In the 1820s and 30s con man Gregor MacGregor claimed to be the "Cazique of Poyais", basically the king of a thriving colony/country in central America that in no way existed. Investments in the entirely fictional country skyrocketed because of its vast amount of made up natural resources and its population of make believe servile and pleasant natives. MacGregor even convinced a few hundred Anglos to move to Poyais, gave them fancy titles in the military and civil service of his pretend country and then put them on ships to central America where they were dropped off in an uninhabitable jungle that MacGregor had no claim to whatsoever and then most of them died.
Uncritical support for grifting anglos and leaving them to die of malaria.
Okay hear me out what if we did Fire Festival 3.0 but in Zemunda or Agriba?
Omfg he got away with it too.
When the British press reported on MacGregor's deception following the return of fewer than 50 survivors in late 1823, some of his victims leaped to his defence, insisting that the general had been let down by those whom he had put in charge of the emigration party. A French court tried MacGregor and three others for fraud in 1826 after he attempted a variation on the scheme there, but convicted only one of his associates. Acquitted, MacGregor attempted lesser Poyais schemes in London over the next decade. In 1838, he moved to Venezuela, where he was welcomed back as a hero.
Yes, and when you see him referred to as "the general", do I have some very surprising news for you about the vast majority of his military record!
There are too many aspects to his life story worthy of mention, torrenting a biography now. Thanks for linking a wild ride of a wikipedia article.
Upon deliberation, my favorite part:
He led the landing party personally on 29 June 1817 with the words: "I shall sleep either in hell or Amelia tonight!" The Spanish commander at Fort San Carlos, with 51 men and several cannon, vastly overestimated the size of MacGregor's force and surrendered without either side firing a shot.
Spanish forces congregated on the mainland opposite Amelia, and MacGregor and most of his officers decided on 3 September 1817 that the situation was hopeless and that they would abandon the venture. MacGregor announced to the men that he was leaving, explaining vaguely that he had been "deceived by my friends."
He turned over the command to one of his subordinates,** a former Pennsylvania congressman** named Jared Irwin, and he boarded the Morgiana with his wife on 4 September 1817 with an angry crowd looking on and hurling insults at him. He waited offshore for a few days, then left on the schooner Venus on 8 September.
Irwin's troops defeated two Spanish assaults and were then joined by 300 men under Louis-Michel Aury, who held Amelia for three months before surrendering to American forces, who held the island "in trust for Spain" until the Florida Purchase in 1819.
Two weeks later, the MacGregors arrived at Nassau in the Bahamas, where he arranged to have commemorative medallions struck bearing the Green Cross motif and the Latin inscriptions Amalia Veni Vidi Vici ("Amelia, I Came, I Saw, I Conquered") and Duce Mac Gregorio Libertas Floridarium ("Liberty for the Floridas under the leadership of MacGregor").
He made no attempt to repay those who had funded the Amelia expedition.
Press reports of the Amelia Island affair were wildly inaccurate, partly because of misinformation disseminated by MacGregor himself.
Imagine what this man could do social media.
Oh, and he his born shortly thereafter was named
spoiler
Gregorio, Gregor MacGregor fathered Gregorio MacGregor
If you want to have some fun, look back on the total population of Scotland at the time and do some math and realize that percentage-wise this is the equivalent of convincing about 72 000 Americans to move to Poyais today.
It's almost the greatest Scottish name of all time, but that honor belongs to Marmaduke Thweng
Oh yes, well worth reading up on. The Poyais scheme is just one chapter in the life of one of the most impressive liars to ever live.
I feel like I've been given the opposite gift, never being able to convince anyone of anything and in fact only hardening their shitty beliefs
Cw: animal abuse
If someone was trying to sell an old or sick horse and pass it off as younger or healthier they'd cut the skin off a finger of ginger and put it in the horse's butt. The burning and discomfort would make the agitated horse seem more active and energetic than it really was.
I don't know how you could relate that to bitcoin but they are both scams.
I read "finger of a ginger, and was like damn, bad time to have ginger hair
I forgot all about figging, except I had never heard of people doing it to horses.
Point.
What if we trained the horses to water-ski and had them stand on top of each other. In a pyramid?
That is more of an NFT analog. Instead of apes with different accessories, you had tulips with slightly different coloration on their petals.
Ooh that's a good one, it has the ponzi scheme aspect and the speculation aspect. And people would know it's not real but put money in it anyways.
Nah, I think bitcoin deserves credit for being a new type of scam. It's not a pyramid scheme or Ponzi scheme or multi-level-marketting scheme. It's most similar to a series of pump and dump scams, but it's more different from those than pyramid schemes are from MLMs, which get separate names.
I’m pretty sure the history of money and bank notes is full of people doing similar things with bitcoin. We’re just used to a relatively mature banking industry that only operates scams through dozens of layers of indirection.
Niall Ferguson wrote a good book about money in modern (post-Reformation) history. He sets out to prove that financialization is the foundation of human progress, gets caught in currents that seem to prove something quite the opposite, and then ends by restating the hypothesis with none of the rest of the book backing it up.
I'd definitely call any cryptocurrency a pyramid scheme. A few whales at the top hold the majority of the value. They trade between themselves to simulate market activity, but their value only comes from others buying in. The currency doesn't achieve any actual promises, so the only way those early adopters see any value is if more buy in. At each stage the pool becomes larger for a smaller share of the asset and profit.
They all have the exact same culture and rhetoric of any mid-level marketing company. That's the model driving it to attract the same kind of person with the same promise.
Company scrip is the closest I can think of, but it lacks the gambling component. It's funny money with arbitrary value that can only be spent in a controlled and exploitative pseudo-economy. There are no currency protections, you can't put it in a real bank or use it outside of places designed to steal from you, it's backed by nothing but the promise of the thief.
Even Marx himself drew a distinction between capital and fictitious capital in 1864. I'm not defending real banks. I'm saying that my credit union is FDIC insured up to $250k of the same currency that I can buy bread with at any store. I can't deposit penis420coin in that account because it doesn't exist outside of a claim to ownership. That actual economy will continue to exist even if Penis420coin Inc. goes bankrupt, while any fuckery by that minter of the coin immediately destroys all of its speculative value. The US dollar is real because it's universally adopted and backed by the US military even if it isn't directly pegged to gold. Any crypto bullshit is only backed by the empty promise of the shadiest pseudo-capitalists out there.
Personally I stuff all my banknotes and coins under my mattress
I do think bitcoin is kind of un-heralded. A massively multiplayer online form of gambling but instead of being a boring ordinary casino game where there is some normal distribution of payouts that gives the house an edge, there are exponential movements driven by crowd psychology and the whims of wealthy people. The game is to keep holding through those exponential movements but also know when to get out before the big -95% crash. Penny stocks pioneered this game mechanic but they lack worldwide 24/7 play without any barriers to entry.
Then much like casino games have an Egypt theme or whatever, cryptocurrency has the theme of libertarian “sound money” ideology usually associated with boomer gold bugs. Although a lot of coins are just associated with various memes.
Also due to its nature anybody can develop & publish their own “game” for immediate worldwide release, with whatever whacky rules they want. Like 10% of all transactions are skimmed into a pot that you can do some other bullshit to compete to get.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)
Not a perfect analog but still. Crypto exchanges have many similarities with these.
the legal ones aren't supposed to bet against you. that said, many of the current forex and cfd brokers have been called bucket shops, they are usually registered in regions with lax regulations like Seychelles or St Vincent and Grenadines and won't allow westerners to register.
Walt disney when the animators try to unionize the first time
There was an old scam done by like a old head of the treasury of Brittany. I forgot the exact details but a guy named Walpol did a ponzi scheme for a big trade ship expiation. The scam got big enough the British government bought him out so the economy didn't crash. Like, it got way bigger than the a shipping run could ever be and people were just trading futures in a giant bubble to the point where it was a large fraction of the entire GDP. From what I recall everyone kinda found out about it but because he was upper class they all laughed it off. I just remember that after he got away with it someone interviewed him and he said he was retiring but he wasn't ever going to read a history book again. He said that having made history and seeing what is written about it he realized the histories are all bullshit. Which I feel like is kinda based for a man in like the eighteenth century or whenever
I looked it up. It is properly called the south sea bubble of 1720
The Mississippi Company was something like bitcoin. John Law basically invented fractional reserve banking by assuming the national debt in exchange for the right to print paper notes backed by France and exclusive trade rights to the Americas. The whole thing blew up because there was no mechanism to stop inflation, investors could buy an unlimited amount of shares of a finite investment.
Ever heard of the Mississippi Company?
If the value of your investment is stored in land, the land can never be destroyed, and that means your investment is fully secure.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
