As I stare at the string of numbers in my Pi wallet that can never be withdrawn, I suddenly recall the excitement of pressing the lightning button for the first time five years ago—back then, I would never have thought that this social experiment cloaked in blockchain would be forging 47 million users into 'human mining machines' of the digital age.
The perfect disguise of a Ponzi coin: from 'consensus' to 'shared loss' in a death spiral.
The most ingenious design of Pi coin is to make every participant a cancer cell in the Ponzi network. The mechanisms of recruiting others to accelerate mining and locking assets to increase computing power essentially allow early players to use the 'blood' of new users to nourish their own account balances. I once witnessed a community leader develop 12 layers of downlines, effortlessly harvesting thousands of Pi coins every day, while the fuel for this 'Ponzi perpetual motion machine' is those grandpas and grandmas who believe that '1 Pi = 1 house.' Ironically, the project side has harvested three scythes over six years: first earning the initial bucket of gold through advertising traffic, then freezing user assets with a lock-up mechanism, and finally completing the ultimate harvest through listing on exchanges.
Trillion-dollar bubble: When 'mobile mining' becomes the fig leaf of a Ponzi scheme.
This so-called 'everyone can participate' mining game actually hides a deadly mathematical trap. The supply of 100 billion is like the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads—even with the most optimistic valuation of $1, its market value would crush Bitcoin, but the reality is that prices will struggle between $0.4 and $1.2 in 2025. More terrifying is that among the 5.5 billion unlocked tokens, 660 million are still locked by the project side in a 'Pandora's box' and could be unleashed at any time. Those holders who believe 'scarcity creates value' will ultimately realize they are merely hostages in the project's liquidity pool.
Survivor's paradox: How to exit gracefully on the eve of a collapse.
The true black humor lies in the fact that the Pi Network community is experiencing a collective Stockholm syndrome. When on-chain data shows that daily active wallets are less than 28,000, those believers shouting 'HODL' are merely the last fools afraid to burst the emperor's new clothes. The old miners I know have long been secretly laying out plans: quietly dumping at $0.23-0.85 in the OTC market while continuing to promote the myth of 'ten thousand coins' within the community— in this game of passing the parcel, the sober ones are all pretending to be crazy.
The current state of Pi coin is akin to the 'Truman Show' of the blockchain world, where all participants are self-directing a performance of value illusion. Perhaps when we look back five years from now, we will find that the most precious thing is not the numbers in the account, but the ultimate truth taught by this absurd experiment: in the crypto world, the ability to see through Ponzi schemes is more important than technology, and the courage to cut losses in time is more valuable than faith.