There are more and more posts and posters promoting this BitConnect "p2p lending" scheme and it's time to call it out for what it most likely is: a scam.
Specifically, it looks like a ponzi scam. Ponzis funnel money from new "investors" to the scam's operator and previous "investors". The previous ones are then able to vouch, either naively or dishonestly, for the investment scheme as being "legit" to new investors.
These scams have come in many forms. When they're online, most often they'll have referral links to incentivize people to promote them even more.
I'm certainly not the first to cast doubt on this service, and not even close to being first on Steem either! Check out these posts from Steemians who do a better job of showing how wrong BitConnect looks to anyone familiar with what a ponzi scheme looks like:
Bitconnect SCAM by @fraserb
The BitConnect scam exposed by @thegrinder
But exposing the scam is not the purpose of this post.
The purpose of this post is to put Steemians on notice that promotion of BitConnect with referral links makes you an active, profiting participant in the scam.
Steem is meant to onboard and introduce people to using a blockchain for the first time. If you're enticing someone new to this frontier to join up with a ponzi scam, and they get burned, you're working counter-productively towards that goal. Smart money/cryptocurrency has enough of an issue with its reputation and it doesn't need to get worse. Furthermore, if these scam links proliferate any more, Steem itself may gain a reputation of being full of scammers.
If you currently are promoting and linking to a probable ponzi, please reconsider the harm you may be doing not just to Steem and its users, but smart money/cryptocurrency in general. You may even think you're profiting but you may just be short sighted. The more people that find this brave new world to be legitimate, the higher its value will be.