I've seen many Bitcoin based Ponzi schemes, pyramids, MLMs and HYIPs etc over the years. Most of them have been exposed on this great website:
The site even describes what Ponzi schemes are right on its front page. For those who want even more details, there's a great listing on Ponzi schemes on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
TL;DR - If you see a service offering daily returns that seem to good to be true, you can be sure it's a Ponzi scheme or similar. And if it also offers a referral program to further increase your earnings, even more alarm bells should ring in your head.
Where do you think your daily money will come from? The best bots and traders will not be able to make a 1% gain per day in the longer term. The only way they can hand out 1% per day to participants is by using fresh money coming in from new participants. So as long as new participants come in, the existing participants can get paid, and will post great testimonials on social media. But make no mistake about it, this is not sustainable.
The first signs of such a Ponzi running out of steam and being just before a collapse are hiccups. Payouts and/or withdrawals have some technical problems, and get delayed. This is what we just saw happening at Control Finance, as can be seen in this video made by a participant of that scheme:
CF says they will continue payouts shortly, and will even payout 3% extra to make up for inconvenience. It is even possible that they will do this, but in that case they will only do it for a select group of participants, namely those with the loudest voices in the social media, hoping they can keep those on board just a bit longer, long enough to organize their own disappearing to Panama or similar. But I think it's more likely that they will immediately take the money and run.
Still, the guys that got into the Ponzi early enough may even have made good money - they just won't be able to get their original investment back anymore. The people who got in late, which are often friends of the early adopters, will have lost most of their investment, and will probably cancel their friendship to the referring friend (who also took a part of their money as referral fees).
The next one in line for such a collapse must be Bitconnect:
Their site screams 'Ponzi': enormous earnings, referral earnings, bad English, cheap website. The most clever thing they did was disguise it as a crypto coin 'BCC', and they even got it listed on http://coinmarketcap.com , which seems to give them some credibility. They claim to make money though 'volatility' and lending, but ask yourself: how large that lending market can really be?
Some BCC participants feel safe because they have BCC coins that they can exchange at any time, but remember, the Ponzi operators (who are they anyway ?) have your Bitcoins. And when they run, the largest BCC exchange (which is their own site) will also collapse, and the value of a BCC will go to zero very fast!
I just wanted to post these warnings here, as I even have some friends that bought into those scams, and I hope my post can prevent further misery. Take care dear readers...