatest nemesis, and that was exactly what caused many of us to lose big chunks of money. You see, upon entry, we promised ourselves we would leave once we hit a certain “profit”, and when we did, we wanted more. And you want to know what made it worst? The fact that we knew it was a ponzi scheme made us rush to make our profits faster so that we can leave and avoid imminent collapse on us, but this didn’t pan out well. In our rush, we made mistakes that made us lose our profits, and even for some people, it ate deep into their starting capital. There was a new problem now. A promise to make back your starting capital and leave once you got it. You know that wasn’t what happened. The ponzi inevitably collapsed with most of our monies in it.
It was bad, I’m telling you. Almost the entirety of Ghanaian University students were in this ponzi scheme when it collapsed. For people that left early, it was nothing but good stories for them. But for the unfortunate majority though, it was nothing short of devastating. People lost their life savings, and even some people that were stupid enough to enter with monies like school fees and stuff…well you get it.
The decision of entering into a ponzi scheme was one of the most devastating financial experiences of my life, but if I had to do it all over again, I probably would, because it was after that experience I found my way to Hive and currently building back up. If there was a way to not experience all the bad things and still have found Hive, I probably would say I wouldn’t have made the same choice if I could do it all over again.
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