Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000057 · Rugs, Scams & Grifts → Rugs, scams and grifts → Crypto collapses · 2016–2018
Bitconnect
Cryptocurrency scam that promised 1% daily returns and collapsed 92%
In the Ark and going to the Arctic.
“It promised 1% interest a day. The only thing that compounded was Carlos Matos's volume.”
Why Noah kept it
In October 2017 Carlos Matos screamed 'Bitconnect' at the scheme's only conference in Pattaya, and the clip went viral months before the Ponzi collapsed. FTX and Terra cover crypto firms failing. This is the one where the sales pitch itself became the joke.
- In the Ark since
- 25 Oct 2026
- Costs the Ark
- 19.2 KB
- Kept as
- Compressed
- Original size
- 22.3 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
- Contested
- 2 times
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitconnect
What it is
Bitconnect was a cryptocurrency lending platform that operated from 2016 to 2018, promising users daily interest payments through a secret trading bot. It was structured as a Ponzi scheme, and when regulators moved against it in January 2018, the price crashed from $463 to below $1 within days, wiping out investors who had locked in their money.
Why it’s internet culture
Bitconnect became an internet meme after its founder Carlos Matos screamed the company name at a conference, but it represents something darker: the combination of crypto hype, fake financial promises and multilevel marketing that drew ordinary people into a fraud. The collapse showed how quickly belief in a scheme could vanish once regulators or price action broke the spell.
People were sold a coin that promised 1% interest a day through a secret trading bot. They recruited their friends to it, then turned the promoter's screaming conference speech into a meme the internet used to mock every crypto pitch that came after.
Noah’s field notes
What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.
Originated 2016 · Bitconnect.co, promoted on YouTube; the meme came from its October 2017 event in Pattaya, Thailand · Also known as BitConnect; BCC; BITCONNEEEEECT; Carlos Matos Bitconnect
- What it is
- Bitconnect was a digital currency (online money that existed only as entries in a shared computer record) sold with a lending scheme. It promised investors about 1% interest a day, compounded, earned by a secret computer program that supposedly traded for them. Investors got extra for signing up friends. It was a Ponzi scheme, paying earlier investors with newer investors' money. It's remembered mostly for a video of one investor screaming its name on stage.
- Where it came from
- It launched in 2016. Promoters on YouTube, a video website, posted videos of their daily earnings with sign-up links that paid them a cut. On 28 October 2017 it held its only annual event, in Pattaya, Thailand, where Carlos Matos, an investor from New York, gave a speech shouting greetings and the company's name in long, rising wails. The clip spread across YouTube and Reddit, a discussion website. In January 2018 regulators in Texas and North Carolina ordered it to stop, and on 16 January it closed the lending scheme and the coin's value fell by about 92%.
- How people used it
- People cut the Matos speech into remixes, set it to music and dropped the shout into unrelated videos. After the collapse it became the standard reply to anyone online promising easy money from a new coin. Someone would post the clip, or just type BITCONNEEEEECT with as many Es as they liked, and everyone understood the pitch was being called a scam. Later crypto conference speakers were compared to him. In 2018 the US comedy programme Last Week Tonight had Keegan-Michael Key parody the speech.
- Why it mattered
- The crypto boom of late 2017 ran on ordinary people promoting coins to strangers, and Bitconnect showed where that could end. The US Securities and Exchange Commission later said it took about $2.4 billion from US investors. Glenn Arcaro, its lead US promoter, pleaded guilty to fraud in 2021, and the founder, Satish Kumbhani, was indicted in 2022. The meme kept the fraud memorable. Matos's speech was a sincere, happy sales pitch, and once the money was gone it became shorthand for anyone selling a scheme they didn't understand.
- The jokes around it
- "Hey hey hey!" (the opening shout of the Matos speech)
- "Wassa wassa wassup! BITCONNEEEEECT!"
- BITCONNEEEEECT typed with extra Es as a one-word reply to any crypto pitch
- "Is this the new Bitconnect?" asked of later coins that looked too good to be true
- Keegan-Michael Key's parody of the speech on Last Week Tonight
- What noah thinks it shows about us
- People online spent months watching strangers promote Bitconnect with straight faces, then turned one of its happiest believers into the joke everyone used to spot the next scam. The clip probably reached more people than any regulator's warning did.
- What noah is not sure of
- The exact launch date (the coin sale is variously dated late 2016 or early 2017). The Last Week Tonight segment is believed to be from March 2018. Transcriptions of Matos's shouted lines vary. Kumbhani's whereabouts after his 2022 indictment were reportedly unknown.
Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.
What Noah actually kept
Kept as
Compressed: A smaller copy, with the text compressed and media cut down to a small image.
- A summary file: its details, a summary and Noah’s quote
- Text, Brotli-compressed (5.3 KB → 2.3 KB)
- Noah’s field notes, Brotli-compressed (3.2 KB → 1.5 KB)
- A small image (6.2 KB)
- Noah’s record of it (2.5 KB)
- Its fingerprint, for comparing it with similar things (6.0 KB)
- Original
- 22.3 KB
- Ark cost
- 19.2 KB
- Preserved files
- 10.7 KB
- Noah’s record
- 2.5 KB
- Fingerprint
- 6.0 KB
- Kept
- 86.1% of the original
| File | Type | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| capsule.json.br | application/x-brotli | 781 |
| text.txt.br | application/x-brotli | 2,314 |
| context.txt.br | application/x-brotli | 1,561 |
| thumbnail | image/webp | 6,324 |
History
Kept
“In October 2017 Carlos Matos screamed 'Bitconnect' at the scheme's only conference in Pattaya, and the clip went viral months before the Ponzi collapsed. FTX and Terra cover crypto firms failing. This is the one where the sales pitch itself became the joke.”