Is Bitcoin interest too good to be true?

Bitcoin interest is relatively new and has launched what they are referring to as the only way that you will want to store your crypto ever again. Bitcoin interest is saying that you simply have to buy Bitcoin interest coins--- lock them up in your wallet and receive roughly 0.9%-1.6% ROI per month. To me this whole Bitcoin interest model is reminding me a lot of Bitconnect with this idea of locking up your coins, and so I thought I’d dive a little deeper in explanation to see if I can really call this a scam.

First off, I’ll give them a little bit of credit for not having a GoDaddy web certification which literally will only cost you about $5.

This is from the website:

“We figured out a new way to generate interest payments to reward our users through what we call "Enhanced Proof of Work" using the Equihash algorithm. Every time a miner solves a block in the Bitcoin Interest network, they are rewarded 12.5 BCI coins while an additional 1 BCI is generated from the block and sent to the "Interest Pool." Once the active Weekly or Monthly interest round has finished, the Interest Pool is distributed evenly to all of the users participating in the current interest round.”

Basically this means that the more coins you hold in your Bitcoin interest wallet the more coins you will earn per month so long as the Bitcoin interest is being mined.

Here’s a link to their available mining pools: https://www.bitcoininterest.io/miningpools.php

From what I can tell the Bitcoin interest team is a lot more transparent than Bitconnect ever was, and on the website they say that you should not send them your coins, but keep them in your wallet because they are your coins. The Bitcoin interest team also has full Linked In profiles for each team member so this is also a good sign.

To me this is a coin that is supposed to appeal to new investors in the crypto space. However, Bitcoin interest does propose an interesting idea where miners are rewarded as usual and stakers are rewarded a bit more than usual. The team believes that if the coins are being held and not sold then that will mean the success of their coin, and for the most part I agree. The only major red flag here for me is that it seems like they could have easily created a desktop wallet for their platform so that we could at least take our coins offline every once and a while as a cold wallet.

Their whole model depends on people actively keeping their coins online in order to generate interest on their coins, so maybe they just don’t plan on creating an offline wallet. It’s hard to believe this coin is a scam with all of their transparency, but I wonder if only having a web wallet where your coins are less secure is a good idea. They also have a very active Twitter account where they are giving specific updates about improvements they are making to the project.

Is this the better alternative to Bitcoin investing or just another creative Ponzi scheme? Let me know what you think in the comments below. Thanks!