ponzi

Remember when I started the experiment with Ruby Mine, a miner promising up to 8% profit daily? In this article? Well, the project is dead. Did I make money with it?

So I invested a tiny mount of roughly 20 USD in form of 0.25 Avax in Ruby Mine. With the 6:1 recommended – not to say enforced – methodology to reinvest 6 days in a row and only claim on the 7th day, I should have made my investment back into about 3 months. And I almost adhered to the 6:1 pattern as advised, only 1 exception, as you see further down.

So in the first week, I made the following rewards:

As you see, the rewards increased in the beginning, but already during the first week it started to slow down a bit. I took profits on the 7th day as advised. Here you also have to consider the transaction fee which were about 0.006 Avax, which leaves only 0.004, not only half of the claimed reward in reality. If my understanding is correct, these transaction are not only defined by the (Avalance) protocol, but also by the Ruby Mine smart contract. If you take profits, the fees where always roughly 3 times higher then rehiring.

Second week looked like this:

I guess you noted already the steady decline of the profits, didn’t you? Bravely as I am I took the “profit” on the 7th day again which was about 0.005 Avax with a transaction fee of around 0.01155. Correct, that is not a profit anymore; its a loss at the end.

Lets have a look at the third week:

Even so I increased my Rubies in the mine constantly due to rehiring, stayed stable or even decreased also in the 3rd week. I didn’t rehire on the 9th, as the transaction costs exceeded the potential amount to rehire. I processed the rehiring then the next morning expecting that a couple of hours do not “violate” the protocols expectation and at the same time not paying more transaction fees then the reinvested amount. That probably worked. Taking profits again, was not really taking profits: The transactions costs were again higher then the claimable amount: 0.004 and a fee of 0.01169. Again a loss.

I stopped the documentation then as the numbers declined even further. Well, as you know, the whole market dumped. And with these dumps, also the Telegram group and the Twitter account disappeared suddenly, Discord changed to Meta Miners, and with that Ruby Mine was and is a thing of the past. Not too many will miss it I guess…

Conclusion

So what did we learn from this little experiment:

• If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Well, no one really believed in a sustainable project providing 8% profit daily in the long run without any other income stream besides bringing more people and their cash into the system.
• If you still invest into a ponzi-scheme you have to be one of the first. But even then it is quite unlikely that you still make a profit as the system, like in this case, might run out of liquidity before you make your money back. Unless you bring a lot of referrals into the system and you profit from them indirectly in addition.
• If you still like to invest, you have to ensure your profits are higher then the transactions costs. So don’t invest such a tiny amount into these systems as I did for this experiment.