Ponzi's original scheme was based on the arbitrage of international reply coupons for postage stamps; however, he soon diverted investors' money to make payments to earlier investors and himself.
...
The profit that could be made by taking advantage of the differing postal rates in different countries to buy IRCs cheaply in one country and exchange them for stamps of a higher value in another country was the intended profit generator for a scheme operated by Charles Ponzi, which became the fraudulent Ponzi scheme.
For anyone interested in more information on this, or on Ponzi himself, I'd highly recommend giving Ponzi's Scheme[0] a read. It's a great book on the subject.
Why not ask for "one or more" stickers? (Still promising only two total in return). If you're not being purist about the ponzie part, that is. Then you might be able to carry it on a little longer.
Which of the examples is considered to be a "startup"? The featured one is a 15-year-old spinoff of a public company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The second one is an actual public company with 4000 employees. The third one might be sort of a startup, but they have over 100 million dollars in VC backing.
For the sake of simplicity, we're using it as a blanket term for "tech company" and are happy with stickers for anything from a tiny 1 person company to a behemoth like Google (or an event like a hackathon).
Wouldn't it be better if you use "tech company" term instead? If the blanket term is already widely accepted, I see no point in using "startup" instead, as that will probably cause much more confusion.
We originally had "tech company" on the site, but after showing it to a few friends and people that were crashing at our house, it was clear that people had a better understanding of the site when we used "startup", so we decided to go with it.
Send us 3 stickers and postage. Get 2 unique stickers back. You get all the profits of the excess postage (assuming bulk rate) plus the extra sticker can go to a bin / advertising page of ALL THE STICKERS.
Why not ask for 50 cents or a new stamp in the envelope? Including a stamp is easier in an envelope, and it should make prepping a return envelope simpler. Require "forever" stamps to protect yourself from a postal price hike.
You should let people know not to send coins, too. Coins can get violently ejected from postal sorting machines and cause injuries.
(And as general advice, if you're going to do a mail campaign like this in the future, it might be a good idea to actually chat to a postal carrier about it first.)
You're right that people should not send coins in regular envelopes. But of course people mail coins, keys, and binder clips pretty frequently. Do you think USPS employees stand around an open sorting machine just waiting to get hit in the face with a paperclip?
I actually know someone who has worked on those machines for decades. He never told me anything other than that the machines might reject your letter, or your thumb drive might fall out and they'd not be able to find where to send it.
Or just have people mail you a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE)? Then you can just put the stickers in it and drop them in the mail (plus, you don't have to buy or address envelopes)
I bet a lot of companies would just give you their stickers, simply to take advantage of your distribution network. It would be funny if this became a legitimate business idea (while the trend is alive).
We've actually already had a couple reach out, but we've turned them down because we want to see how long we can sustain this by "crowdsourcing" stickers (i.e. being a ponzi scheme).
The nit picking in these comments seems, for once, to actually be in good spirit, but this is a really fun idea!
I would love to do this with startup / event t-shirts so I could (eventually) clean out my drawers...too bad sizing clothes is a little more complicated than stickers.
How so? Each new "investor's" sticker goes to "pay off" a previous one, and then they are in turn "paid off" with the stickers from two new "investors."
if i sent international + the cost of sending in usd (i have no idea how much it costs to send a letter from the us, only sent postcards), will you honour it?
(i have a fuckton of us coins at my place that i have no use and it's not worth to exchange them)
not sure how to get a stamp for sending mail from the US to where I live honestly. But the idea is cool and thanks for considering internationals as well ;)
Might work if they are still sold in your country.
A bit expensive though and not sure if they are willing to accept these, because they have to be exchanged for a stamp, they don't count as a stamp themselves.
The article linked by thesimon states "UPU member postal services are obliged to exchange an IRC for postage, but are not obliged to sell them" so it looks like this would work. They cost 2€ here in Germany ($2.20) compared to $1.20 for a USPS First-Class Mail International Letter, so it's not that bad. Really cool!
And this would nicely keep with the whole theme, since Ponzi's original scheme involved arbitrage with IRCs, before he decided it would be easier to just rip people off.
I think it's just one of those factoids that gets passed around through pop-culture because nobody takes the time to verify it.
Before reading the Snopes page just now, I would probably have said that I was pretty sure mailing cash was technically illegal. But thinking about it now, I have no idea where I got that idea from.
The Postal Service advises against it. You probably heard some postal official say "Don't mail cash" and mistook it as a citation of law rather than simple advice.
If a particular address was known to consistently receive cash in the mail, wouldn't that make it a target of theft?
As someone who lives in the Bay Area and has seen car windows smashed for the change in the cupholder and a friend's motorcycle knocked over to get the flattened soda can that was being used as a stabilizer, yes, that's a security concern.
A transient mailing of discrete paper cash is different than a call-to-action requesting coins that will be delivered to the same address on a regular basis.
Nit, but: it's not actually a Ponzi scheme. What made Ponzi's scheme a Ponzi scheme was not the postal coupons. It was pretending that investors were making huge profits to make them keep their money invested, and paying them with each other's money. At that point the coupons was just an alibi.
Of course I don't know ponzi.es' long-term plan, maybe they'll start taking investment and promising huge returns. That'd be pretty funny. Though I don't know if you can legally run a Ponzi scheme, even an ironic one.
Isn't that exactly what this is? You "invest" a sticker, and you get a 100% return on your investment by receiving two stickers. It's not explicitly stated, but given the name and the context, I assume that the stickers you receive come from new "investors."
It is, but for it to work you have to give the appearance that it is actually working for a long enough period of time. That requires exponential grow or most people reinvesting returns (so they don't realize there's no actual money to pay them back).
If you give the returns immediately (the two stickers) with no option to reinvest, the ponzi scheme is going to run out of steam very quickly and there's no way this is going to attract a lot of people.
In summary, this is a Ponzi Scheme, but not one that has a lot of chance of being sustained for very long.
I believe, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that in a pyramid scheme the individual participants receive money from new participants that they recruit (and the people your recruits recruit, and so forth down the line). If you join a pyramid scheme and then do nothing else, you receive nothing.
A Ponzi scheme is centralized, with new participants joining directly with the scheme, and proceeds paid out to all existing participants.
As structured, this sticker scheme is a Ponzi scheme, since it's all centralized and you don't do anything besides send in your sticker and postage.
No you're totally right, it's not a pyramid scheme. I still don't think it's a Ponzi scheme though because I don't think a sticker and return postage constitutes an investment. It's just a normal, if unsustainable, trade.
For now. It would be totally consistent with how Ponzi schemes work in real life to start with something legit that turns out to not be sustainable, and then turning it into something fraudulent. Say once people have started sending in stickers they should choose to offer a service where they hang on to your stickers to save you the trouble of mailing back and forth, and doubling your holding every 10 days. Then a sticker would be an investment and it would be a Ponzi scheme.
I can only hope they'll do something like that. It'd be totally in the spirit of Ponzi.
Obviously it's not actually a Ponzi scheme if you take the whole "stickers" thing into account. Which is presumably why they aren't being raided by the authorities right now.
But it's definitely meant to mirror the structure of one, just with stickers instead of money. If they had you send in $10,000 instead of a sticker, and promised $20,000 back, it would clearly qualify.
So I'd say it's "a Ponzi scheme, but for stickers."
the amount of time and effort I'm willing to spend to get start up stickers is probably about equal to the effort it takes to type in the address to mail them to. probably less.
go to a conference that they sponsor (or at least have a booth at), they will be everywhere. I went to a small regional Python conference a couple years back and they were there.
Honestly not sure. I've never had a post rise this quickly, though it's definitely fun to watch! Here's a screenshot of where people are visiting from: https://i.imgur.com/Of5xKOk.png
I agree, especially with the tremendous amount of votes... Usually for the first 30 minutes or so you'll be lucky to get a handful of votes, which rapidly accelerates your post.
The submitting account has other stories which didn't earn many points, FWIW. But I agree that this is.. silly and IMHO not deserving of #1 spot on HN, there are some serious topics being discussed!
Hm, not sure I agree with that second part. HN can find a number of non-serious things interesting, and I think this is at least a little interesting. The issue is, was it really THAT interesting?
Ponzi's original scheme was based on the arbitrage of international reply coupons for postage stamps; however, he soon diverted investors' money to make payments to earlier investors and himself. ...
The profit that could be made by taking advantage of the differing postal rates in different countries to buy IRCs cheaply in one country and exchange them for stamps of a higher value in another country was the intended profit generator for a scheme operated by Charles Ponzi, which became the fraudulent Ponzi scheme.